on bringing a handkerchief to a gunfight
or, the failed party
As you’ve probably already seen on every feed you subscribe to posted by every single person you’ve ever known, the Supreme Court is preparing to overturn Roe v Wade. The goal is quite obvious and Alito’s language in the leaked ruling takes aim at Marriage Equality, among other things.
The first thing I have to say is that I was wrong. I have been wrong about this topic for a long time.
Never in my life did I believe conservatives would actually work to ban abortion at the federal level. Two reasons for this:
This is an insanely unpopular position. Most Americans, including conservatives, are in favor of safe, legal access to abortions. This, in turn, makes this move an electoral disaster for conservatives. Too, many Christian voters are single-issue voters, and this is their single issue. With abortion no longer on the ballot, many of these Christians may move back to the Democrats.
They don’t need a federal ban because they’ve quietly made abortion effectively illegal or extremely difficult in many states. This tends to get less coverage and so it also gets less pushback from most voters.
More on the first point there: the conservative movement has changed over the course of my life from a political party to a culture distinct and insular more invested in triggering liberals than in defining any political theory or ideology. So while I have long believed in point one and believe this would have remained true until maybe even just the last few years, it’s very possible that this will do nothing to change the makeup of the conservative movement.
Point two is why I never really considered the possibility of the Court overturning Roe v Wade. Conservatives get their cake and they get to eat it. They can show their anti-abortion base that they’re serious about this but also don’t get pummeled nationally because these effective abortion bans are always happening somewhere else.
At this point, it seems impossible to deny that we have one political party invested in curtailing Civil Liberties. Despite what Glenn Greenwald may say about the censorious left and the dangers of cancel culture, there is a real threat to our civil liberties and they are not coming from young queer radical leftists on tiktok.
The otherside of this, unfortunately, is that the Democrats aren’t especially interesting in preserving our existing Civil Liberties. In fact, they often work with the GOP to curtail Civil Liberties. Whether it’s continuing the Patriot Act, expanding it, setting up a global electronic spy network, imprisoning journalists and activists for their political activities, or locking up whistleblowers in cages, the Democrats simply don’t believe that citizens should have the rights guaranteed them.
This is obvious with conservatives because they’re explicit about it, but we can see the actions and inactions of the Democrats as proof of their indifference or incompetence.
For decades, the Democrats could have enacted legislation to protect people’s access to safe and legal abortions. President Obama had the mandate and public support to do it. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi could make it happen this year.
No matter what they tweet or say publicly about it, we need to watch what they do.
Someone will complain about Sinema and Manchin. Fair enough. They in particular don’t seem to be on board with any Democratic policy goals.
However, what is the point of a political party if you can’t pull in the votes when needed?
There are a few possible explanations for this:
President Biden is an incredibly weak president and a terrible politician.
The Democrats don’t want to enact their policy agenda as laid out in the 2020 election.
The party is so fractured and broken and ineffectual that it simply doesn’t function.
At least one of these things has to be true. You can’t simply handwaive all of these options away. And maybe the truth is some fourth or fifth option I’m not accounting for, but I would say that whatever that reason may be, it says nothing good about the party.
People are already blaming voters from 2014 and 2016 and even 2020. They keep beating the drum of electoralism.
But, I mean, we voted in the Democratic party. They have control of two of the three branches of government.
If the pundits and the party’s response is that the Democrats can’t do anything because they don’t have a supermajority, it means they could have done quite a lot as the minority party in Congress. They could have blocked Trump from filling the courts with conservatives. They could have shut down the concentration camps at the Mexican border (which still exist, by the way—this party promise has conveniently been forgotten after Biden became president).
So again, the Democrats are either useless, complicit, or completely broken.
I don’t have a bright side to offer here. There are things the Democrats could do with this new knowledge, but will they do anything legislatively? Or will this just be used for fundraising?
But ask yourself the next time you scold some voters or non-voters:
What did you get out of the Obama super majority in 2008? What have you gotten out of Joe Biden’s majority in 2020?
Democrats consistently fundraise on protecting access to safe and legal abortions, yet what have they actually accomplished with all this money? The way I see it, access to abortion just got one step closer to being outlawed at the federal level.
They fundraise on protecting trans kids and immigrants and poor people, but what legislation has gone into effect to help these people? How often are Democrats standing alongside Republicans in opposition to pro-social policies?
I mean, for fuck’s sake, Donald Trump gave more direct Covid relief than Joe Biden. Just consider that for a moment.
The president who loudly proclaimed Covid a hoax gave more monetary support to citizens during the pandemic than the believe-the-science president.
So what must be done? What can be done?
A whole lot!
Will the Deomcrats make any of it happen before the incoming electoral slaughter?
I hope so, but I once knew someone who told me to hope in one hand and shit in the other.
I called him a weirdo for shitting in his hand, but maybe that shitty hand readying itself to smear itself all over the walls is the only one available in modern American politics.
A few other thoughts from other people:
