A friend nearly fell off her scuffed-up Birkenstocks when I told her I admired Marjorie Taylor Greene. Given the appalled horror of her response, I feared the fatal rupture of our decades-long friendship.
No, I don’t support Greene’s views and beliefs, many rooted in politicized Christianity, American-redneck style. I don’t believe in gun ownership unless it’s a single-shot rifle and you need the meat to feed yourself and your people. I believe that climate change is an existential threat. I am not a racist and believe that all people are the same, regardless of the color of their skin. In fact, I basically oppose everything in Trump’s shifting agenda. I have been a leftist Democrat all my life and have never missed an election.
So, what gives? I admire Greene because she had the courage to change her mind, flipping from hysterical Trump advocate to one of his most impassioned critics. As her fellow Republican representatives sat silently on their hands, hoping that the President’s probing eye wouldn’t alight upon them and nix their chances for re-election, Greene stood up and called their bluff. Had she been a Democrat, her words would have been just more partisan bleating into the wind, perhaps earning her a 15-second soundbite on CNN. She instead looked around at the bottomless pit of basic need suffered by the impoverished people of her northern Georgia congressional district ─ and changed her mind.
We have all experienced some version of this dynamic in our personal lives. My mother was raised in rural Oregon by Norwegian immigrants. She described her father as “to the right of Atila the Hun,” a man so conservative he believed that both human babies and farm animal babies with physical defects should not be saved (“Let the scrubs die out”), and even refused to post newly enacted federal minimum-wage laws (as required by law) in his local business: A Trumper before his time.
After training as a registered nurse during the Second World War, Mom left Oregon to work in the Midwest. Seeing first-hand the wider world around her, she concluded that her parents were full of shit and became a lifelong FDR Democrat, the only one of her five siblings to jump political ship. Like Greene, knowledge and personal experience changed her mind.
But Mom was an anonymous private citizen decades before computers, social media, and all of the rest of it. The relatives and friends inside her orbit were the only ones privy to her world view transformation. Greene, on the other hand, a high-profile and divisive Republican politician, knew very well what she was up against; newly dubbed “Marjorie Traitor Greene” by former idol Trump, she understood that her MAGA defection would set off a tsunami of revenge orchestrated and paid for by our so-called leader of the free world, including the very real threat that Trump would handpick a more compliant Republican to run for her House seat and defeat her in this year’s primaries. In announcing her resignation from Congress, she told the world that she refused to act “like an abused wife” and silently await what was sure to be a painful political fate at the hands of the boss man. She also apologized for her previous MAGA tunnel vision.
Conspiracy theories abound, of course, about hidden agendas that may have motivated Greene’s defection (Does she really just want to be President?). That’s standard fare for our screentime-saturated lives; it’s the world we live in, yet we don’t really know what will happen in the Greene saga. What I do know is that we desperately need more of our elected officials to stand up, however fearfully, to the Bully in Chief. It’s time, and history could well view Greene’s defection as the first major chip in the dam of what’s to come. It’s hard to be first.
I’ve never voted for a Republican and would never vote for Greene. We don’t see the world in the same way. But she nevertheless deserves recognition for her courage in boldly speaking up and stepping away while disillusioned colleagues (many eligible for retirement) silently skulked away and left the fight.
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