Friday wrote:My dad was a diehard Republican his whole life. I'm probably not the most-left person here, but I'm for sure the most left person of everyone I know irl. I've dragged all my friends to the left, of course, the same way you guys dragged me. Not that I wasn't left before I came here, but I'm a lot more left now.
So no, blood isn't ironclad. In fact, sometimes it shows you what not to do and be. I don't know if that's the case for W's daughter(s), but it might be.
I'm about where my parents are politically. My dad's a Bernie Bro and that can get exhausting when he starts talking about it, but we're largely on the same page on the candidates and the issues even if one of us is a lot more inclined to believe conspiracy theories than the other.
My gran's a Democrat and probably pretty closely aligned with my views, though she watches a lot more CNN and NBC than I do and I think it gives her a bit more of an establishment perspective. My grandpa is an actual RINO; he registered Republican in California in the 1950s when that meant Earl Warren, and he's remained Republican even though he's been voting Democratic since the parties realigned in the 1960s. He gets a certain ironic enjoyment out of all the Republican Party junk he receives in the mail; he had a framed photo of Reagan in his office when I was a kid and I used to wonder why because I knew he hated Reagan, but eventually I realized he must have gotten that photo in the mail from the Republican Party and framed it and hung it up as a joke.
My other grandparents were Republican. Grandpa didn't talk much about, well, anything except college sports and the weather; I rarely heard him say anything about politics, but he didn't seem happy with the W Bush administration (I remember him griping about how much money we spend on the military instead of on education, and I once heard him call Alberto Gonzales a "goddamn worthless Mexican", which, on the one hand, yikes, but on the other hand, at least we agree on the "goddamn worthless" part). Grandma was an evangelical Christian and part of what you'd call the Republican base; she was a sweet and kind person on an individual level but held some beliefs that were not at all sweet or kind. It was interesting watching her rationalize her support of Trump in her final years; she clearly found him off-putting as a person, but as Fox News and whatever Jesus stations she watched on the TV repeated their talking points at her she came around to deciding okay he's not that bad even if I wish he wouldn't say the things he says sometimes.
And I've already gone over my own shifts in how I vote. I've always thought tactics and results matter, but my opinions on what tactics lead to which results have changed (and Arizona has changed too). What I want hasn't changed; my willingness to tolerate assholes like Sinema as a step on the road has.
So I suppose, as in so many things, I've come back around to being more like Gran than like my parents. (Though I have heard my dad acknowledge Biden as "not bad for what he is," which I guess is about how I feel.)