"... one of strange bedfellows indeed. If the G.O.P. wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere — it will have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself.... A post-Roe America will need to move beyond its wrongheaded obsession with autonomy.... We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills. We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another... A world without Roe is a world lived in the reality of this existential interdependence, since none are more dependent than unborn children on their mothers. And as this dependence rightly calls forth maternal duties of care, so too does the mother’s greater vulnerability in pregnancy, childbearing and, should she opt for it, child-rearing place demands on the child’s father and society at large. The reknitting of these interweaving obligations — these solidarities — is the next political and cultural frontier.... The Democrats were once a closer fit for the solidaristic vision, which is why before Roe, pro-lifers once happily made their home in the Democratic Party.... The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss.... After all, easy access to abortion (not to mention egg freezing and other technopharmacological interventions) helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace, thereby delaying real accommodations for time-consuming (and sometimes unexpected) parenting, especially for those women at the lowest socioeconomic levels in our society."
ADDED: I was impressed by the quality of the writing, but the 2 top-rated comments call it "word salad." Bachiochi took some surprising turns, and you had to follow along and think. Accept the challenge. But if you read to see what you already know, I guess you think What the hell is this mess?! The food metaphor — salad — is apt. These readers are babies, reacting with disgust to the unfamiliar. Here's a clue: Vegetables are good for you!
Lewis Black's angry little man is, in true Archie Bunker style, completely right. San Francisco has ruined quite a few other things, but their take on pizza deserves criminal sanction. I don't think a Pizza Desecration Act would be enough to legitimize a draconian cyberpunk corpocracy, but it certainly couldn't hurt.
At any rate, Althouse is being absurdly optimistic to think pro-lifers are single-issue voters. Perhaps that was true a half-century ago, but not now. In the face of massive judicial corruption on behalf of pedophiles and other deviants, among many other issues of religious freedom, the Christian resurgence will continue to rise.
I have problems with some of the excerpted quotes. For example, "We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills. We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another... A world without Roe is a world lived in the reality of this existential interdependence". I guess I am still a rights-bearing bundle of desire. The libertarian sector is divided on abortion rights, with some giving more weight to the rights of the mother, others to the unborn child. I do not wish for "interweaving obligations" or "solidarities". I would prefer that the government leave me alone for the most part. It seems like this was written by an author who doesn't actually know any libertarian-leaning conservatives.
Bachiochi took some surprising turns, and you had to follow along and think.
Yeah. My reply to the "word salad" barb is that "proving a negative is surprisingly difficult," but I am sure it would go right over the head of that "top-rated commenter."
'Logic fallacy alert'
I am always interested in the identification of fallacies, since they are so heavily used in the propaganda we all have shoved in our faces every day, so please explain. I have read the excerpt three times now, I don't see it.
Texas outlawing abortion means it's urgent to vote Republicans out of state office after Roe, and not only for democrats, at least until Republicans in power notice that they don't have majority support even among Republicans on the issue and drop the pose.
"the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself."
I don't think Trump "stumbled upon" it at all. I think he saw it, and that is what made him choose to run for President. The blowback from the elites has been a thing to behold, and it's easier to go along with all the propaganda, even if you doubt it.
I was watching a War in the Pacific documentary to get to sleep after the building fire alarm went off at 2 am, and for the first time ever, I found myself almost rooting, on an emotional level, for those poor benighted Japanese. What has the propaganda apparatus done to my subconscious? Not that they had been the hapless victims of a mass delusion, and didn't deserve to die the way they did, you can feel that way even about Nazi soldiers, but I was like "Why didn't you bring your destroyers to counter the submarines you must have known would be there!" I was admiring how tough those redoubtable Imperial battleships were, built by the plucky Japanese; what a pounding they could take! I felt sad when the Japanese admiral called for air support, and it never came because we had sunk almost all of their carriers. I blame propaganda working on my mind at an unconscious level.
with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere
I'm sympathetic to the word salad argument. What jumped out most is this bit of misunderstanding about the implications of overturning Roe. Overturning Roe will lock single-issue voters more tightly to their respective parties since, for the first time since 1973, their opinions will matter. It's the current regime that allows these people to wander--because the Supreme Court has declared that their views don't matter, that their opinion on the subject, however important to them, is irrelevant to the wheels of state. Overturning Roe overturns that reality.
easy access to abortion...helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace
Creative, though not convincing. Abortion rights empower businesses by enabling them to force their female employees to remain childless?
"America will need to move beyond its wrongheaded obsession with autonomy . . . We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another"
I'm not a libertarian, but I call BS: libertarianism insists on free choice, not "autonomy" in the abstract. No libertarian denies that we are "deeply dependent on one another." There is no inconsistency in a libertarian saying that women should be free to have sex with whomever they like, but that once a woman has chosen to have unprotected sex, she is responsible for all the consequences, from STD's to carrying babies to term. Far from celebrating "autonomy," abortion is the copout that denies the full agency of women.
There might be a potential bipartisan consensus here. As long as women are taught, and want to believe, that they are basically on their own, trying to get ahead, abortion on demand makes a lot of sense. A community arguably only takes on some kind of "right" to interfere if it is supportive of pregnant women, mothers, and children.
I keep wondering if Trump pointed the way to some kind of re-alignment of parties. If Republicans just want to run on "managing," then they might just be urging us to accept a world run by MBAs.
This is not the end of the war over abortion. Assuming Roe/Casey is overturned, the battle moves from the Courts to the legislative branches. That alone will make the fight more visible.
Also, this is the only issue Dems would have to run on in 2022. They have to front burner abortion. I don't see many pro-lifers becoming Dem curious anytime soon.
Comments need to respond to the material in the post. The author is making a specific argument. Don't write things that you could write without understanding that argument.
I'm being a little vigorous with deletions on this one because this piece is special and demands understanding.
Word salad. Her premise is that if Roe is gone that pro life voters will vote Democrat is a pipe dream. Trump is what was once a reasonable Democrat party. Crime, Marxist ideology the whole progressive package os a turn off for most voters who are currently semi conscious. Those voters aren't going to vote progressive.
I'm with the word salad people. Anyhow, the only religious people who vote Republican these days are the fundamentalist types, and aside from abortion they also do so because liberals hate them and want to kill them. That isn't going to change.
The article is full of failed political theories regarding Trump sprinkled with lots of conjecture and light on evidence supporting the opinion advanced. I can see why if you fully agree with the writer, then you wouldn't need any additional evidence to convince you of their genius. After all, genius is how much someone agrees with you. If not fully onboard with Bachiochi's viewpoint and it reads like well phrased yet meaningless gibberish.
Fact: Abortion is a top issue to 1% of voters. For everyone else, it is not even in the top ten. So the notion that the GOP will not be relevant without Roe is silly when you look at what are the top issues as seen by voters: The government/Poor leadership (an issue Trump ran on) Coronavirus/Diseases (an issue DeSantis and libertarian Rand Paul are dominating on) Immigration (Trump again) Unifying the country (Biden exceeds at, but in boosting issue #1) Economy in general (Trump again)
"But but, a NYT wrote in perfect english how the GOP is irrelevant without Roe" - gibberish
I question the entire premise of the article. Overturning Roe doesn't end abortion, it merely returns abortion to the table for legislative battling. Pro-life voters will have as much or more incentive to vote for pro-life candidates, because in a post-Roe world, those candidates can oppose abortion directly, instead of by some vague voodoo that channels pro-life Chi towards towards judiciary.
Writes Erika Bachiochi in a NYT op-ed with a title that obscures most of what's interesting about it — "I Couldn’t Vote for Trump, but I’m Grateful for His Supreme Court Picks."
Quality writing.
Trump made the country better, helped Americans and their quality of life was far better under his administration than the Joe Biden Regime.
But you are icky if you vote for him and we will cast you out.
Because women are too stupid to look past mean tweets and DIVISIVENESS!!!11!!
A lot of those "single issue voters" are people who want the Constitution to apply. And if Roe is fixed, then they are still going to trust the Republicans to appoint judges who will not try to super legislate from the bench. And why are so many people so eager to keep Roe? My own expectation is that at least half the states will still have legal abortion on demand, and 3/4 will have restrictions on abortion that the majority will be willing to live with.
The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss....
And the billions of dollars in selling baby parts.
But we don't mention democrat slush funds in the NYT's.
I was impressed by the quality of the writing, but the 2 top-rated comments call it "word salad."
Not necessarily word salad.
But it was at least edited based on the sensibilities of the leftist audience. It is pretty clear she had to walk on eggshells to write that article.
This is standard "good conservative" stuff.
Leftists are actively forcing women to be submissive to predatory men. She tries to touch on this but has to put it in a way that does not attack the foundations of the Democrat party.
Leftists are also ghouls selling baby parts for money. A high concentration of poor and black baby parts as well. I wonder if they are paying some of the mothers to grow the fetus to a saleable weight.
Not that "word salads" aren't real, but I find that the expression "word salad" is often used by the Dumbest Generation to describe any compound or complex sentence--not to mention the dreaded compound-complex sentence--not their ADD-riddled minds can't handle.
