By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, April 12,
2024
Donald Trump loves gold, but he has the opposite of the
Midas effect: Everything he touches turns to dross—even when he stumbles onto
the right policy, more or less, as he has in the matter of abortion as a
federal question.
The conservative legal view of Roe v. Wade—which
is not necessarily an anti-abortion view—is that the Supreme
Court exnihilated a federal right to abortion straight out of the penumbras of
Justice Harry Blackmun’s posterior based on very little more than pure
political will, and that Dobbs rightly reversed this act of
judicial superlegislation, returning the matter to the democratic process and,
mainly, to state legislatures. A person who generally supports abortion rights
could easily hold that position—and, indeed, many do. By no means is it the
case, however, that, as Trump stated,
vacating Roe was something “that all legal scholars [on] both
sides wanted.” (Even on the most serious of moral issues, Trump cannot help but
lie, stupidly, blatantly, and to no purpose. He lies out of habit and because
he enjoys it.) The argument about Roe was an argument about
law, not an argument about abortion.
Now comes the argument about abortion.
Overturning Roe provided only the
opportunity to have that argument, and, for the moment, the anti-abortion side
is not having a lot of luck advancing its case. Possibly this is because the
anti-abortion movement has chosen a leader who so transparently does not give a
fig about abortion or any other moral or political question except to the
extent that it serves his interests. But, Trump aside, there are other reasons
for the pro-life stall. First is that the anti-abortion movement was so
entirely focused on Roe for half a century that many advocates
forgot how to talk about abortion in the context of democratic controversy.
Second is that, while most Americans report views on abortion that are in fact
at odds with the anything-goes Roe regime, overturning Roe was
a 60-40 proposition against (very popular among Republicans,
but not a majority position overall), and meaningfully
restricting abortion access is unpopular in the polls and, so far, a
proven election loser, a fact that the anti-abortion movement must face head-on
if it is to engage in the necessary project of persuasion and
consensus-building. Third is that many of the so-called “trigger laws” that
came into effect following Dobbs—as well as some post-Dobbs legislative
proposals—were stupidly and incompetently written, or, as in the case of
Arizona, were originally enacted in 1864 and bear the hallmarks of the mid-19th
century, putting anti-abortion advocates in the position of fighting a
rear-guard action in defense of bad laws that should be reformed or replaced.
Fourth is that convincing the federal judiciary to accept the federalist legal
reasoning leading to Dobbs was a great deal easier than
convincing the American public to accept the federalist outcome that
followed the decision, while at the institutional level both anti-abortion
groups and abortion-rights groups have strong financial and political
incentives to keep abortion at the urgent center of national politics rather
than fighting it out serially in the legislatures of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona,
Arkansas, etc.
The Dobbs decision returned abortion to
the states, and if Donald Trump sounds indifferent about how that plays out in
the states, it is not because he is indifferent, exactly, much less possessed
of “disinterest” as Jamelle Bouie put it with perfect wrongness (subsequently
edited away) in the New
York Times—it is because he subordinates the abortion issue, like every
other issue, to his own narrow self-interest. Trump was, recall, a
self-described “pro-choice” Manhattan playboy and reality-television grotesque
who made occasional
cameos in pornographic films before he decided that he wanted to chase the
Republican presidential nomination. As with the Second Amendment, traditional
marriage (ho, ho!), and much else, Trump lurches from position to position,
precisely as one would expect a man with no moral anchor to do.
Trump has long been to the left of the longstanding
Republican consensus on many issues: abortion, gun control, taxes,
entitlements, marriage and family—almost every issue other than immigration, in
fact, though even on immigration he has at times been an amnesty supporter and
a “path to citizenship” advocate, when he thought it would benefit him. For a
different kind of politician, that discongruity might have a moderating effect
and provide some basis for seeking broader and deeper political compromises than
American politics has produced in recent years. But Donald Trump suffers from a
particularly toxic combination of character defects—laziness, stupidity,
arrogance, insecurity, and profound personal cowardice—that make such an
outcome impossible.
Too much? No: Laziness, because Trump’s stand is the one
that requires the least work; stupidity, because he doesn’t understand that
“Let the states decide” is a dodge that works under Roe but not
under Dobbs, when the states are, in fact, deciding; arrogance,
because he
has good reason to believe this will be enough for the rubes who are going
to support him no matter what; insecurity, because a better kind of man (with a
lead in the polls) might do some good by making the case forthrightly, but
Trump is an inferior kind of man and knows it; profound personal cowardice,
because Trump fears losing something he wants more than he fears being on the
wrong side of a question when wrong equates to millions of
dead children.
And so we get the worst of both worlds: for the
anti-abortion movement, a weak, fickle, and cowardly champion; for those who
support abortion rights, sneering triumphalism from Trump’s sycophants; for
those who would seek to build consensus, a Republican nominee—and a Republican
Party—determined to make that impossible.
The question of consensus is, in this context,
consistently misunderstood. My own views on abortion have at times been a
matter of strangely intense public interest—on the ultimate question, my
understanding of abortion is approximate that of Mother
Teresa, and I don’t think it would be wrong to describe me as an
“extremist,” as
Ross Douthat did in the New York Times. Consensus-building
in this matter is not something undertaken in order to accommodate abortion
enthusiasm in the interest of advancing a broader political agenda but rather
the opposite: Consensus-building is the only way to build a stable, long-term policy
that actually protects the lives of the unborn and reduces—in fact, not in
theory—the practice of abortion. Consensus-building is the way toward
anti-abortion goals, not a detour from them. As I have written before:
The pro-life movement doesn’t win when nobody can get an abortion—it wins when
nobody wants one.
A federal prohibition on abortion—one that does not have
an obvious constitutional basis—probably would not stand very long but would
instead be judicially vacated or revoked by the future Democratic congressional
majority it probably would provoke into being. It would be a terrific
fundraising tool for both anti-abortion and abortion-rights groups—the two have
at least some financial interests in common—but it would not advance the
anti-abortion cause either politically (in the long run) or practically (in the
short run, or, most likely, ever). We need stability, not convulsion.
None of which, please note, is of any interest at all to
Donald Trump, whose current political agenda begins and ends with the goal of
winning the power to pardon himself in order to avoid incarceration and
ultimate financial ruination. Trump is a relative moderate in the sense of
having policy instincts that are often well to the left of where we would have
found Paul Ryan or Jeane Kirkpatrick on the issues. But Trump is a radical in
rhetoric and, more importantly, in his lawless and reckless pursuit of his own
interests, including his illegitimate attempt to hold onto power through
a coup d’état the last time he weaseled his way into the White
House. Trump being Trump—a man without natural decency, religious formation, or
patriotism—his relatively moderate policy tendencies are entirely hostage to
his radical selfishness.
That’s a funny kind of Midas touch.
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