Dave's Daily Dose 5/6/2022

Two Roes, Two Furious

As with our last Dose, the trigger warning still stands. But I do sincerely hope that people are starting to feel better today.

Let’s dig in.

• I had two “more on this tomorrow(s)” last time. The first, I was just alluding to my heterodox personal views, which I kind of summed up at the beginning of an article last year.
  
  I mainly just wanted to get that one out of the way, because the other is a point that’ll come up later in this Dose, so sit tight.

• Having reminded people of where I stand, this is just a friendly reminder that while so many are out there sharing snarky Facebook memes about how hypocritical it is for pro-lifers to only care about the welfare of the unborn and no one else, it’s entirely possible to care about both, and assemble a coherent politics of progressive morality from there.
  
  I would know, because that’s exactly what I’ve done. And maybe the fact that this tired “gotcha” talking point hasn’t convinced anyone in 50 whole years should tell the snark monsters to go back to the drawing board.

• I got a soundbyte from one my podcasts, of Chuck Schumer sternly vowing to hold a vote next week on that doomed federal bill to reinstate Roe rights.
  
  And wow. It’s just amazing! All this determination. All that spine. He really got his back up!
  
  It was illuminating.
  
  This is the same Senate leadership that has haggled, outright lied to us, and dragged its feet for two whole years on all its other priorities, because it was too afraid to take filibuster-doomed votes. Even though the fact that our bare majority is so strongly constrained by the filibuster meant that the single biggest advantage we gained from controlling the Senate’s agenda was “the ability to hold show votes that embarrass and divide Republicans”. And this was one of the few ways we could actually stand a chance at turning back the tide of Trumpism in 2022 and 2024.
  
  And now this? This is the one issue of such overriding moral clarity that we must abandon our once-cautious strategy and “get caught trying”? Not the one where the millions of those kids who the snarky meme says we ought to care about had their CTC (the one that was effectively a UBI) expire while Chuckie fucking stood by and did nothing? Not the one where we make sure there’s a planet left for those millions of kids to inherit? Not even the one where we pass a bipartisan revision of the Electoral Count Act to make the eleven weeks between November 5, 2024 and Jan 20, 2025 even the slightest bit less likely to mean the end of what little democracy we’ve ever had in America?
  
  These people are feckless traitors to the entire party. And I don’t mean that in that basic-ass way in which #Resistance Twitter is constantly accusing them of the sin of just not agreeing with progressives enough, despite… never actually calling themselves progressives. No, I mean the way that Darth Vader’s generals earned themselves battlefield executions for their pissed-poor performance.
  
  The Democratic leadership are showing their true colors now. You know that saying, “Show me your government’s budget, and I’ll show you what you actually value”? Well, after this, there’s no mistaking what Chuck Schumer was willing to spend his own budget of political capital on. And it certainly wasn’t “all the kids who have already been born” — that’s proven.
  
  This leadership doesn’t care about protecting the country from Trumpism. They think it’d be a nice thing to avoid, but they’re not willing to stake everything they hold sacred on it. They may even sincerely believe that Roe is one of those sacred things that needs to be protected — which is close, right?
  
  But when you’re talking about this level of power, of historical consequence — the stuff that’s more important than your trash pickup or your municipality’s zoning code — protecting the things you care about means taking real risks. And as I pointed out last time, this party has spent the last 50 years refusing to make friends with any Roe-skeptic constituency that could have given them the electoral majorities needed to protect America from Republicans, let alone protect Roe (their own stated goal).
  
  On second thought, maybe they’re not feckless traitors. Maybe they’re just children, too frightened and too naïve to understand the deadly gladiator match they’ve been thrust into.

• In case I haven’t spelled it out, you can go ahead and put me firmly in the camp that predicts “Abortion rights will end up being more secure 50 years after Dobbs than they were the entire 50 years of Roe”.
  
  What especially gets me about this is how the media keeps harping that “every developed nation which bans abortion ends up with an authoritarian/illiberal takeover”. Nice try, but did you guys forget Ireland, Argentina, and South Korea, among others?
  
  But then again, if we couldn’t rely on that bad narrative, we’d have to admit that maybe there’s a chance Dobbs didn’t happen solely because America is descending into authoritarianism (although it is), but rather that our brush with Trumpism was in part caused by Roe being poorly and prematurely decided.
  
  And then we’d have to question whether the nascent mad crusade to reinstate Roe is really a better idea than simply accepting¹ Dobbs and fighting like hell in the states — which would have the salutary effect of saving us from the authoritarian descent we’re being told to be afraid of because of Dobbs in the first place.

• I wonder if the aftermath of the post-Dobbs state-level abortion battles ends up being the spark that revives federalism and reverses the post-Civil-War trend from increasing national-level identity back to increasing state-level identity.

• Alright, now for that last thing I promised…
  
  In the throes of my own fit of pique this week, I originally wanted to write a snarky “Liberals Need This Trauma” take. And in a way, as I’ve voiced throughout this newsletter, I remain very concerned that we on the left are suffering from a fundamental collective action problem, where the emotional trauma that has been so clearly evident just this week alone is threatening to drive a counterproductive crusade, one which would crowd out any reflection on our strategic mistakes in the Roe era.
  