A world without Roe is a world lived in the reality of this existential interdependence, since none are more dependent than unborn children on their mothers. And as this dependence rightly calls forth maternal duties of care, so too does the mother’s greater vulnerability in pregnancy, childbearing and, should she opt for it, child-rearing place demands on the child’s father and society at large. The reknitting of these interweaving obligations — these solidarities — is the next political and cultural frontier....
The rest of it consists of a great argument, and Jonathon Haidt has been making it for a long time. He said that he was once a very partisan liberal, but as an anthropologist, he was living with a family in India, I think, that was deeply conservative, and he had to overcome his innate horror, and doing so, he came to realize that the patriarch's conservatism, and that of the family, actually was a framework to provide care and safety for all members of the family. Which came to him as an astounding insight that he kind of based his career on it, hough it seemed kind of trivially true to me.
He also has an explanation for why the liberal found the argument to be a "word salad."
When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations – Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity – I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.
In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond.
...
The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.
“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw!”
“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
" We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills." This has never been the understanding of conservatives (or Republicans.) They have always understood the necessity of connections with each other. Ever hear of barn-raisings? Read Democracy in America. But these connections need not always require the intermediacy of Government - much can and should be done through family, community, faith, and voluntary association. Government should do what only it can do, and what it does particularly well (a short list, it seems, these days.)
It is Progressive activists and careerists who are bundles of desires proceeding through life by sheer force of will, credentials, and networks and cancelling anyone who might demur.
If I understand the excerpt correctly, the writer is talking about the next frontier in the culture wars after abortion--the economic purpose of a woman. Is a woman's purpose in our society only economic? And what does economic mean? Just producing goods or also producing (ie raising) the next generation? Upper class women are protected from the effects of these ideas, not so those in the lower classes. Isn't the idea behind Aid to Dependent Children (or whatever it's called now) that women are economically useful in bringing up the next generation?
well props to her for trying to explore the issues, but why was he 'divisive,; trying to uphold the institutions that support society, perhaps not in the most tactful way, but after 55 million dead, maybe the time for tact is over, the West is on a path to erase it's self, from history, to be overwhelmed by powers who are antithetical to our way of life, we import a subject class like the Romans, we need not look too hard at that history, to see where this led, to the Social Wars, the Triumvirates and ultimately the end of the Republic, why is abortion, the peculiar institution, invulnerable to reform, ultimately I think the Court will fold, Roberts doesn't want to be against the tide of history, Barrett has shown an unwillingness to do her duty, lets not even speak of Kavanaugh shall we,
trumps argument was largely about working class interests vs the demands of the overclass, broadly defined, the latter group doesn't seem interested in a stable currency, reliable supply chains, secure borders heck even secure neighborhoods for anybody, white black brown or other,
'Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude. "Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more. "They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them.'
the Overclass can't even agree there is such a thing as man and woman, in some instances enabling biological men to supplant women in key institutions like sport, it's at war with the Industrial Revolution, that allowed both genders to have a degree of leisure unheard of in human history, it has shipped over the bulk of our manufacturing to a pitiless power, with revenge on it's mind, making the meaning of work which is the key to mans identity and a foundation to family developments
If the G.O.P. wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere
This snippet is completely wrong. If we are entering a "post-Roe world," (that's a big if), it's just the judicial opinion that's gone. The fight over abortion is still very much there. I have zero confidence that our society will harmonize over the abortion issue if and when Roe is overruled. Instead of voting to get a better group of Supreme Court Justices, you're voting to get a better group of legislators.
A sizable number of people think all abortions should be outlawed. That's a minority of the electorate, I think.
I think there's possibly a majority who supports the idea of allowing early abortions. But there's practically zero support for partial-birth abortion, 3rd trimester abortions, homicidal abortions. And many hard leftists want to codify Roe and are unable to move the points to where they (might) cobble together a majority.
Plus you're likely to see Congress at some point try to federalize the abortion rule for the whole country.
Roe was an absolute mess of an opinion, but overturning Roe doesn't resolve the case or controversy.
3 major points I'd like to make...
1) An unborn child is a "person" with a right to life, and the equal protection clause should definitely apply to that child.
2) The Constitution does not say when life begins or when people die. Judges should be careful assuming facts. Stick with the laws.
3) Conception is a great (and highly important) spiritual point. Human DNA is God's blueprint for a human being. Atheists also could see the importance of human DNA (but I would ask them, do you really think a blueprint is an accident?). But the basic problem with saying that conception is "when life begins" as a legal matter is that we don't know when conception happens. Only God knows. So if you were to try to make it a crime to abort a zygote, you wouldn't be able to prove that a zygote existed. You could, of course, try to outlaw many forms of birth control just to be on the safe side, but you'd get widespread opposition to any attempt to outlaw birth control.
"those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere"
This is silly. When abortion law is frozen by Supreme Court doctrine, Democrats can potentially compete for single-issue anti-abortion voters through other issues, since those voters know that the Republicans can't really change the law either. If abortion law is returned to the legislative arena, then real change becomes possible. There will be one party advocating restrictions and one party opposing them, and the single-issue anti-abortion voters will be locked into the former.
Otherwise, she's just arguing that economic compulsion leads some women to abort. Maybe that's true, but allowing states to restrict abortion is not going to change the economic compulsion those women face. The author doesn't even try to address this fact.
The gratuitous shot at egg-freezing is revealing, too. The author really just doesn't like for women to have choices, even when there isn't an innocent fetus at stake.
Its nice that the author recognizes that Big Business loves Abortion. They want cheap labor, and hate labor unions. So, the supply of labor must always be increased, whether its putting women in the workplace, or importing foreigners.
Of course, the general effect (or is it affect?)of middle class women staying in the workplace while they have kids, or not having kids at all, is to also jack up housing prices and more important to the business class - rents. More people means more demand for rental apartments = higher rent.
Of course, if you talk to libertards, they'll deny all this. Or give their goofy, "well if we just let the free market work its magic we'll all get unicorns popping out gold bricks".
As someone states abovem, Libertarians are the most overrepresent demographic on TV and in the MSM. that's because your typical Rich Liberal/leftist will not tolerate a social conservative, but the idea of cutting his taxes and helping his Tech/Entertainment company or law firm deal with less regulations seems pretty damn reasonable. I mean, they may have heart, but money is the most important thing to them.
So we end up with TV shows having Liberal/leftists and libertarian tinged conservatives. Even though the libertarian/socially liberal "conservatives is far outnumbered by social conservaties (whatever their economic views). You'll note that BHTV has had a large number of liberatrians on, but rarely any social conservatives.
"....it will have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon,...."
LOL
"stumbled upon"
Riiiiiight. Even though the economic policies Trump was chatting about in the 1980's/90's/00'swere the same ones he spoke of in 2015/16. In that sense, Trump was like Reagan in that he was telegraphing where he was headed in terms of economic populism/America first for decades in the same way Reagan had spent decades building up his coherent world and economic views and expressing them publicly.
No, this article is just another NeverTrumper trying to explain away the astonishing tone deafness of the republican establishment that is 75% aligned with the democraticals but have to try and hide it.
See Lindsay Graham 1.0 vs Graham 2.0 and now back to Graham 1.0. Pure Failure Theatre, as always.
It gets better:
"...with Roe gone, those single-issue voters..."
There is no such thing as single issue/pro-life voter. They are all full culture war voters.
This is one of many fundamental premises our "respectable republican" Erika gets wrong, and if you get the fundamentals wrong, what good is the follow on "analysis"?
Yes, let's BLAST through libertarianism! We don't want the serfs to get the idea that their lives and property belong to themselves and not the beloved State! We might end up with a free society! The horror . . . the horror. . . .
I noticed long ago to be suspicious of anyone who use the word solidarity; for they have a high probability of being a socialist, or someone who's adopted the false consciousness of socialism and on their way to becoming as such.
Solidarity in politics is usually an approach for us-vs-them. Tribalism. Identity politics. You're inviting others to be united with you, and if they disagree, they are not not only not part of the solid group, but they are making it weaker. Solidarity can not countenance dissent.
That said, the point is well made that if abortion is out of the way, it's a lot easier for the deceptive socialists to destroy the rights of mankind again by attracting well-meaning but deceived Christians who believe forced charity will make the world better.
The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss.... After all, easy access to abortion (not to mention egg freezing and other technopharmacological interventions) helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace, thereby delaying real accommodations for time-consuming (and sometimes unexpected) parenting, especially for those women at the lowest socioeconomic levels in our society."
First, I did like the writing of the portion you quoted as I do not have access to the full article. This is a word entre, not salad, deep, rich and fulfilling. I have read many things that threw around fancy terms that obfuscated the meaning. This passage is clear.
Second, I agree with the fist sentiment of the part I sub-quoted. The big lie is that value comes from your career when value comes from a healthy family, that leads to productive and law abiding citizens within a framework of familial dependency.
Third, I take exception to the idea that abortion and egg freezing helps business ensure that women are readily available... This gives business agency they do not possess. The ability to control when children happen has given WOMEN the ability to join the work force in ways denied to them before, and businesses were slow to take advantage of that (given the long fight for equality.) Businesses don't drive social change, they react to it.
Fourth, businesses did not delay accommodating the family because women joined the work force, it more likely accelerated accommodation because women were more involved in the work force. Prior to women in the workforce there was almost no accommodation for family as far as I can see.
