Don’t care if it led to the GOP suffering in this election
overturning Roe was worth it, if for no other reason than preventing libs from getting away with reading the Constitution that way. A right to an abortion is simply not enshrined in the constitution
But if there is a silver lining for Right-wingers for whom abortion is not a big deal, it's that Roe was genuinely terrible jurisprudence, and striking it down was the right thing to do for that reason. That it's had an undeniable electoral cost is unfortunate, but it still had to be done.
For those concerned with democracy, indeed, this is how it should be working: abortion law is now subject to the democratic, legislative process, as the ballot initiatives in many states are showing.
The comments so far confirm your view. People who are anti-abortion don't care how unpopular that stance is, myself included. But as you frequently hear people like Yglesias say this to the left, now it is time for the right to hear it. If you really care about abortion, then you need to elect republicans. if you want to elect republicans, you need to stop talking about it.
The success of the left on this issue has been in their ability to frame it as a purely religious issue. The question of who counts as a human being and when you are allowed to destroy them is obviously relevant to atheists just as much as it is Christians. The conservative (and correct) viewpoint will do better if and when it can properly frame the issue around those questions. As to how they should go about doing that, I admit I'm not sure. You are unfortunately correct in that most people would rather just not think about the issue.
As someone who believes that abortion is murder of the unborn, I will say that I don't care how many elections Republicans lose over the issue. In my opinion, it shouldn't be up for a vote. "Just let people murder the unborn" is unacceptable, period. If advocating for the unborn's right to life leads to Democrats running everything, frankly I would consider that a serious indictment of liberal democracy and our society as a whole.
What's the point of winning elections if you don't enact anything you want? Overturning Roe and winning House by a small margin is much, much better than winning the house by 200 seats or something and the only policy "victory" being lowering taxes by 0.69420%.
You got the vibe just from reading the comments on your last post that this would end up happening. A lot of centrists who have voted D their entire life are completely fed up with the incompetence of the party along with the insanity on the fringes, with the latter feeding into the former. A lot of people saying they would definitely vote republican if not for the absolute insanity on abortion. If R’s even had a tiny bit of nuance here (12 weeks for example), it would have been an easy W. But the fact that you have a non-0 chance of a national ban INCLUDING cases of rape is just too extreme, and on a much more personal level than the fringes of the left. I would rather get fired from my job for using the wrong pronouns than my daughter have to bear the child of her rapist, personally, and I think most would agree. And that’s not even getting into the talk of banning plan B and other types of contraception. So a lot of us either reluctantly pulled the lever for dems, or in my case decided to just stay home.
I don’t see a way out here since there is a subset of republicans that ONLY vote based on abortion, and they are among the most motivated special interests in all of politics. We’ll see if they soften their stance now that the damage is done, but I don’t think they will.
God awful candidates like Herschel Walker didn’t help the case either. With all politics being national, candidates like him reflected badly on republicans across the country. With DeSantis winning as he did, I feel like trumpism could finally be weakening. He has his cult followers, but with all of the serious issues facing the world, I think people are going to gravitate towards DeSantis when they see how competent he is.
Redefining marriage was unpopular at one time. The left forced it on us anyway and now its popular.
As you said in "Why is Everything Liberal?" the left don't just count on elections and politicians to advance their agenda. They work tirelessly in many other areas of life in between elections, too.
Abortion may have to be one of those things the right works on in small pieces behind the scenes.
Wait, Saving lives of the most vulnerable human beings is Racist ??? LOL I thought you were suppose to be one of the intelligent progressive guys out there, and you come with if you dont let me kill a baby, you are racist like affirmative action. You are missing the big picture here about the Democrat Massive win yesterday despite all against them:
The candidate doesn’t matter, the issue doesn’t matter.
Only Harvesting votes and voting early matters. Election day is Obsolete.
Democrats are Professionals in this new game. Harvest and you will Win Massive.
One thing I take away is that voters respond strongly to a threat that they believe is aimed at them, personally. What I think happened here, is that a lot of women who might think extreme abortion acts are monstrous and would never commit them against their own children, would still rather permit other women to do monstrous things to their own children than to create a 1-in-1000 gray-area situation in which pro-life laws put them, personally, in a bind.
