#602: Pro-life Politics after Dobbs (@ The Dispatch)
A new essay.
This election cycle is giving off strong 2016 vibes for pro-lifers, who have been vigorously debating how best to respond to Donald Trump’s moderation on abortion.
Last night’s debate was a perfect distillation of the position Trump has carved out. Trump’s ‘return it to the States’ position allows him to own overturning Roe, while also not being mad about the liberal ways those states have voted on these issues. His support for paying for IVF takes that line of critique off the table, and he successfully characterized Walz as liberal on the issue and directly asked Harris whether she would support abortion up until the ninth month—a question that should be asked, and which the moderators obviously did not want asked.
In short, it was a politically savvy display—and pro-lifers will vote for him en masse for it.
If you want to understand the backstory for this assessment, you can read my latest essay at The Dispatch on the dilemma Trump’s shifts has foisted on the pro-life movement. Here are a few grafs to whet your appetite:
If anything, the pro-life movement has been trading on a narrative about its political power that overstates its influence in national elections. However popular pro-life sentiments are, their role in voting is murky. It is highly plausible that Republican voters prefer politicians who are pro-life but will vote for them only because that issue comes bundled with other, more important concerns.
In 2016, abortion came last on Pew’s survey of topics that debate viewers wanted to hear about. While the fall of Roe seems to have both persuaded voters to sign up for the pro-choice cause and motivated them to vote, the number of pro-life voters who are motivated by abortion considerations to such a degree that they would stay home because Trump is only marginally or superficially “pro-life” is tiny. In the August Siena/New York Times poll of swing states, 31 percent of Democrats listed abortion as their top priority—while only 3 percent of Republicans did. Gallup has shown a similar asymmetry and has suggested that only 8 percent of the electorate requires their candidate to be pro-life. In such a context, all Trump needs to do is be marginally more pro-life than his opponent and he is likely assured of retaining the pro-life movement’s votes. After all, even the most principled of pro-life voters will always have the comparison to Kamala Harris to lean back on in voting.
What happens on the margins of political life is disproportionately important in closely contested elections. After all, the presidency might turn on depressed or enthusiastic turnout in a few swing states. But Trump stands to gain as much or more by giving low-frequency, low-attention, and vaguely pro-life voters reasons to vote for him (and taking away reasons to vote against him), as does placating the institutional voices who make up the “pro-life movement.” While some pro-life writers derided Trump’s attempt to make himself palatable to suburban women as hopelessly unrealistic, he does not need to win all of them to make up for however many pro-lifers he might lose. Trump has done well with that constituency before, and his new “pro-life” positions are perfectly tailored to ameliorate conservatives’ concerns. Though pro-life leaders groused about Trump’s announcement that he would fund IVF treatments, few (white) suburban parents have serious objections to it—including those who are avowedly “pro-life.”
Debates among pro-lifers about how to vote are important, but in the way debates among the online left are important: They reveal what a tiny cadre of elites think, even if they are divorced from the realities of the constituents they claim to represent. They might shape discussions and help Trump identify where the actual “red line” for his pro-life supporters might be, but their real political significance, in terms of the votes they generate, is (in the end) likely to be marginal to non-existent.
Turner’s Dido Building Carthage is one of the pivotal paintings of his career, as he more or less abandons realism in his landscape in favor of capturing atmosphere instead.
Reminder
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Around the Web
Ari Schulman has an excellent essay on what comes after IVF. He is optimistic there might be resistance to such technologies; I’m not convinced, but it’s a compelling argument.
Yascha Mounk thinks universities should abolish grades—a proposal I agree with, though for very different reasons than ‘grade inflation.’
The Penultimate Word
“It so happened that in this man Jesus God himself came into the world, which he had created and against all odds still loved. He took human nature upon himself and became man, like the rest of us, in order to put an end to the world's fight against him and also against itself, and to replace man's disorder by God's design. In Jesus God hallowed his name, made his kingdom come, his will done on earth as it is in heaven, as we say in the Lord's Prayer. In him he made manifest his glory and, amazingly enough, he made it manifest for our salvation. To accomplish this, he not only bandaged, but healed the wounds of the world; he helped mankind not only in part and temporarily, but radically and for good in the person of his beloved Son; he de livered us from evil and took us to his heart as his children. Thereby we are all permitted to live, and to live eternally.” — Karl Barth