Anyone who cannot vote for Trump but likes his Court picks has neither clarity of thought to resist leftist programming or the power of her conviction. For me, this discredits all else she has to say.
Am I the only one who finds the idea of feminist alone issues running against the author’s communitarian focus? Which is it: we’re all in this together or women are a special, separate case?
I can’t read the article because of the paywall. My hopes for the author’s ideas was raised when she listed God first on her obligations. But that appears to be a head fake if I understand the socialist thrust of her ideas. Another case of confusion over opposites. Socialism is based on power at the end of a gun barrel forcing people to do what the state demands. Jesus preached voluntary actions based on faith and God’s desires for humans. I did, however, like the author’s point about our responsibilities to other people, which boils down to loving your neighbor as yourself, which is not the same as equity. Jesus understood that everything is filtered through individual choice. A person is not forgiven unless they acknowledge his/her wrongdoing and sincerely repents. Love of person is unconditional but treatment of the individual depends on alignment with God.
“Texas outlawing abortion means it's urgent to vote Republicans out of state office after Roe, and not only for democrats, at least until Republicans in power notice that they don't have majority support even among Republicans on the issue and drop the pose”
I very much disagree with that. A significant majority of the country agrees that late term abortion, absent extenuating circumstances, should be banned. That is essentially what the TX law does - it bans late term abortions. The bulk of the country appears to agree with the original Roe structure of allowing unfettered first term abortions, and banning most third term abortions. They are barbaric. A viable baby is brutally murdered, then cut up and butchered to remove them from the mother’s womb. And, with Planned Parenthood, apparently the parts are often sold for reuse. The more that most people see what is involved in third term abortions, the less they approve.
What Trump did was accelerate the class shift and redistribution of the two parties. He brought a lot of working class, and regular middle class over to the Republicans. A lot of them are Roman Catholic (a lot of the Evangelicals had already jumped). In particular, Hispanics, whose flight to the Republicans seems, if anything, to be accelerating, with illegals invading their communities, the police being prevented from policing, COVID-19 lockdowns, etc. Abortion may not be driving their flight from the Dem party, but limiting it isn’t slowing it down either.
That's how we roll now: read the headline to see if you agree or not. The adventuresome few who read further will label the article a "word salad" if it's not immediately comprehensible. That is a result of polarization, but also of the great masses of opinion people are processing now.
In the 50s, local Republicans were the Planned Parenthood people and local Democrats were working-class Catholics. I'm more open to unorthodox combinations of views and opinions that cut across the great binary divide. When giant corporations are working hand-in-hand with the left, and Russia isn't Communist any more, and Red China is "eating our lunch" in the capitalist game, it's clear that Buckley-era conservatism isn't really relevant anymore, but I doubt that a realignment would tie up the loose ends and make our divisions neater and clearer.
I look forward to Erika's next article explaining how she realized that she should have voted for Trump, but I don't think the Times will publish it.
Wow. This is a word salad at best, and self-delusion at worst. I am leaning towards self-delusion- nothing she predicts on what happens, on overturning Roe, makes any sense on its face or even on deeper consideration. Pro-lifers aren't going to suddenly start voting for Democrats if Roe is overturned- such single issue voters on either side are going to be more likely to stick with their parties because their votes on the issue are more broadly useful as the battle moves to the legislatures. Most voters probably don't think much about their votes for state senate and house seats- if Roe is overturned, they will have incentive to start caring more about those elections.
In any case, this is all nonsense anyway- abortion isn't going to vanish from the US regardless of what happens with these court cases- half the country won't see any change at all, and an in-clinic abortion will be available for a less than 10 hour bus trip pretty much everywhere. What is most likely to change is that women start using birth control more effectively in those states where abortion isn't readily available any longer. In short, I predict no big political changes at all, no matter what happens.
Maybe she is criticized for a word salad since she is making Roe/Casey do too much. What will happen? Not the end of abortion in the United States, for sure. Not even a drastic reduction. That would be like forecasting that the Supreme Court's sodomy decision in 1986, Bowers v Hardwick, would end, or even much reduce, same sex relations.
This brings back to mind a personal experience I had working at the Progressive Magazine around 1983. Pacifist extraordinaire Sam Day was discussion abortion with some feminists at the office one day. He expressed concern about the left making abortion a top priority as it was already doing by then. He said he feared it was importing a kind of callousness into what ought to be a movement above all for the sanctity of all life. Day was not opposed to abortion, and I believe he deferred more to the feminists over time. But that day he said something I always saw as prophetic.
"Trump isn't divisive, unless you think he started his own Russian collusion story etc."
This always has to be walked back one more step, to the Clinton campaign and the DNC promoting Trump in the first place. Trump derangement had to be arranged so that the Democratic rank-and-file wouldn't turn on the people who had paid good money for control of the party.
Althouse: "The author is making a specific argument."
What is that specific argument?
There are four assertions in the text you chose to highlight: ..Libertarianism is strong in the GOP. ..Economic populism is displacing that Libertarianism. ..Trump portrays himself as an economic populist. ..Libertarianism and pro-lifeism are strange bedfellows.
I disagree with the first assertion. Libertartinism cedes to Government the minimum of power. Both major Parties tend toward increasing the powers of Government, altho the GOP somewhat less than the Democrats.
If as I maintain the GOP is not Libertarian, the second assertion falls.
If printing and spreading devalued currency is "economic populism" then yes, Trump is that.
I disagree that Libertarianism and pro-lifeism are strange bedfellows. There is little overlap. Libertarianism seeks to minimize the powers of Government across the broad spectrum of those powers. Pro-lifeism seeks to place the legal definition of life as beginning at conception.
Most everyone alive is "pro-life." The question of when life legally begins however is less well agreed on. I think Libertarians, in roughly the same proportion as the general population, would place that point somewhere between conception and parturition.
I whacked at the article for 20 minutes with a text editor. Tossed out the "Trump is asshole" irrelevancies. Tossed out the gobbledy-goop words and phrases. What remains seems to be political advice to the GOP from someone who hopes they fail.
What "specific argument" do you find the author making?
A significant majority of the country agrees that late term abortion, absent extenuating circumstances, should be banned. That is essentially what the TX law does - it bans late term abortions.
So in your world, seven weeks is "late term". The striking dishonesty of you and others is amazing. Third term abortions are already exceedingly rare, and difficult to obtain. Almost all of them are because of birth defects that would lead to the baby's death after a few excruciating hours or days.
And, with Planned Parenthood, apparently the parts are often sold for reuse.
This lie has been thoroughly debunked. That you keep repeating it demonstrates the dishonesty I already noted.
Yes, let's BLAST through libertarianism! We don't want the serfs to get the idea that their lives and property belong to themselves and not the beloved State! We might end up with a free society!
That's the problem with libertarianism. Libertarians believe that serfs own, or even have the ability to obtain, property.
What Trump did was accelerate the class shift and redistribution of the two parties. He brought a lot of working class, and regular middle class over to the Republicans.
More bullshit. Trump did not accelerate the class shift and redistribution of the two parties. If he had he would have at least won the popular vote once and the electoral college twice, he did neither.
The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss.... After all, easy access to abortion (not to mention egg freezing and other technopharmacological interventions) helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace, thereby delaying real accommodations for time-consuming (and sometimes unexpected) parenting, especially for those women at the lowest socioeconomic levels in our society."
And this is an example of the fuzzy thinking of the author. Egg freezing and the "technopharmalogical" (if that is even a word) interventions are almost exclusively available (at least in this country), the upper middle class and the rich. Describing such people as "unencumbered worker[s] who are beholden to their bosses" is sheer fantasy.
Autonomy is not wrongheaded, but processed through reconciliation, and to mitigate communal/dictatorial corruption. The balance of public and private smoothing functions, and capitalism (i.e. retained earnings), is negotiable to preserve individual, family, and community fitness.
That said, there is no mystery in sex and conception. A woman and man have four choices: abstention, prevention, adoption, and compassion, a right to self-defense for other than light, social, redistributive, and fair weather causes, and still six weeks until functional viability (e.g. heart beat, nervous system activity).
Be impressed by the quality of the writing if you like, but don't let it blind you to the shabbiness of the argument. Believing that parents have obligations to their children does not automatically entail whatever open-ended set of obligations to strangers Bachiochi wants them to drag in their wake.
"Roe, Roe, Roe your baby down the river Styx" is one issue. Clinical cannibalism is another. The greater issues are the Twilight Amendment that is a source of progressive mischief and dysfunction, and the establishment of the Pro-Choice religion that denies women and men's dignity and agency, and reduces human life to a negotiable commodity.
I agree with so many ofl the commenters who have stated that abortion is not likely to be banned. And certainly, Republican women are not likely to become Democrats because of that. There are so many other philosophical reasons and issues which make people choose the Republican Party, but especially the role of government in the life of a private citizen. Social responsibility is better met and handled on the local level through private agencies.
