Democracy in Action

The left is, shall we say, not taking Friday very well. The Dobbs decision has them spinning and convinced that suddenly there’ll be a big blue wave to take out the GOP.

Meanwhile, the GOP has gained over a million new voters.

I hope you’ll spend some time with this Ross Douthat column because he makes a point I want to echo.

What happened on Friday was democracy in action, whether you support what happened or not.

For fifty years, Republicans have been laying the groundwork through democracy to overturn a Supreme Court decision that they saw as an overreach by the Supreme Court.

Nothing in the constitution even hints at an abortion right and Republicans, through moral conviction or legal worldview, have argued that a Supreme Court that can divine rights into the constitution is too powerful. Our constitution is meant to be read by all of us and generally understood. One can find a right to keep and bear arms, even if we don’t understand all the nuances. One cannot find an abortion right. There is not one in American history that one can point to as defining it.

There is no right to marry in the constitution, but one can point to American history and say there must be that right. Why? Because George and Martha Washington did not have to remarry once the constitution was ratified. It was just accepted. The same goes for the right to own property, which the constitution hints at because of the necessity of compensating people for taking their property. But abortion? No state permitted it until around the time of Roe. Intellectually, whether one supports abortion or not, that has to be understood as a bridge too far for the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence.

For fifty years, Republicans have moved to the pro-life side. An army of legal scholars gave intellectual firepower to the cause. Judges, lawyers, and law students embraced those arguments. Republican voters threw out Republican politicians who did not embrace the idea. Those voters elected pro-lifers. They rallied to Republican presidential candidates and consolidated behind those who promised judges who would read the constitution in a way that aligned with their intellectual and legal worldview.

And they won. It took fifty years and several setbacks, including David Souter, but they won.

They did it democratically.

They argued for a cause the elite in this country hate. Even a lot of Republicans who gave them lip service privately thought the pro-life movement stood no chance and so they could be humored to no effect. But they won.

The media, which tends to represent the elite, are diametrically opposed to the pro-life side. This is even now skewing how they talk about the issue and the political ramifications in November.

The lower down the socio-economic scale, the more pro-life a person is. The more religious a person is, the more pro-life they become. The media is the opposite of both of those things. Rich, white, secular people now at the core of the Democratic Party are exactly opposite those things. They view the pro-life side as unpopular in culture and personally disdain it.

But with people, it is popular. The press and Democrats fundamentally misunderstand the data. They say a majority support abortion, but the polling itself is far more nuanced. The voters support regulation and bans later in pregnancy. The Democrats think they can mobilize their base in November, but there won’t be enough to override those worried about the economy.

The media will spread the mythologies of the left because the media is more pro-abortion than the Democratic Party itself. One can kind of understand why with the stories we’ve heard of rape doors, sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, etc. The male reporters want abortion rights and the female reporters think they need them. I would not be surprised to learn that members of the media have disproportionally to other industries had more abortions.

Corporate America too is very pro-abortion. They’d rather pay for an abortion than lose a woman to maternity leave.

But America? It is far more nuanced and complex in its views than what the news tells us.

For fifty years, pro-lifers through the GOP have advanced democratically. They’ve elected officials, advanced senate and presidential picks, and reshaped a federal judiciary. It is probably the most successful movement of mass democracy in American history, but because the intellectual elite in this country abhor it, it won’t get that credit.

But it worked. The pro-life movement won at the ballot box and, because of that, reshaped the Supreme Court.

The left? It secured its rights with courts that shared their worldview and never made democratic inroads to secure itself. When it had power, it failed to codify abortion. Through Harry Reid, the left overplayed its hand and got rid of the judicial filibuster, which helped make this day possible. It bestowed sainthood on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, inspiring her to stay for history instead of leaving to protect her legacy. And now, they riot and promise violence.

The pro-life movement should build a monument to Harry Reid and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the two people who, frankly, did more, in the end, to get us to this moment than many others. The day would have come, but could not have come when it did but for Reid and Ginsburg.

Now, fifty years of hard work in democracy will not be undone by a momentary burst of violence.