Dave's Daily Dose 5/4/22

Roe Edition, Duh

Trigger Warning: I generally don’t bother much with trigger warnings because I believe if I can’t say something controversial without being unnecessarily provocative, then I’ve failed¹. However, this is an extremely sensitive topic on which I’m admittedly rather heterodox² (from both sides), so this trigger warning is my attempt at “reading the room”.

What follows is going to be mostly a series of observations and rants with less than my usual coherence, and shouldn’t be taken as a final word, a personal attack, or anything but an invitation to join me in a hard discussion about how we all got to this point.

If you’re not here for this, if you’re still in your feelings and sensitive about it… just stop reading. It’s okay, there’s no judgment here, but it won’t do anyone any good to continue in that state.

On with the show…

• Imagine a world where liberals had cared as much about welfare as they did absolutism on Roe.

• That’s a catty way of saying this:
  
  Did you know that for at least 30 years now, American women have had fewer children than they say they’d prefer? I bet a lot of women would be better off if we had a stronger welfare state that could actually support families because liberals had done better at coalitioning with abortion-maximalism skeptics in swing states.

• Politico’s unique brand of toxic mercenariality³ contributed to this leak. I’m not saying they’re all that special against the backdrop of our toxic media; anyone could have done this. But they were the ones who did it, and they did it because they’re heartless shit-disturbers who think this is all a game.

• Roe’s downfall is one of the last major events to shape the Seventh Party System — in fact, it should settle the debate about whether we’re truly in a new party system once and for all.
  
  Anyways, abortion politics will play out very differently for the next several decades, and may even reshape the parties’ relationships with other social issues. As much as Roe’s supporters are rightly terrified that “women will die”, I think they’ve also severely underestimated the risk of an authoritarian catastrophe from the right-wing social politics that Roe revived.
  
  Dobbs is now both a challenge and an opportunity for Democrats to refocus on seizing state legislatures, which was always fundamentally the real path to power in American politics (because it provides you with a deep and battle-tested bench for higher office, and allows you more control over the “facts on the ground” that drive fundamental political macro trends).

• Dobbs will also have major demographic and economic impacts on states with trigger laws or who otherwise ban abortion.

• The whole “Democrats didn’t tell their voters how much SCOTUS/elections matter” line has been setting my bullshit detector off for quite some time, but this crisis finally helped me put my finger on it.
  
  Look. Democrats made their case for decades. So did the Roe-friendly media. No, this line feels like someone’s trying to save face.
  
  I don’t want to fall down the trap of blaming a single narrative for a much larger, more causally complex outcome. But I think “Roe is settled law!” and all the endless hearing questions about stare decisis are useful hooks for building an alternative explanation to this suspiciously-convenient-to-those-in-power voter complacency narrative.
  
  Democrats spent 50 years treating Roe’s legal finality as a rhetorical trump card, and refused to brook dissent or bargain with the vast middle of swing voters who weren’t entirely on board with abortion maximalism⁴. True, both parties committed to purges and purity tests post-Roe. But Republicans’ purity tests were about getting enough justices on SCOTUS to overturn Roe, and Democrats’ were about never ceding one blessed inch on Roe. Republicans accumulated SCOTUS picks, adjusting to setbacks and refining their nominee pool until they reached critical mass not once, but twice⁵, while for Democrats, every loss was treated as an unconstitutional abrogation — despite one of the most reliably pro-choice justices ever voicing her dissatisfaction with Roe’s legal reasoning. Democrats refused to countenance the slightest bit of moderation, of coalition-building in flyover country, as “selling women out”. Republicans leaned hard into the difficult⁶ task of building a grassroots movement to recruit pro-life women, as epically hard as that was given their own institutionalized misogyny, while Democrats pretended that even women who were lightly skeptical of abortion should never do anything but defend Roe to the last uterus, and that only women-hating men could ever want to interfere with women’s sacred rights.
  
  I have news for them: the refusal to build winning coalitions is what “sold women out”. Even on its own terms of abortion rights being a positive good, the entire 50-year strategy to defend Roe was an abject failure.
  
  The point is, Democrats talked about abortion and SCOTUS a lot. But every time they were given a chance to use it to undermine Republicans’ national political strategies, Democrats chose to have the less inclusive coalition in all the states they needed to avoid the crisis of geographic Senate bias we’re now facing. It’s just implausible that they didn’t talk to their voters enough; that sounds like people covering their asses for major strategic failures, and comforting themselves with the same old Communication Fallacy heroin they’ve relapsed to after all the other major defeats: “If only we’d explained ourselves better, the American people would have agreed with and voted for us”. No, you explained yourselves plenty fucking enough. But your actions spoke louder than your words, and your actions were refusing to ever make friends who could help you.

1. I often fail at this, but at least I’m honest with myself.

2. I’ll explain more on that tomorrow.

3. Is that a word?

4. Look, I’m well aware that both parties love to willfully indulge themselves rosy interpretations of polls, so don’t come at me with your own warmed-over version of those awful takes.

The basic truth, like it or not, is that roughly 1/3 of the country are pro-life, another 1/3 are pro-choice, and the middle 1/3’s views range anywhere from the nuanced to the incoherent.

Also, more on this part tomorrow.

5. The first leading up to Casey.

6. Many Democrats might also call it “cynical” and “tokenistic”, and I’d agree with them, but hey, it worked.