I also don't mind Bachiochi's writing style and would not call it word salad, which connotes an incoherent mishmash much like how President Biden speaks. I would call Bachiochi's style cohesive although quite antiquated and verbose. I looked at her ideas at the link to her book and also found them antiquated and somewhat offensive in her characterization of women's rights arising from the dignity of motherhood rather than personhood. While the social order requires that our species reproduce and raise children, not every person is required by that social order to bring children into the world in order to have value and worth.
You don't even have to be a socially approved "good" or virtuous person in order to deserve love and equal rights.
"... one of strange bedfellows indeed. If the G.O.P. wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere
No, actually, they won't.
Because the Democrats will always be promising to bring Roe back if they take back SCOTUS.
And since the Democrats are at war with believing Christians (just read anything they have to say on "religious exemptions" for Christians, as opposed to people who want it as an excuse to smoke peyote), believing Christians will still be forced to support a GOP that's willing to protect them.
Writes Erika Bachiochi in a NYT op-ed with a title that obscures most of what's interesting about it — "I Couldn’t Vote for Trump, but I’m Grateful for His Supreme Court Picks."
Then she's an idiot, and a mostly worthless person.
It's like someone who claims to be a pacifist, but is really happy the military beat the Nazis. If you don't like the costs of your philosophy, and don't want to have to pay them, then your philosophy is garbage
Amazon blurb says :: ... Inspired by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft ... ------------ suppose a different novel plot - I'm imagine instead - Doctora Frankenstein as woman and assembling "Eve" instead of "Adam"
Trump is entirely and intentionally divisive. His insults and name-calling, his encouragement to his acolytes to "beat up" those who criticize him, his sneering mocking of people with physical disabilities, his blame-casting and lying about his "unprecedented successes," all point to an old man who remains emotionally and intellectually a 14-year old bully, to someone who divides those into those who are either with him--part of his gang--or outsiders to be scorned and attacked.
Field Marshall Freder the hopeless): "More bullshit. Trump did not accelerate the class shift and redistribution of the two parties. If he had he would have at least won the popular vote once and the electoral college twice, he did neither."
Hilarious!
Trump most certainly did do just that. The acceleration of redistribution happened fastest in the most rural counties, heavily hispanic/dem counties along the southern border (which went for Trump in 2020), and amongst black and hispanic working class across the country (as opposed to blacks/hispanics with college degrees).
Even the dem consultants recognize this.
But Freder wouldnt be Freder if he wasnt years behind on reality.
Just think about how shocked Freder will be when he finds out Hillary paid for the hoax dossier!
Like others here, I dispute the existence of the so-called 'single-issue voter'. Much more likely that people identify by an issue that is MOST important to them. Voters who align with Republicans because they are prolife cannot fail to see how their pro-abortion opponents are so consistently evil on other issues like criminal justice, redistributive economics, human sexuality, religious liberty ... well, the list goes on.
Even if Roe/Casey were set aside and abortion was illegal everywhere, why would prolife voters even consider aligning with the side that seeks to destroy the country?
A post-Roe America will need to move beyond its wrongheaded obsession with autonomy....
I think what she's talking about is the "autonomy" justification for abortion. It's the woman's body, and she controls her body, she rules her body. And yes, this philosophy is bad, and it's very damaging for women.
Her point (I think) is that autonomy is a lousy (and kind of absurd) attitude to take about a pregnancy. A woman does not impregnate herself. And she's not a solitary person when she's pregnant. Every pregnancy has a father. Every pregnancy has a baby.
For decades the feminist movement has been teaching men that pregnancy is none of our business. Only women get pregnant, so this doesn't concern us. And yet every pregnancy has a dad. We are intimately involved in pregnancy.
We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills. We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another...
What's damaging is to talk about autonomy or individualism in the case of a pregnancy, which is about a union. A man and a woman unite and create a baby. To ignore this takes you down an insane road where you say stuff like, "You don't have a uterus so this doesn't concern you!" or "Only women get pregnant!"
And feminism has zero concern about male autonomy. If feminists really believed in "autonomy," then fathers would have no duties, no obligations, the birth of the baby was a choice the mother made. Indeed, the ancient Greeks and Roman (from where Blackmun got the viability doctrine) believed that the baby was not autonomous (a baby is weak and helpless). The parents had no obligations, they could just walk away. That's autonomy, at least according to the ancient pagans -- walking away from babies and letting them die.
Feminism has never fought for autonomy for men (obviously), which is why there is no constitutional right for men to walk away from babies.
Feminism is solely concerned with women, and is often actively hostile to anybody who is not a woman (i.e. men and children of both sexes).
Feminism has never really grappled with why abortion is part of the Playboy philosophy. Abortion is not just a woman killing her baby. It often involves a man walking away from his baby. Or he joins in and pays for the infanticide. Indeed, many men coerce abortions.
How strange that men, who are often accused of coercing sex, are never accused of coercing abortions!
"I hate you and I'm not paying any child support. Fuck you!" Isn't that coercion? Indeed, if a man ghosts you when you are pregnant, isn't that coercive as well?
Currently it's like feminism sends both man and baby into the phantom zone for 9 months, and then when the baby is born feminism wants to resurrect chivalry and duty. As I like to say, feminism shoots at patriarchy and it kills fatherhood (and babies).
Freder Frederson said... "And, with Planned Parenthood, apparently the parts are often sold for reuse. "
This lie has been thoroughly debunked. That you keep repeating it demonstrates the dishonesty I already noted.
No, it hasn't, which is why you provided no link. I'm not providing a link because there's so many different lies you could be pushing that there's no point in trying to figure out which dishonest "debunking" you're claiming to believe.
So, provide us your "debunking", and we'll rip it apart.
Or, don't provide us with one, and we'll all know even you know you're lying
What exactly is wrong with being "divisive"? I love liberty, and feel no desire for unity in any way, shape or form with State-shtuppers such as Robert Cook.
I've watched a lot of people switch political sides, some multiple times, since 2001. A common factor is that the vast majority that I have seen are driven to switch -- only in part at first -- by a single issue, then they see who their allies are on that issue, and they decide they like them, and realize they are not the evil idiots they seemed to be, and the partial converts end up adopting most of the positions of their former enemies. That is how many pro-lifers ended up agreeing with conservatives on a host of issues. It's how many people became conservative after 9/11. I see it happening now in NYC as a subset of parents of school age children are being driven away from the left based on school Covid policies. In the other direction, sometimes it has often been race, or gay rights, or Trump that drove it. Of course, there are many more reasons on both sides.
BUT, with Roe gone, that does not mean they will flip back. It will take, for each person, some new issue that makes it intolerable for them to continue to identify with the right. And then again, they will at first align with the left only on that one issue, and then adopt the left portion on many others by the same process. This is almost always how it happens. I mean, I have not conducted an academic study, but I have observed it over and over and over again.
I make no prediction how or whether this will play out for most pro-life people. But even if Roe ends, abortion is not going away as an issue. So if it is important to you, you still will need to account for it in your political calculus. It will just become less important as a Presidential and Senate issue. But in local elections it will become even more relevant.
Althouse Stalinist In Residence Coo: "Trump is entirely and intentionally divisive. His insults and name-calling, his encouragement to his acolytes to "beat up" those who criticize him his sneering mocking of people with physical disabilities, his blame-casting and lying about his "unprecedented successes,..."
"his encouragement to his acolytes to "beat up" those who criticize him"
BS. It was Trump supporters that were targeted for vicious assaults across the country.
"..him his sneering mocking of people with physical disabilities,.."
A completely debunked lie. Again.
The lefties "Rupar-ed" Trump by freeze-framing a millisecond of the Trump video at the exact moment when his hand went into a flexed posture and put that picture next to a still photo of the reporter with that same flex and pretended that was it.
Even though Trumps motions had been seen repeatedly in the past when discussing lots of other people and subjects.
I could go on, but Stalinists are gonna Stalinist and there aint nothing you can do to stop these revisionist tale-tellers like Cookie, whom I'm certain seems quite persuasive in the teachers lounge or local coffee shop.
Next up for Cookie: Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house!
I liked the article and agree with much of it, as you'd expect from someone who is Christian and left leaning (I'm a member of the Labour Party, which used to have a solid phalanx of Catholic voters and MPs and even Ministers). It was free marketeers, with the active support of business, that got rid of the family wage and encouraged the entry of women into the market place. That was good, but not the impact on wages. It drove down wages for skilled working class men and made working couples a necessity if you wanted to buy a house. And having babies, normally something young women in a marriage actively want (it's evolutionarily driven)suddenly in a world without family wages becomes a problem. Even with contraception pregnancies happen, even with the Pill. The modern left doesn't seem to care about this as its voter base seems to be university educated and minority ethnic. Guess what. Labour has been out of power since 2010 and doesn't look likely to regain it in 2023/4. Why has the left abandoned the working class? It's not only immoral, it's electorally stupid, as the working class, and lower middle class are majorities of the electorate. Anyway, back to the author. I think she's viewing the world a bit too optimistically, but I hope Roe/Casey is overturned and abortion legalised, if it must, through the legislative process, which is the right place for it.
Final point, as I've written before, in much of Europe, Dobbs/Mississippee (15 weeks) would be seen as more liberal than the present European abortion regime.
The critical reviews on her book are impressive because a lot of feminists and pro-lifers love it. Thanks for the link, Althouse, I'm reading that book!
