Politics

Why I’m No Longer a Republican

I was a Republican until 2020. For most of that time, leaving the party felt like leaving my faith. Here is what changed.

Where I started

I was a Republican until 2020.

Growing up Mormon, being Republican did not feel like a choice I made. It felt like part of the same package as the Church. Going against the party felt like going against my spiritual beliefs. It felt like going against being Mormon.

So even when something did not sit right, I kept it to myself.

I always felt a little out of place

Two things never sat right with me.

The first was how the party treated LGBTQ+ people. I could not make it match the way I was taught to treat people. The Church’s own history here is its own page.

The second was welfare. The outlook was always that people in need had done it to themselves. That never matched the scriptures I grew up with, where King Benjamin asks, “are we not all beggars?” That one is The Least of These.

I had my issues. I just did not think having issues meant I could leave.

Then Trump ran

I was never really that into politics until Trump ran the first time. Honestly, at first things seemed interesting.

That was also when I started watching the party change. It did not happen all at once. It got more radical, year after year, until I did not recognize it, and then until I did not feel comfortable being part of it.

What I watched

The anti-vaccine movement went mainstream. Ideas that used to be the fringe became the party’s position, and then its health policy. I wrote about that on Vaccines and RFK Jr.

The blind eye. When people in the party did terrible things, and when voters did, the answer was not accountability. It was defending them, or changing the subject. The clearest example I know is from my own state, on The Standards vs. Who Gets Defended.

Christian nationalism. I watched the idea that America should be officially Christian move toward the center of the party. PRRI’s 2023 American Values Atlas, published in February 2024, found that 55% of Republicans qualify as adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism. In fairness to the people I grew up with, Utah was the only red state below the national average, at 28%. But it was the direction of the party as a whole.

What changed in me

Leaving the Church and leaving the party were not the same thing, but they were connected. Once I let myself check what I had been told, I could not stop at religion.

Ultimately it came down to how I see people. How I think society should be structured. And how much power I think the government should have, and over whom.

I used to think those answers came with my faith. When I looked at them on their own, they were not the answers I had been handed.

How it ended

By 2020 I could not look at Donald Trump as anything other than a con man, and a liar who had not kept his promises. Since then a federal jury has found him liable for sexual abuse, and a New York jury has convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. And a party that had become full of lies, hate, and abuse, and defended all of it.

I want to be precise about that, because precision is the whole point of this site. He was not convicted of rape. The jury found him liable for sexual abuse in a civil case. I would rather say the exact thing, because the exact thing is bad enough.

What follows

The pages after this one are the reasons, one at a time, held to the same standard as the rest of this site: courts, government watchdogs, federal data, and the other side stated first.