I'm pro-life and believe that, ideally, abortion should be entirely illegal. I'm involved with and donate a few percentage points of my paycheck to our local crisis pregnancy center, which I believe does good work and saves lives. But I suppose, in my heart-of-hearts, I'm about 1000x more alarmed about all the ways that the Democrats aspire to target my children, my family, and my church than I am about a woman somewhere being legally permitted to kill her own children, even after they're born (as is apparently now enshrined in Montana law). So although I don't vote the same way as them, I think I get where these women are coming from.
We Christians need to internalize the idea of being a minority group, which is something Aaron Renn has discussed intelligently. As a minority group, our political focus needs to be on looking out for our own rights and freedoms, not trying to use politics to make the majority behave like us, against its will.
Call me naive but pro-life has all the hallmarks of a "right side of history" kind of issue.
-Expands the moral circle
-Easier to explain to a child
-Becomes more tenable as societies get richer
And just anecdotally, I've observed the most random, secular blue-tribe women come out and decide to keep pregnancies that logically they should have aborted. There's *something* to anti-abortion weed that allows it to randomly spring up in blue-tribe gardens. (And sure, there are red-tribe women who get abortions, but that can easily be explained by "people can ditch morality when it runs against their self-interest".)
"People understand that there is a religiously-motivated base of voters within the Republican coalition that wants to ban all abortions, and will never be satisfied with intermediate steps. One can say something similar about the pro-choice side. "
I don't think you can. A less silly example to cite here would be immigration, where there are plenty of unironic "we should flood the country with foreigners without any regard to assimilation or cultural compatibility" libs. Likewise, you see plenty of backlash when liberals overplay their hand on immigration policy.
"pro-infanticide", on the other hand, is just a ridiculous caricature that describes basically no liberal.
Richard, I get your point but Roe had to be overturned. It set a horrible precedent for constitutional law. As you know, all it did was return the decision on abortion to the people. If "the people" don't like that, and would rather have an unelected body of 9 oligarchs running the country, then we're completely lost.
Liberals do have higher IQs than conservatives, cos (as you point out) the former is the creed of the uni grad class. This has *nothing* to do with their political tactics. Or indeed their political views. If they came to their opinions and tactics through deliberative thought, then sure, maybe their high IQ would help. But they don't arrive at it through thought. They arrive at it through status signalling and purity spirals on Twitter. Itself grounded in differentiating themselves from whatever the Republican position is. What's the proof? Lods of instances. But the best is probs the Defund the Police nonsense in the runup to the 2020 election. To say nothing about the excuse-making for riots. They didn't do this cos it's a sensible position, much less cos they thought it would help Biden with swing voters. They did this cos the most taboo thing in their social milieu is to be racist like those awful rednecks. And do they had a purity spiral to be as 'anti-racist' (anti poor white) as they could, and that's where it lead them. Pure performative indignation and post hoc rationalisation. It's through *sheer luck* that the in-group peacocking around abortion - which spurred the Dems to make that the most salient campaign point - happened to coincide with the v real fears of millions of normies and middle class swing voters.
I agree that the GOP had an unimpressive day and that many of its candidates were mediocre, at best. I am skeptical, however, that the results turned significantly on the abortion issue.
Rather, it seems, based on federal elections for the last 20 years or so, the U.S. electorate is simply evenly divided and that played itself out again yesterday. While the pre-game pundits went on about a coming "red wave", that never really appeared evident in the actual polling.
The GOP's main problem today, I think, is that it does not offer a coherent and attractive set of positions to voters. For example, you have a GOP that theoretically supports free markets and tax cuts while simultaneously supporting import tariffs and domestic corporate subsidies. And the positions the GOP should support -- limited government, free markets, individual liberty -- generally require much more than cute political sound bites to justify (e.g., the typical glib politician can easily posture on his support of "price gouging" laws, while his more economically literate opponent would struggle with a lesson in economics to show that such laws actually harm consumers).