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72 comments:
Lewis Black's angry little man is, in true Archie Bunker style, completely right. San Francisco has ruined quite a few other things, but their take on pizza deserves criminal sanction. I don't think a Pizza Desecration Act would be enough to legitimize a draconian cyberpunk corpocracy, but it certainly couldn't hurt.
At any rate, Althouse is being absurdly optimistic to think pro-lifers are single-issue voters. Perhaps that was true a half-century ago, but not now. In the face of massive judicial corruption on behalf of pedophiles and other deviants, among many other issues of religious freedom, the Christian resurgence will continue to rise.
Accept the challenge
Write better.
I have problems with some of the excerpted quotes. For example, "We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills. We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another... A world without Roe is a world lived in the reality of this existential interdependence". I guess I am still a rights-bearing bundle of desire. The libertarian sector is divided on abortion rights, with some giving more weight to the rights of the mother, others to the unborn child. I do not wish for "interweaving obligations" or "solidarities". I would prefer that the government leave me alone for the most part. It seems like this was written by an author who doesn't actually know any libertarian-leaning conservatives.
A diet of word salad leads to chronic logorrhoea.
Bachiochi took some surprising turns, and you had to follow along and think.
Yeah. My reply to the "word salad" barb is that "proving a negative is surprisingly difficult," but I am sure it would go right over the head of that "top-rated commenter."
'Logic fallacy alert'
I am always interested in the identification of fallacies, since they are so heavily used in the propaganda we all have shoved in our faces every day, so please explain. I have read the excerpt three times now, I don't see it.
Trump isn't divisive, unless you think he started his own Russian collusion story etc.
Richard Epstein has the same problem - none of his insights on anything any longer work because he can't read Trump.
Texas outlawing abortion means it's urgent to vote Republicans out of state office after Roe, and not only for democrats, at least until Republicans in power notice that they don't have majority support even among Republicans on the issue and drop the pose.
"the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself."
I don't think Trump "stumbled upon" it at all. I think he saw it, and that is what made him choose to run for President. The blowback from the elites has been a thing to behold, and it's easier to go along with all the propaganda, even if you doubt it.
I was watching a War in the Pacific documentary to get to sleep after the building fire alarm went off at 2 am, and for the first time ever, I found myself almost rooting, on an emotional level, for those poor benighted Japanese. What has the propaganda apparatus done to my subconscious? Not that they had been the hapless victims of a mass delusion, and didn't deserve to die the way they did, you can feel that way even about Nazi soldiers, but I was like "Why didn't you bring your destroyers to counter the submarines you must have known would be there!" I was admiring how tough those redoubtable Imperial battleships were, built by the plucky Japanese; what a pounding they could take! I felt sad when the Japanese admiral called for air support, and it never came because we had sunk almost all of their carriers. I blame propaganda working on my mind at an unconscious level.
Gerson in the Post strikes a similar theme--pro-life communitariansim and Republican anti-vax libertarianism.
with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere
I'm sympathetic to the word salad argument. What jumped out most is this bit of misunderstanding about the implications of overturning Roe. Overturning Roe will lock single-issue voters more tightly to their respective parties since, for the first time since 1973, their opinions will matter. It's the current regime that allows these people to wander--because the Supreme Court has declared that their views don't matter, that their opinion on the subject, however important to them, is irrelevant to the wheels of state. Overturning Roe overturns that reality.
easy access to abortion...helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace
Creative, though not convincing. Abortion rights empower businesses by enabling them to force their female employees to remain childless?
"without the divisiveness of the man himself"
Meaning, without the 24/7 demonization by Dems.
"America will need to move beyond its wrongheaded obsession with autonomy . . . We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another"
I'm not a libertarian, but I call BS: libertarianism insists on free choice, not "autonomy" in the abstract. No libertarian denies that we are "deeply dependent on one another." There is no inconsistency in a libertarian saying that women should be free to have sex with whomever they like, but that once a woman has chosen to have unprotected sex, she is responsible for all the consequences, from STD's to carrying babies to term. Far from celebrating "autonomy," abortion is the copout that denies the full agency of women.
There might be a potential bipartisan consensus here. As long as women are taught, and want to believe, that they are basically on their own, trying to get ahead, abortion on demand makes a lot of sense. A community arguably only takes on some kind of "right" to interfere if it is supportive of pregnant women, mothers, and children.
I keep wondering if Trump pointed the way to some kind of re-alignment of parties. If Republicans just want to run on "managing," then they might just be urging us to accept a world run by MBAs.
This is not the end of the war over abortion. Assuming Roe/Casey is overturned, the battle moves from the Courts to the legislative branches. That alone will make the fight more visible.
Also, this is the only issue Dems would have to run on in 2022. They have to front burner abortion. I don't see many pro-lifers becoming Dem curious anytime soon.
Comments need to respond to the material in the post. The author is making a specific argument. Don't write things that you could write without understanding that argument.
I'm being a little vigorous with deletions on this one because this piece is special and demands understanding.
Word salad. Her premise is that if Roe is gone that pro life voters will vote Democrat is a pipe dream. Trump is what was once a reasonable Democrat party. Crime, Marxist ideology the whole progressive package os a turn off for most voters who are currently semi conscious. Those voters aren't going to vote progressive.
I'm with the word salad people. Anyhow, the only religious people who vote Republican these days are the fundamentalist types, and aside from abortion they also do so because liberals hate them and want to kill them. That isn't going to change.
The article is full of failed political theories regarding Trump sprinkled with lots of conjecture and light on evidence supporting the opinion advanced. I can see why if you fully agree with the writer, then you wouldn't need any additional evidence to convince you of their genius. After all, genius is how much someone agrees with you. If not fully onboard with Bachiochi's viewpoint and it reads like well phrased yet meaningless gibberish.
Fact: Abortion is a top issue to 1% of voters. For everyone else, it is not even in the top ten. So the notion that the GOP will not be relevant without Roe is silly when you look at what are the top issues as seen by voters:
The government/Poor leadership (an issue Trump ran on)
Coronavirus/Diseases (an issue DeSantis and libertarian Rand Paul are dominating on)
Immigration (Trump again)
Unifying the country (Biden exceeds at, but in boosting issue #1)
Economy in general (Trump again)
"But but, a NYT wrote in perfect english how the GOP is irrelevant without Roe" - gibberish
I question the entire premise of the article. Overturning Roe doesn't end abortion, it merely returns abortion to the table for legislative battling. Pro-life voters will have as much or more incentive to vote for pro-life candidates, because in a post-Roe world, those candidates can oppose abortion directly, instead of by some vague voodoo that channels pro-life Chi towards towards judiciary.
Writes Erika Bachiochi in a NYT op-ed with a title that obscures most of what's interesting about it — "I Couldn’t Vote for Trump, but I’m Grateful for His Supreme Court Picks."
Quality writing.
Trump made the country better, helped Americans and their quality of life was far better under his administration than the Joe Biden Regime.
But you are icky if you vote for him and we will cast you out.
Because women are too stupid to look past mean tweets and DIVISIVENESS!!!11!!
A lot of those "single issue voters" are people who want the Constitution to apply. And if Roe is fixed, then they are still going to trust the Republicans to appoint judges who will not try to super legislate from the bench. And why are so many people so eager to keep Roe? My own expectation is that at least half the states will still have legal abortion on demand, and 3/4 will have restrictions on abortion that the majority will be willing to live with.
The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss....
And the billions of dollars in selling baby parts.
But we don't mention democrat slush funds in the NYT's.
I was impressed by the quality of the writing, but the 2 top-rated comments call it "word salad."
Not necessarily word salad.
But it was at least edited based on the sensibilities of the leftist audience. It is pretty clear she had to walk on eggshells to write that article.
This is standard "good conservative" stuff.
Leftists are actively forcing women to be submissive to predatory men. She tries to touch on this but has to put it in a way that does not attack the foundations of the Democrat party.
Leftists are also ghouls selling baby parts for money. A high concentration of poor and black baby parts as well. I wonder if they are paying some of the mothers to grow the fetus to a saleable weight.
'...it will have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon...'
So Trump just got lucky, I guess.
A lot of words to write without writing the 'S' word.
An advocate for socialism at the NTY. Who knew?
Not that "word salads" aren't real, but I find that the expression "word salad" is often used by the Dumbest Generation to describe any compound or complex sentence--not to mention the dreaded compound-complex sentence--not their ADD-riddled minds can't handle.
A world without Roe is a world lived in the reality of this existential interdependence, since none are more dependent than unborn children on their mothers. And as this dependence rightly calls forth maternal duties of care, so too does the mother’s greater vulnerability in pregnancy, childbearing and, should she opt for it, child-rearing place demands on the child’s father and society at large. The reknitting of these interweaving obligations — these solidarities — is the next political and cultural frontier....
To quote Jack Posobiec, Your terms are acceptable.
The rest of it consists of a great argument, and Jonathon Haidt has been making it for a long time. He said that he was once a very partisan liberal, but as an anthropologist, he was living with a family in India, I think, that was deeply conservative, and he had to overcome his innate horror, and doing so, he came to realize that the patriarch's conservatism, and that of the family, actually was a framework to provide care and safety for all members of the family. Which came to him as an astounding insight that he kind of based his career on it, hough it seemed kind of trivially true to me.