  And sadly, I don’t have an answer for that. It’s a genuinely hard problem. Collective trauma rarely yields good collective decisions. My perspective simply isn’t all that popular right now, nor do I suspect it’ll ever be, let alone within the Democratic Party. And who knows? Maybe my perspective is wrong. Maybe I’m pulling a Pete Carroll here, ordering up a pass to Tyler Lockette when half the country knows I should be giving the ball to Marshawn Lynch.
  
  What I can say is that it has to start with empathy. It’s the only way we “get from here to there”. And to me, that means starting by sharing my story, because over this week I’ve realized that the snarky take I wanted to write was really about my own feelings on this issue, not liberals’. It’s not even so much about the issue itself, but the discussion surrounding it.
  
  My pique started when I was listening to the wonderful ladies of Pantsuit Politics talking in an emergency episode Tuesday about how the Dobbs leak was “still a gutpunch, despite knowing this was going to happen for a while”. And I felt so alienated. I know that may sound self-absorbed and uncharitable of me; but to see people only just now wallowing in their own pain, without an ounce of empathy for anyone but whom they’ve decided was worthy of their empathy, it made me feel bitter. Fair or not, I felt like they were the ones being self-absorbed.
  
  As an outsider — a convert to the left — and one who remained a heterodox on this issue, I’ve constantly been asked to show empathy towards the people on the other side of this one issue. I was asked to empathize with the plight of women having unplanned pregnancies, and so I did. I was asked to empathize with women suffering under oppressive patriarchies, and so I did. I was asked to empathize with women suffering medical conditions, rape and incest, poor women, women who’ve died from back-alley abortions…
  
  And so I did. I stopped being so rigid, so naïve, and started looking at the moral world as it was, not how I thought it should have been. I stopped obsessing over whether abortion was murder, and started caring about the fact that every single case of it was a tragedy. When I stopped living in anger about a gargantuan crime against humanity, I was finally able to start living in the sadness of all those millions of desperate women, and find myself some hope for how to create a better world for them.
  
  This change of heart was the single biggest reason why I became a progressive: because for as great a tragedy as abortion is, and as great as are all the tragedies that feed it, the only way to stop any tragedy is progress. Not a zero-sum world where we hate each other, and that hate keeps us all deprived and lashing out at each other. A positive-sum world, where we can one day provide enough for all of humanity to live in harmony.
  
  The thing is, through all this, no one ever bothered to ask if they needed to empathize with me. I’m a straight, White, upper-middle-class male; what the fuck do I know, right? It didn’t matter that my mother was a poster-child for abortion-on-demand when she got pregnant with me, that she didn’t let the setback of being pressured by the patriarchy into childbirth and a bad shotgun marriage keep her from having the career she wanted — no, she was part of the problem, just like me, for being a tool of the patriarchy by opposing abortion. Roe’s supporters pride themselves on being the champions of empathy. But from where I’m sitting, they let themselves fall victim to the same tribal trap as their opponents, only empathizing with whom they have decided was worthy of it.
  
  I’m not equivocating these feelings of mine with the actual moral stakes underlying Roe and Dobbs — all those countless lives whose expected paths have now changed. All that empathy over these years has helped me gain a better sense of moral perspective and proportionality than to indulge myself in that narcissism. But they’re also inextricably linked with how we progressives get out of this mess — global warming, Trumpism, war, inequality, and yes, the march against abortion rights. The simple truth that I’ve been trying to drive home this week is that supporters of abortion rights wouldn’t have ended up crying right now if they’d ever had their own sense of perspective about the problems with Roe and how they’ve been going about defending it.
  
  I know it’s “not my place” to ask this. I’m an evil man, barely better than those misogynistic religious-zealot pro-lifers, right? How arrogant can I be to make demands on people who are suffering at a time like this? But I’m going to do it anyways. If you’re a supporter of Roe, now is a time to reflect, not lash out. All that righteous anger has been hurting people who want to help you, even if they don’t fully agree with you. You’re not alone on this journey, because I will continue to reflect with you, especially as we learn more about this frightening new reality we’ll be living in from now on.
  
  When my cousins — who more or less share my views — attended the first Women’s March in 2017, they were among those angrily turned away from voicing their support for stopping Trump’s hate, all for being nominally pro-life women. Since I was old enough to know what abortion and politics were, I’ve watched promising Democrat after promising Democrat be hounded out of primaries or forced to change their public stances to “pro-choice” in the middle of crucial statewide races where it would be a clear liability, including in my own home state. As a news junkie since the early 2000s when I discovered Slate from the MSN homepage on my high school’s library computers, I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched pro-life but otherwise progressive Democrats get rousted from editorial pages for daring to suggest just enough moderation to flip a swing state or two.
  
  I don’t expect those who I’m asking to take this journey of reflection to instantly agree with me, or really ever. But just look at all these losses we’ve suffered. When will it ever stop? Well, if you want it to stop, now’s the time to reflect. Because I don’t know about you, but I still think the American project can do right, and lead us to liberty. I care about this country, and as fellow progressives, and most importantly fellow Americans, I care about you. And we can only do this together.

1. Not without some good kayfabe, of course. Which, to be fair to Schumer, there’s an outside chance that he’s actually smart enough to be playing at with next week’s vote.