Consequently, the GOP needs a fairly well-educated electorate, and that is an increasing problem in my view. Left-wing institutions, including the education system and most major media outlets, have been and continue to be effective at indoctrinating voters (and pre-voters). Your average voter today learns to reflexively respond to any societal problem (real or imagined) with the notion that government needs to "do something" rather than consider that the work of private individuals, institutions, and markets are generally much better alternatives. And how many voters today understand the importance of our federal government being one of limited and enumerated powers? When His Majesty Biden declared a canceling of student loans, I doubt those high IQ liberal college kids paused to consider whether this act was consistent with the Constitution's separation of powers.
I'm an atheist and extremely anti-abortion (relevant: raised Catholic). I think this is an entirely consistent humanist position. Abortion kills humans, hence I'm against it. And not just humans, completely innocent children.
I can distinguish this from being pro-euthanasia (which I'm mostly against, in fact), and being pro-death penalty (which I am very much in favor of). People being euthanized tend to be old and have already contributed most of what they will contribute, while criminals are criminals.
Preventing the murder of children is a value. IT IS A VALUE. If it's unpopular, I don't give a single fuck. People who are pro-child murder are wrong. If it leads to Republicans losing elections for a few cycles or even forever, that's regrettable but worthwhile. Even if Dobbs leads to more abortion extremism in deep blue states (unlikely but possible), it will still lead to less child murder overall. Abortion extremism, in general, is not popular and will never gain currency at a national level, or at least not until we escape the childbirth loop through machine-based surrogacy (~10-20 years) and/or cloning (~50-100 years).
There's a great Vox article by (I think) Kelsey Piper from a while ago; it was part of a big futurism feature they had at the time, and I cannot find it for the life of me. Anyway, she (or the article) made the point that in the relatively near future our abortion debate will be entirely irrelevant due to the emergence of new reproductive technologies like artificial wombs. Victories against abortion between then and now will set us up for a future so bright I can hardly imagine it. Two billion Americans.
Don’t care if it led to the GOP suffering in this election
overturning Roe was worth it, if for no other reason than preventing libs from getting away with reading the Constitution that way. A right to an abortion is simply not enshrined in the constitution
Excellent post.
But if there is a silver lining for Right-wingers for whom abortion is not a big deal, it's that Roe was genuinely terrible jurisprudence, and striking it down was the right thing to do for that reason. That it's had an undeniable electoral cost is unfortunate, but it still had to be done.
For those concerned with democracy, indeed, this is how it should be working: abortion law is now subject to the democratic, legislative process, as the ballot initiatives in many states are showing.
The comments so far confirm your view. People who are anti-abortion don't care how unpopular that stance is, myself included. But as you frequently hear people like Yglesias say this to the left, now it is time for the right to hear it. If you really care about abortion, then you need to elect republicans. if you want to elect republicans, you need to stop talking about it.
The success of the left on this issue has been in their ability to frame it as a purely religious issue. The question of who counts as a human being and when you are allowed to destroy them is obviously relevant to atheists just as much as it is Christians. The conservative (and correct) viewpoint will do better if and when it can properly frame the issue around those questions. As to how they should go about doing that, I admit I'm not sure. You are unfortunately correct in that most people would rather just not think about the issue.
As someone who believes that abortion is murder of the unborn, I will say that I don't care how many elections Republicans lose over the issue. In my opinion, it shouldn't be up for a vote. "Just let people murder the unborn" is unacceptable, period. If advocating for the unborn's right to life leads to Democrats running everything, frankly I would consider that a serious indictment of liberal democracy and our society as a whole.
What's the point of winning elections if you don't enact anything you want? Overturning Roe and winning House by a small margin is much, much better than winning the house by 200 seats or something and the only policy "victory" being lowering taxes by 0.69420%.