He also has an explanation for why the liberal found the argument to be a "word salad."
When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations – Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity – I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.
In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond.
...
The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.
https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-understand-conservatives/
Needless to say, Haidt took quite a beating from the embedded left in the press.
Maybe her argument is hard for you to understand, but it also seems trivially true to me. But you have my respect for taking it on.
“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,” said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe, “but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw!”
“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
" We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills." This has never been the understanding of conservatives (or Republicans.) They have always understood the necessity of connections with each other. Ever hear of barn-raisings? Read Democracy in America. But these connections need not always require the intermediacy of Government - much can and should be done through family, community, faith, and voluntary association. Government should do what only it can do, and what it does particularly well (a short list, it seems, these days.)
It is Progressive activists and careerists who are bundles of desires proceeding through life by sheer force of will, credentials, and networks and cancelling anyone who might demur.
If I understand the excerpt correctly, the writer is talking about the next frontier in the culture wars after abortion--the economic purpose of a woman. Is a woman's purpose in our society only economic? And what does economic mean? Just producing goods or also producing (ie raising) the next generation? Upper class women are protected from the effects of these ideas, not so those in the lower classes. Isn't the idea behind Aid to Dependent Children (or whatever it's called now) that women are economically useful in bringing up the next generation?
well props to her for trying to explore the issues, but why was he 'divisive,; trying to uphold the institutions that support society, perhaps not in the most tactful way, but after 55 million dead, maybe the time for tact is over,
the West is on a path to erase it's self, from history, to be overwhelmed by powers who are antithetical to our way of life, we import a subject class like the Romans, we need not look too hard at that history, to see where this led, to the Social Wars, the Triumvirates and ultimately the end of the Republic,
why is abortion, the peculiar institution, invulnerable to reform, ultimately I think the Court will fold, Roberts doesn't want to be against the tide of history, Barrett has shown an unwillingness to do her duty, lets not even speak of Kavanaugh shall we,
trumps argument was largely about working class interests vs the demands of the overclass, broadly defined, the latter group doesn't seem interested in a stable currency, reliable supply chains, secure borders heck even secure neighborhoods for anybody, white black brown or other,
'Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude. "Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more. "They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them.'
Who wrote this? It's really good...
He could write like the Dickens!
the Overclass can't even agree there is such a thing as man and woman, in some instances enabling biological men to supplant women in key institutions like sport, it's at war with the Industrial Revolution, that allowed both genders to have a degree of leisure unheard of in human history, it has shipped over the bulk of our manufacturing to a pitiless power, with revenge on it's mind, making the meaning of work which is the key to mans identity and a foundation to family developments
If the G.O.P. wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere
This snippet is completely wrong. If we are entering a "post-Roe world," (that's a big if), it's just the judicial opinion that's gone. The fight over abortion is still very much there. I have zero confidence that our society will harmonize over the abortion issue if and when Roe is overruled. Instead of voting to get a better group of Supreme Court Justices, you're voting to get a better group of legislators.
A sizable number of people think all abortions should be outlawed. That's a minority of the electorate, I think.
I think there's possibly a majority who supports the idea of allowing early abortions. But there's practically zero support for partial-birth abortion, 3rd trimester abortions, homicidal abortions. And many hard leftists want to codify Roe and are unable to move the points to where they (might) cobble together a majority.
Plus you're likely to see Congress at some point try to federalize the abortion rule for the whole country.
Roe was an absolute mess of an opinion, but overturning Roe doesn't resolve the case or controversy.
3 major points I'd like to make...
1) An unborn child is a "person" with a right to life, and the equal protection clause should definitely apply to that child.
2) The Constitution does not say when life begins or when people die. Judges should be careful assuming facts. Stick with the laws.
3) Conception is a great (and highly important) spiritual point. Human DNA is God's blueprint for a human being. Atheists also could see the importance of human DNA (but I would ask them, do you really think a blueprint is an accident?). But the basic problem with saying that conception is "when life begins" as a legal matter is that we don't know when conception happens. Only God knows. So if you were to try to make it a crime to abort a zygote, you wouldn't be able to prove that a zygote existed. You could, of course, try to outlaw many forms of birth control just to be on the safe side, but you'd get widespread opposition to any attempt to outlaw birth control.
It's not word salad; it's just bad thinking.
"those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere"
This is silly. When abortion law is frozen by Supreme Court doctrine, Democrats can potentially compete for single-issue anti-abortion voters through other issues, since those voters know that the Republicans can't really change the law either. If abortion law is returned to the legislative arena, then real change becomes possible. There will be one party advocating restrictions and one party opposing them, and the single-issue anti-abortion voters will be locked into the former.
Otherwise, she's just arguing that economic compulsion leads some women to abort. Maybe that's true, but allowing states to restrict abortion is not going to change the economic compulsion those women face. The author doesn't even try to address this fact.
The gratuitous shot at egg-freezing is revealing, too. The author really just doesn't like for women to have choices, even when there isn't an innocent fetus at stake.
Its nice that the author recognizes that Big Business loves Abortion. They want cheap labor, and hate labor unions. So, the supply of labor must always be increased, whether its putting women in the workplace, or importing foreigners.
Of course, the general effect (or is it affect?)of middle class women staying in the workplace while they have kids, or not having kids at all, is to also jack up housing prices and more important to the business class - rents. More people means more demand for rental apartments = higher rent.
Of course, if you talk to libertards, they'll deny all this. Or give their goofy, "well if we just let the free market work its magic we'll all get unicorns popping out gold bricks".
As someone states abovem, Libertarians are the most overrepresent demographic on TV and in the MSM. that's because your typical Rich Liberal/leftist will not tolerate a social conservative, but the idea of cutting his taxes and helping his Tech/Entertainment company or law firm deal with less regulations seems pretty damn reasonable. I mean, they may have heart, but money is the most important thing to them.
So we end up with TV shows having Liberal/leftists and libertarian tinged conservatives. Even though the libertarian/socially liberal "conservatives is far outnumbered by social conservaties (whatever their economic views). You'll note that BHTV has had a large number of liberatrians on, but rarely any social conservatives.
"....it will have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon,...."
LOL
"stumbled upon"
Riiiiiight. Even though the economic policies Trump was chatting about in the 1980's/90's/00'swere the same ones he spoke of in 2015/16. In that sense, Trump was like Reagan in that he was telegraphing where he was headed in terms of economic populism/America first for decades in the same way Reagan had spent decades building up his coherent world and economic views and expressing them publicly.
No, this article is just another NeverTrumper trying to explain away the astonishing tone deafness of the republican establishment that is 75% aligned with the democraticals but have to try and hide it.
See Lindsay Graham 1.0 vs Graham 2.0 and now back to Graham 1.0. Pure Failure Theatre, as always.
It gets better:
"...with Roe gone, those single-issue voters..."
There is no such thing as single issue/pro-life voter. They are all full culture war voters.
This is one of many fundamental premises our "respectable republican" Erika gets wrong, and if you get the fundamentals wrong, what good is the follow on "analysis"?
Bob Boyd: the amazing thing about Scrooge is that when he became generous, he did so with his OWN money! What a concept!
Yes, let's BLAST through libertarianism! We don't want the serfs to get the idea that their lives and property belong to themselves and not the beloved State! We might end up with a free society! The horror . . . the horror. . . .
I noticed long ago to be suspicious of anyone who use the word solidarity; for they have a high probability of being a socialist, or someone who's adopted the false consciousness of socialism and on their way to becoming as such.
Solidarity in politics is usually an approach for us-vs-them. Tribalism. Identity politics. You're inviting others to be united with you, and if they disagree, they are not not only not part of the solid group, but they are making it weaker. Solidarity can not countenance dissent.
That said, the point is well made that if abortion is out of the way, it's a lot easier for the deceptive socialists to destroy the rights of mankind again by attracting well-meaning but deceived Christians who believe forced charity will make the world better.
The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss.... After all, easy access to abortion (not to mention egg freezing and other technopharmacological interventions) helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace, thereby delaying real accommodations for time-consuming (and sometimes unexpected) parenting, especially for those women at the lowest socioeconomic levels in our society."
First, I did like the writing of the portion you quoted as I do not have access to the full article. This is a word entre, not salad, deep, rich and fulfilling. I have read many things that threw around fancy terms that obfuscated the meaning. This passage is clear.
Second, I agree with the fist sentiment of the part I sub-quoted. The big lie is that value comes from your career when value comes from a healthy family, that leads to productive and law abiding citizens within a framework of familial dependency.
Third, I take exception to the idea that abortion and egg freezing helps business ensure that women are readily available... This gives business agency they do not possess. The ability to control when children happen has given WOMEN the ability to join the work force in ways denied to them before, and businesses were slow to take advantage of that (given the long fight for equality.) Businesses don't drive social change, they react to it.
Fourth, businesses did not delay accommodating the family because women joined the work force, it more likely accelerated accommodation because women were more involved in the work force. Prior to women in the workforce there was almost no accommodation for family as far as I can see.
Anyone who cannot vote for Trump but likes his Court picks has neither clarity of thought to resist leftist programming or the power of her conviction. For me, this discredits all else she has to say.
