I’ve given up trying to make sense of their so called ‘policy’s’ . But this looks like a step towards forced abortion. As they chose.
There is no coherent policy that they’re all on the same page with. That’s a given.
The question I’m interested in hearing about, though, is how they handle that incoherence politically. Seems to me they’re screwed–if they adhere to the abortion = murder nonsense they’ve been able to agree on pre-Roe v Wade, they’re going to lose a lot of elections for the next decade or more but if they soften that line very much, (enough to persuade Dems to vote R), they’re probably going to lose at least an equal number of votes from A = M crowd.
So what emerges, politically, from this dilemma?
One thought is they simply shut up about it = abortion. It’s not like the Reactionary crowd has a shortage of stuff to motivate frothing turnout over; they’ll just make up a new outrage to add to their list.
If really pressed on the issue, their response will be akin to what the Ds said for the last few decades: “The SCOTUS has spoken. No point in us trying to end-run that.”
I disagree they’re going to lose many voters over this, much less any elections. There are a few pro-abortion zealots amongst the usual R voters who will make this their one single issue upon which they’ll switch parties & vote D.
But as long as the R propaganda machine can list a hundred D outrages before breakfast, it’s going to take a very, very single-minded single issue person to vote D for whom everything else the Ds stand for is anathema and everything else the Rs stand for is Mom & Apple Pie.
One thing we will have to watch out for is inaccurate polling results. Kinda like the “shy trump voter” of yore, in the vast swathes of the country where religious allegiance is a very important part of personal life, nobody in those small towns is going to admit they’d like to have abortion back; they fear being burned at the stake by their neighbors next Sunday.
I think it’s up to the Dems to keep reminding persuadable voters that the GOP is treating R voters as if they’re very stupid. Remember, thanks to gerrymandering, there are many districts whose representatives must keep voting for harsh anti-abortion measures–there’s no amount of simply “shutting up” that will make their voting records disappear.
They will only be “voting for harsh anti-abortion measures” if somebody is clamoring for those measures. That’s what I don’t see lasting very long. Right now some of the farthest of the far-anti’s are pushing rather wacky legislative agendas in their statehouses. That’s a group flush with victory and drunk on their own success.
Good bet they won’t keep that up long. They sure won’t if the voters abandon them for saner pastures to the left. Real quick they’ll realize that shutting up is the smart move. Except for a few performative asshats akin to the FC. Who’re more in it for celebrity and grift than for governance.
I think their voters are clamoring. it’s hard for me to imagine how someone who’s been screaming his whole life that abortion is murder, that women must be jailed, that doctors are evil baby-killing torturers, that fetuses are full-fledged human beings are going to go “Maybe I’m just full of shit” so quickly. Even if it’s only 10% of voters who’ll remain hard-core anti-abortion people, that’s 20% of GOP voters, and that 20% is the core of many Republican congresscritters’ constituencies who’ll view flip-flopping on abortion as an unforgivable betrayal of their values.
Perhaps. But ideas make it into bills at the state or the federal level only when organized pressure groups push.
IMO the big imponderable right now is what happens in 2024. If the R get their ass handed to them pretty much coast to coast, there will be a pause to regroup. OTOH if they sweep the field, the country will be on a very much express-lane path to White religious totalitarianism. With lawless oligarchic kleptocracy at the top.
Two very different futures for the country portend two very different futures for the question of abortion & repro-rights.
Absolutely worth being concerned about, but personally, I find it harder in the past few years imagining the two coexisting peacefully, especially after DeSantis. Unless there are fewer voters than I expect who’ll demand ideological purity from everything if given power, or else more shareholders than I expect willing to eat large financial losses to advance the white Christian ethnostate.
And, of course, republicans double-down on this:
Right now, there’s about 10 movements to put abortion rights into the Constitution of that many states. Or maybe more such movements, since I think there may be more than one in some states. There’d be more, but many states don’t allow citizen initiatives.
I understand every word you wrote, but I don’t understand your point.
Ah, I was talking about the prospect of religious fundamentalism and big business kleptocracy coexisting. It’s absolutely possible, but after seeing DeSantis go after Disney and Target getting bomb threats, I’m not as sure how likely it is anymore. Not unless the religious nuts let more things slide or shareholders are happy with only profit from white evangelicals purely for the love of the ethnostate and accompanying labor camps.
Got it. Thank you.
I’ll argue that a future US kleptocracy would be more like in pre-war Russia or current e.g. Philippines than the “shareholder value” fatcat-ocracy of the current USA.
IOW, a dozen well-connected families aggregate beneficial ownership of everything to themselves. Lots of minor fat-cats, middle-sized business owners, and financial services types get sidelined. It becomes a government owned by, and solely focused on, the benefit to those dozen families and everybody else can lump it.
The fact that transition will be wealth-destroying in toto will not matter to the dozen families who’ve grown their net worths into the tens or hundreds of trillions. Those folks’ numbers are the only ones which matter.
Meanwhile a loud continuous culture war backed up by a police state keeps 55% of the populace overjoyed or at least Schadenfreude-entertained and the other 45% utterly silenced, cowed, or jailed.
Will this be tried? If tried, would it be successful for at least a generation or two? Hard to say. But I do not see the two ideas as antithetical to each other. More like orthogonal with only small and peripheral influences on each other.
YMMV of course.