You got the vibe just from reading the comments on your last post that this would end up happening. A lot of centrists who have voted D their entire life are completely fed up with the incompetence of the party along with the insanity on the fringes, with the latter feeding into the former. A lot of people saying they would definitely vote republican if not for the absolute insanity on abortion. If R’s even had a tiny bit of nuance here (12 weeks for example), it would have been an easy W. But the fact that you have a non-0 chance of a national ban INCLUDING cases of rape is just too extreme, and on a much more personal level than the fringes of the left. I would rather get fired from my job for using the wrong pronouns than my daughter have to bear the child of her rapist, personally, and I think most would agree. And that’s not even getting into the talk of banning plan B and other types of contraception. So a lot of us either reluctantly pulled the lever for dems, or in my case decided to just stay home.
I don’t see a way out here since there is a subset of republicans that ONLY vote based on abortion, and they are among the most motivated special interests in all of politics. We’ll see if they soften their stance now that the damage is done, but I don’t think they will.
God awful candidates like Herschel Walker didn’t help the case either. With all politics being national, candidates like him reflected badly on republicans across the country. With DeSantis winning as he did, I feel like trumpism could finally be weakening. He has his cult followers, but with all of the serious issues facing the world, I think people are going to gravitate towards DeSantis when they see how competent he is.
Redefining marriage was unpopular at one time. The left forced it on us anyway and now its popular.
As you said in "Why is Everything Liberal?" the left don't just count on elections and politicians to advance their agenda. They work tirelessly in many other areas of life in between elections, too.
Abortion may have to be one of those things the right works on in small pieces behind the scenes.
Wait, Saving lives of the most vulnerable human beings is Racist ??? LOL I thought you were suppose to be one of the intelligent progressive guys out there, and you come with if you dont let me kill a baby, you are racist like affirmative action. You are missing the big picture here about the Democrat Massive win yesterday despite all against them:
The candidate doesn’t matter, the issue doesn’t matter.
Only Harvesting votes and voting early matters. Election day is Obsolete.
Democrats are Professionals in this new game. Harvest and you will Win Massive.
One thing I take away is that voters respond strongly to a threat that they believe is aimed at them, personally. What I think happened here, is that a lot of women who might think extreme abortion acts are monstrous and would never commit them against their own children, would still rather permit other women to do monstrous things to their own children than to create a 1-in-1000 gray-area situation in which pro-life laws put them, personally, in a bind.
I'm pro-life and believe that, ideally, abortion should be entirely illegal. I'm involved with and donate a few percentage points of my paycheck to our local crisis pregnancy center, which I believe does good work and saves lives. But I suppose, in my heart-of-hearts, I'm about 1000x more alarmed about all the ways that the Democrats aspire to target my children, my family, and my church than I am about a woman somewhere being legally permitted to kill her own children, even after they're born (as is apparently now enshrined in Montana law). So although I don't vote the same way as them, I think I get where these women are coming from.
We Christians need to internalize the idea of being a minority group, which is something Aaron Renn has discussed intelligently. As a minority group, our political focus needs to be on looking out for our own rights and freedoms, not trying to use politics to make the majority behave like us, against its will.
Call me naive but pro-life has all the hallmarks of a "right side of history" kind of issue.
-Expands the moral circle
-Easier to explain to a child
-Becomes more tenable as societies get richer
And just anecdotally, I've observed the most random, secular blue-tribe women come out and decide to keep pregnancies that logically they should have aborted. There's *something* to anti-abortion weed that allows it to randomly spring up in blue-tribe gardens. (And sure, there are red-tribe women who get abortions, but that can easily be explained by "people can ditch morality when it runs against their self-interest".)
"People understand that there is a religiously-motivated base of voters within the Republican coalition that wants to ban all abortions, and will never be satisfied with intermediate steps. One can say something similar about the pro-choice side. "
I don't think you can. A less silly example to cite here would be immigration, where there are plenty of unironic "we should flood the country with foreigners without any regard to assimilation or cultural compatibility" libs. Likewise, you see plenty of backlash when liberals overplay their hand on immigration policy.
"pro-infanticide", on the other hand, is just a ridiculous caricature that describes basically no liberal.
Richard, I get your point but Roe had to be overturned. It set a horrible precedent for constitutional law. As you know, all it did was return the decision on abortion to the people. If "the people" don't like that, and would rather have an unelected body of 9 oligarchs running the country, then we're completely lost.