Am I the only one who finds the idea of feminist alone issues running against the author’s communitarian focus? Which is it: we’re all in this together or women are a special, separate case?
I can’t read the article because of the paywall. My hopes for the author’s ideas was raised when she listed God first on her obligations. But that appears to be a head fake if I understand the socialist thrust of her ideas. Another case of confusion over opposites. Socialism is based on power at the end of a gun barrel forcing people to do what the state demands. Jesus preached voluntary actions based on faith and God’s desires for humans. I did, however, like the author’s point about our responsibilities to other people, which boils down to loving your neighbor as yourself, which is not the same as equity. Jesus understood that everything is filtered through individual choice. A person is not forgiven unless they acknowledge his/her wrongdoing and sincerely repents. Love of person is unconditional but treatment of the individual depends on alignment with God.
“Texas outlawing abortion means it's urgent to vote Republicans out of state office after Roe, and not only for democrats, at least until Republicans in power notice that they don't have majority support even among Republicans on the issue and drop the pose”
I very much disagree with that. A significant majority of the country agrees that late term abortion, absent extenuating circumstances, should be banned. That is essentially what the TX law does - it bans late term abortions. The bulk of the country appears to agree with the original Roe structure of allowing unfettered first term abortions, and banning most third term abortions. They are barbaric. A viable baby is brutally murdered, then cut up and butchered to remove them from the mother’s womb. And, with Planned Parenthood, apparently the parts are often sold for reuse. The more that most people see what is involved in third term abortions, the less they approve.
What Trump did was accelerate the class shift and redistribution of the two parties. He brought a lot of working class, and regular middle class over to the Republicans. A lot of them are Roman Catholic (a lot of the Evangelicals had already jumped). In particular, Hispanics, whose flight to the Republicans seems, if anything, to be accelerating, with illegals invading their communities, the police being prevented from policing, COVID-19 lockdowns, etc. Abortion may not be driving their flight from the Dem party, but limiting it isn’t slowing it down either.
That's how we roll now: read the headline to see if you agree or not. The adventuresome few who read further will label the article a "word salad" if it's not immediately comprehensible. That is a result of polarization, but also of the great masses of opinion people are processing now.
In the 50s, local Republicans were the Planned Parenthood people and local Democrats were working-class Catholics. I'm more open to unorthodox combinations of views and opinions that cut across the great binary divide. When giant corporations are working hand-in-hand with the left, and Russia isn't Communist any more, and Red China is "eating our lunch" in the capitalist game, it's clear that Buckley-era conservatism isn't really relevant anymore, but I doubt that a realignment would tie up the loose ends and make our divisions neater and clearer.
I look forward to Erika's next article explaining how she realized that she should have voted for Trump, but I don't think the Times will publish it.
Wow. This is a word salad at best, and self-delusion at worst. I am leaning towards self-delusion- nothing she predicts on what happens, on overturning Roe, makes any sense on its face or even on deeper consideration. Pro-lifers aren't going to suddenly start voting for Democrats if Roe is overturned- such single issue voters on either side are going to be more likely to stick with their parties because their votes on the issue are more broadly useful as the battle moves to the legislatures. Most voters probably don't think much about their votes for state senate and house seats- if Roe is overturned, they will have incentive to start caring more about those elections.
In any case, this is all nonsense anyway- abortion isn't going to vanish from the US regardless of what happens with these court cases- half the country won't see any change at all, and an in-clinic abortion will be available for a less than 10 hour bus trip pretty much everywhere. What is most likely to change is that women start using birth control more effectively in those states where abortion isn't readily available any longer. In short, I predict no big political changes at all, no matter what happens.
Maybe she is criticized for a word salad since she is making Roe/Casey do too much. What will happen? Not the end of abortion in the United States, for sure. Not even a drastic reduction. That would be like forecasting that the Supreme Court's sodomy decision in 1986, Bowers v Hardwick, would end, or even much reduce, same sex relations.
This brings back to mind a personal experience I had working at the Progressive Magazine around 1983. Pacifist extraordinaire Sam Day was discussion abortion with some feminists at the office one day. He expressed concern about the left making abortion a top priority as it was already doing by then. He said he feared it was importing a kind of callousness into what ought to be a movement above all for the sanctity of all life. Day was not opposed to abortion, and I believe he deferred more to the feminists over time. But that day he said something I always saw as prophetic.
"Trump isn't divisive, unless you think he started his own Russian collusion story etc."
This always has to be walked back one more step, to the Clinton campaign and the DNC promoting Trump in the first place. Trump derangement had to be arranged so that the Democratic rank-and-file wouldn't turn on the people who had paid good money for control of the party.
Althouse: "The author is making a specific argument."
What is that specific argument?
There are four assertions in the text you chose to highlight:
..Libertarianism is strong in the GOP.
..Economic populism is displacing that Libertarianism.
..Trump portrays himself as an economic populist.
..Libertarianism and pro-lifeism are strange bedfellows.
I disagree with the first assertion. Libertartinism cedes to Government the minimum of power. Both major Parties tend toward increasing the powers of Government, altho the GOP somewhat less than the Democrats.
If as I maintain the GOP is not Libertarian, the second assertion falls.
If printing and spreading devalued currency is "economic populism" then yes, Trump is that.
I disagree that Libertarianism and pro-lifeism are strange bedfellows. There is little overlap. Libertarianism seeks to minimize the powers of Government across the broad spectrum of those powers. Pro-lifeism seeks to place the legal definition of life as beginning at conception.
Most everyone alive is "pro-life." The question of when life legally begins however is less well agreed on. I think Libertarians, in roughly the same proportion as the general population, would place that point somewhere between conception and parturition.
I whacked at the article for 20 minutes with a text editor. Tossed out the "Trump is asshole" irrelevancies. Tossed out the gobbledy-goop words and phrases. What remains seems to be political advice to the GOP from someone who hopes they fail.
What "specific argument" do you find the author making?
A significant majority of the country agrees that late term abortion, absent extenuating circumstances, should be banned. That is essentially what the TX law does - it bans late term abortions.
So in your world, seven weeks is "late term". The striking dishonesty of you and others is amazing. Third term abortions are already exceedingly rare, and difficult to obtain. Almost all of them are because of birth defects that would lead to the baby's death after a few excruciating hours or days.
And, with Planned Parenthood, apparently the parts are often sold for reuse.
This lie has been thoroughly debunked. That you keep repeating it demonstrates the dishonesty I already noted.
Yes, let's BLAST through libertarianism! We don't want the serfs to get the idea that their lives and property belong to themselves and not the beloved State! We might end up with a free society!
That's the problem with libertarianism. Libertarians believe that serfs own, or even have the ability to obtain, property.
What Trump did was accelerate the class shift and redistribution of the two parties. He brought a lot of working class, and regular middle class over to the Republicans.
More bullshit. Trump did not accelerate the class shift and redistribution of the two parties. If he had he would have at least won the popular vote once and the electoral college twice, he did neither.
The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss.... After all, easy access to abortion (not to mention egg freezing and other technopharmacological interventions) helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace, thereby delaying real accommodations for time-consuming (and sometimes unexpected) parenting, especially for those women at the lowest socioeconomic levels in our society."
And this is an example of the fuzzy thinking of the author. Egg freezing and the "technopharmalogical" (if that is even a word) interventions are almost exclusively available (at least in this country), the upper middle class and the rich. Describing such people as "unencumbered worker[s] who are beholden to their bosses" is sheer fantasy.
Autonomy is not wrongheaded, but processed through reconciliation, and to mitigate communal/dictatorial corruption. The balance of public and private smoothing functions, and capitalism (i.e. retained earnings), is negotiable to preserve individual, family, and community fitness.
That said, there is no mystery in sex and conception. A woman and man have four choices: abstention, prevention, adoption, and compassion, a right to self-defense for other than light, social, redistributive, and fair weather causes, and still six weeks until functional viability (e.g. heart beat, nervous system activity).
Be impressed by the quality of the writing if you like, but don't let it blind you to the shabbiness of the argument. Believing that parents have obligations to their children does not automatically entail whatever open-ended set of obligations to strangers Bachiochi wants them to drag in their wake.
"Roe, Roe, Roe your baby down the river Styx" is one issue. Clinical cannibalism is another. The greater issues are the Twilight Amendment that is a source of progressive mischief and dysfunction, and the establishment of the Pro-Choice religion that denies women and men's dignity and agency, and reduces human life to a negotiable commodity.
I agree with so many ofl the commenters who have stated that abortion is not likely to be banned. And certainly, Republican women are not likely to become Democrats because of that. There are so many other philosophical reasons and issues which make people choose the Republican Party, but especially the role of government in the life of a private citizen. Social responsibility is better met and handled on the local level through private agencies.
I also don't mind Bachiochi's writing style and would not call it word salad, which connotes an incoherent mishmash much like how President Biden speaks. I would call Bachiochi's style cohesive although quite antiquated and verbose. I looked at her ideas at the link to her book and also found them antiquated and somewhat offensive in her characterization of women's rights arising from the dignity of motherhood rather than personhood. While the social order requires that our species reproduce and raise children, not every person is required by that social order to bring children into the world in order to have value and worth.
You don't even have to be a socially approved "good" or virtuous person in order to deserve love and equal rights.
"... one of strange bedfellows indeed. If the G.O.P. wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere
No, actually, they won't.
Because the Democrats will always be promising to bring Roe back if they take back SCOTUS.
And since the Democrats are at war with believing Christians (just read anything they have to say on "religious exemptions" for Christians, as opposed to people who want it as an excuse to smoke peyote), believing Christians will still be forced to support a GOP that's willing to protect them.
Writes Erika Bachiochi in a NYT op-ed with a title that obscures most of what's interesting about it — "I Couldn’t Vote for Trump, but I’m Grateful for His Supreme Court Picks."
Then she's an idiot, and a mostly worthless person.
It's like someone who claims to be a pacifist, but is really happy the military beat the Nazis. If you don't like the costs of your philosophy, and don't want to have to pay them, then your philosophy is garbage
Amazon blurb says :: ... Inspired by the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft ...
------------
suppose a different novel plot - I'm imagine instead - Doctora Frankenstein as woman and assembling "Eve" instead of "Adam"
"Trump isn't divisive...."
Trump is entirely and intentionally divisive. His insults and name-calling, his encouragement to his acolytes to "beat up" those who criticize him, his sneering mocking of people with physical disabilities, his blame-casting and lying about his "unprecedented successes," all point to an old man who remains emotionally and intellectually a 14-year old bully, to someone who divides those into those who are either with him--part of his gang--or outsiders to be scorned and attacked.
Field Marshall Freder the hopeless): "More bullshit. Trump did not accelerate the class shift and redistribution of the two parties. If he had he would have at least won the popular vote once and the electoral college twice, he did neither."
Hilarious!
Trump most certainly did do just that. The acceleration of redistribution happened fastest in the most rural counties, heavily hispanic/dem counties along the southern border (which went for Trump in 2020), and amongst black and hispanic working class across the country (as opposed to blacks/hispanics with college degrees).
Even the dem consultants recognize this.
But Freder wouldnt be Freder if he wasnt years behind on reality.
Just think about how shocked Freder will be when he finds out Hillary paid for the hoax dossier!
Like others here, I dispute the existence of the so-called 'single-issue voter'. Much more likely that people identify by an issue that is MOST important to them. Voters who align with Republicans because they are prolife cannot fail to see how their pro-abortion opponents are so consistently evil on other issues like criminal justice, redistributive economics, human sexuality, religious liberty ... well, the list goes on.
Even if Roe/Casey were set aside and abortion was illegal everywhere, why would prolife voters even consider aligning with the side that seeks to destroy the country?
A post-Roe America will need to move beyond its wrongheaded obsession with autonomy....
I think what she's talking about is the "autonomy" justification for abortion. It's the woman's body, and she controls her body, she rules her body. And yes, this philosophy is bad, and it's very damaging for women.
Her point (I think) is that autonomy is a lousy (and kind of absurd) attitude to take about a pregnancy. A woman does not impregnate herself. And she's not a solitary person when she's pregnant. Every pregnancy has a father. Every pregnancy has a baby.
For decades the feminist movement has been teaching men that pregnancy is none of our business. Only women get pregnant, so this doesn't concern us. And yet every pregnancy has a dad. We are intimately involved in pregnancy.
We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills. We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another...
What's damaging is to talk about autonomy or individualism in the case of a pregnancy, which is about a union. A man and a woman unite and create a baby. To ignore this takes you down an insane road where you say stuff like, "You don't have a uterus so this doesn't concern you!" or "Only women get pregnant!"
And feminism has zero concern about male autonomy. If feminists really believed in "autonomy," then fathers would have no duties, no obligations, the birth of the baby was a choice the mother made. Indeed, the ancient Greeks and Roman (from where Blackmun got the viability doctrine) believed that the baby was not autonomous (a baby is weak and helpless). The parents had no obligations, they could just walk away. That's autonomy, at least according to the ancient pagans -- walking away from babies and letting them die.
Feminism has never fought for autonomy for men (obviously), which is why there is no constitutional right for men to walk away from babies.
Feminism is solely concerned with women, and is often actively hostile to anybody who is not a woman (i.e. men and children of both sexes).
Feminism has never really grappled with why abortion is part of the Playboy philosophy. Abortion is not just a woman killing her baby. It often involves a man walking away from his baby. Or he joins in and pays for the infanticide. Indeed, many men coerce abortions.
How strange that men, who are often accused of coercing sex, are never accused of coercing abortions!
"I hate you and I'm not paying any child support. Fuck you!" Isn't that coercion? Indeed, if a man ghosts you when you are pregnant, isn't that coercive as well?
Currently it's like feminism sends both man and baby into the phantom zone for 9 months, and then when the baby is born feminism wants to resurrect chivalry and duty. As I like to say, feminism shoots at patriarchy and it kills fatherhood (and babies).
Freder Frederson said...
"And, with Planned Parenthood, apparently the parts are often sold for reuse. "
This lie has been thoroughly debunked. That you keep repeating it demonstrates the dishonesty I already noted.
No, it hasn't, which is why you provided no link. I'm not providing a link because there's so many different lies you could be pushing that there's no point in trying to figure out which dishonest "debunking" you're claiming to believe.
So, provide us your "debunking", and we'll rip it apart.
Or, don't provide us with one, and we'll all know even you know you're lying
What exactly is wrong with being "divisive"? I love liberty, and feel no desire for unity in any way, shape or form with State-shtuppers such as Robert Cook.
I've watched a lot of people switch political sides, some multiple times, since 2001. A common factor is that the vast majority that I have seen are driven to switch -- only in part at first -- by a single issue, then they see who their allies are on that issue, and they decide they like them, and realize they are not the evil idiots they seemed to be, and the partial converts end up adopting most of the positions of their former enemies. That is how many pro-lifers ended up agreeing with conservatives on a host of issues. It's how many people became conservative after 9/11. I see it happening now in NYC as a subset of parents of school age children are being driven away from the left based on school Covid policies.
In the other direction, sometimes it has often been race, or gay rights, or Trump that drove it. Of course, there are many more reasons on both sides.
BUT, with Roe gone, that does not mean they will flip back. It will take, for each person, some new issue that makes it intolerable for them to continue to identify with the right. And then again, they will at first align with the left only on that one issue, and then adopt the left portion on many others by the same process. This is almost always how it happens. I mean, I have not conducted an academic study, but I have observed it over and over and over again.
I make no prediction how or whether this will play out for most pro-life people. But even if Roe ends, abortion is not going away as an issue. So if it is important to you, you still will need to account for it in your political calculus. It will just become less important as a Presidential and Senate issue. But in local elections it will become even more relevant.
Althouse Stalinist In Residence Coo: "Trump is entirely and intentionally divisive. His insults and name-calling, his encouragement to his acolytes to "beat up" those who criticize him his sneering mocking of people with physical disabilities, his blame-casting and lying about his "unprecedented successes,..."
"his encouragement to his acolytes to "beat up" those who criticize him"
BS. It was Trump supporters that were targeted for vicious assaults across the country.
"..him his sneering mocking of people with physical disabilities,.."
A completely debunked lie. Again.
The lefties "Rupar-ed" Trump by freeze-framing a millisecond of the Trump video at the exact moment when his hand went into a flexed posture and put that picture next to a still photo of the reporter with that same flex and pretended that was it.
Even though Trumps motions had been seen repeatedly in the past when discussing lots of other people and subjects.
I could go on, but Stalinists are gonna Stalinist and there aint nothing you can do to stop these revisionist tale-tellers like Cookie, whom I'm certain seems quite persuasive in the teachers lounge or local coffee shop.
Next up for Cookie: Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house!
I'm rather fond of my autonomy. Come and take it, women.
I liked the article and agree with much of it, as you'd expect from someone who is Christian and left leaning (I'm a member of the Labour Party, which used to have a solid phalanx of Catholic voters and MPs and even Ministers).
It was free marketeers, with the active support of business, that got rid of the family wage and encouraged the entry of women into the market place. That was good, but not the impact on wages. It drove down wages for skilled working class men and made working couples a necessity if you wanted to buy a house. And having babies, normally something young women in a marriage actively want (it's evolutionarily driven)suddenly in a world without family wages becomes a problem. Even with contraception pregnancies happen, even with the Pill.
The modern left doesn't seem to care about this as its voter base seems to be university educated and minority ethnic. Guess what. Labour has been out of power since 2010 and doesn't look likely to regain it in 2023/4. Why has the left abandoned the working class? It's not only immoral, it's electorally stupid, as the working class, and lower middle class are majorities of the electorate.
Anyway, back to the author. I think she's viewing the world a bit too optimistically, but I hope Roe/Casey is overturned and abortion legalised, if it must, through the legislative process, which is the right place for it.
Final point, as I've written before, in much of Europe, Dobbs/Mississippee (15 weeks) would be seen as more liberal than the present European abortion regime.
ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself
I'm old enough to remember when some folks wanted "Reaganism without Reagan". It doesn't work like that, people.
The critical reviews on her book are impressive because a lot of feminists and pro-lifers love it. Thanks for the link, Althouse, I'm reading that book!
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