Liberals do have higher IQs than conservatives, cos (as you point out) the former is the creed of the uni grad class. This has *nothing* to do with their political tactics. Or indeed their political views. If they came to their opinions and tactics through deliberative thought, then sure, maybe their high IQ would help. But they don't arrive at it through thought. They arrive at it through status signalling and purity spirals on Twitter. Itself grounded in differentiating themselves from whatever the Republican position is. What's the proof? Lods of instances. But the best is probs the Defund the Police nonsense in the runup to the 2020 election. To say nothing about the excuse-making for riots. They didn't do this cos it's a sensible position, much less cos they thought it would help Biden with swing voters. They did this cos the most taboo thing in their social milieu is to be racist like those awful rednecks. And do they had a purity spiral to be as 'anti-racist' (anti poor white) as they could, and that's where it lead them. Pure performative indignation and post hoc rationalisation. It's through *sheer luck* that the in-group peacocking around abortion - which spurred the Dems to make that the most salient campaign point - happened to coincide with the v real fears of millions of normies and middle class swing voters.
I agree that the GOP had an unimpressive day and that many of its candidates were mediocre, at best. I am skeptical, however, that the results turned significantly on the abortion issue.
Rather, it seems, based on federal elections for the last 20 years or so, the U.S. electorate is simply evenly divided and that played itself out again yesterday. While the pre-game pundits went on about a coming "red wave", that never really appeared evident in the actual polling.
The GOP's main problem today, I think, is that it does not offer a coherent and attractive set of positions to voters. For example, you have a GOP that theoretically supports free markets and tax cuts while simultaneously supporting import tariffs and domestic corporate subsidies. And the positions the GOP should support -- limited government, free markets, individual liberty -- generally require much more than cute political sound bites to justify (e.g., the typical glib politician can easily posture on his support of "price gouging" laws, while his more economically literate opponent would struggle with a lesson in economics to show that such laws actually harm consumers).
Consequently, the GOP needs a fairly well-educated electorate, and that is an increasing problem in my view. Left-wing institutions, including the education system and most major media outlets, have been and continue to be effective at indoctrinating voters (and pre-voters). Your average voter today learns to reflexively respond to any societal problem (real or imagined) with the notion that government needs to "do something" rather than consider that the work of private individuals, institutions, and markets are generally much better alternatives. And how many voters today understand the importance of our federal government being one of limited and enumerated powers? When His Majesty Biden declared a canceling of student loans, I doubt those high IQ liberal college kids paused to consider whether this act was consistent with the Constitution's separation of powers.
Florida passed a 15 week restriction and R's did great there.
I'm an atheist and extremely anti-abortion (relevant: raised Catholic). I think this is an entirely consistent humanist position. Abortion kills humans, hence I'm against it. And not just humans, completely innocent children.
I can distinguish this from being pro-euthanasia (which I'm mostly against, in fact), and being pro-death penalty (which I am very much in favor of). People being euthanized tend to be old and have already contributed most of what they will contribute, while criminals are criminals.
Preventing the murder of children is a value. IT IS A VALUE. If it's unpopular, I don't give a single fuck. People who are pro-child murder are wrong. If it leads to Republicans losing elections for a few cycles or even forever, that's regrettable but worthwhile. Even if Dobbs leads to more abortion extremism in deep blue states (unlikely but possible), it will still lead to less child murder overall. Abortion extremism, in general, is not popular and will never gain currency at a national level, or at least not until we escape the childbirth loop through machine-based surrogacy (~10-20 years) and/or cloning (~50-100 years).
There's a great Vox article by (I think) Kelsey Piper from a while ago; it was part of a big futurism feature they had at the time, and I cannot find it for the life of me. Anyway, she (or the article) made the point that in the relatively near future our abortion debate will be entirely irrelevant due to the emergence of new reproductive technologies like artificial wombs. Victories against abortion between then and now will set us up for a future so bright I can hardly imagine it. Two billion Americans.