By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, November 04, 2024
The presidential election tomorrow will not resolve very
much in American politics. It may not even resolve the question of who the next
president is going to be, at least for a while. Who knows?
One thing we can be sure is not going to get sorted out
in short order: our anguished, ongoing national fight over abortion.
The Democrats think they have a winning issue with
abortion, and they may not be wrong. Republicans might consider with some
wariness the recent history of abortion in the swing states: Nevada and Arizona
both have abortion-rights measures on the ballot, and both
are expected to pass; Wisconsin’s Supreme Court was tilted toward abortion
rights with the election of a sympathetic justice in 2023; Michigan codified abortion
rights via ballot initiative in 2022; Pennsylvania has seen a spate of
abortion-rights candidates elected since Dobbs, and the issue
played a role in a securing a
Democratic majority in the state house. The recent abortion-rights push has
had less effect in Georgia and North Carolina. Democrats hope—believe would
be too strong a word right now—that the desire to secure abortion rights, or to
punish Republicans for attempts to curtail abortion rights, will be sufficient
to carry Harris to victory in enough of those swing states to win her the
presidency. Democrats wouldn’t put it that way, but they hope to make Harris
the abortion president.
I do not share the Democrats’ view on abortion but, even
from the bunker of my hostile assumptions, that doesn’t look like the dumbest
idea in political history. Americans are a squirrely bunch, and they are not
especially difficult to stampede into doing something stupid or awful—they
have, bear in mind, already elected Donald Trump once.
In our time of imbecilic populism, there is an imperative
for politicians and activists to pretend that We the People can never be wrong.
And that ends up being a problem when We the People—who are, in the main, fools
and worse—aren’t with you on an issue. And so you have to invent some new
categories—the Real Americans™ who are always on your side—or else pretend that
We the People have been misled, that (the Republican version) they are victims
of media bias or (the Democratic version) that they have been bamboozled by
people who exploit their quaint religious beliefs in order to blind them to
their own interests. We the People and the world’s political forces are like
the czar and his ministers: The former must always be good and wise and holy,
while the latter is responsible for anything that goes wrong. The czar has
absolute power and is responsible for absolutely nothing. All of this nonsense
is easier to keep straight in your head if you believe that the other side is
simply evil.
For pro-lifers, the facts of the case can be hard to look
at in the face. What are the facts? One of them is that We the People were a
lot more sympathetic to the pro-life position when it was only hypothetical.
Another is that while Americans traditionally have held a much more
restrictionist view of abortion than had been established under the Roe–Casey
regime—becoming progressively less open to abortion as the pregnancy
progressed—they were not and are not fundamentally anti-abortion. Another is
that the Democrats’ demonization campaign against the Supreme Court is working,
even
(especially?) when it is stupid and dishonest. Yet another is that the
good-faith objections to abortion restrictions are based, at least in part, on
libertarian assumptions shared by a great many conservatives, including
anti-abortion conservatives, the morally serious among whom have great regard
for individual liberties and for the autonomy of the individual citizen.
(Democrats are single-serving libertarians, to be sure—wild
geese when it comes to abortion and politically acceptable sexual appetites,
totalitarian ants when it comes to anything to do with
making money unless the profits come from performing abortions.)
There is great evil in the practice of abortion, but
there also are good-faith disagreements between people of good will who simply
are working from different priors and who disagree not only about conclusions
but about the facts of the case per se. If I believed, as abortion-rights
advocates say they believe, that the question involves only what a woman does
with her own body, then I would come to more or less the same legal and
political conclusions as my progressive friends have—but I believe that they are
in error about the facts.
That’s not the end of the tough stuff for abortion
opponents. Not only are our positions not as popular as they would need to be
for us to prevail democratically—and the chance to prevail or to fail
democratically is all Dobbs delivered and all it was intended to
deliver—it also is the case that our fellow travelers have done a lot of shoddy
work where they do prevail politically. We abortion opponents have found
ourselves flat-footed when put into the position of defending laws that are
badly written, ill-considered, or, in some cases, archaic. And that is not only
a messaging problem: A bad law is a bad law even if there is a good marketing
campaign executed on its behalf. And so while we have a lot of work ahead of us
when it comes to political and moral persuasion, we also have a lot of work
ahead of us when it comes to the substance of what it is we wish to see done
legally.
Inconveniently, these challenges come at a moment when
the pro-life movement is at the nadir of its credibility, its leaders and
foot-soldiers alike having rallied to the cause of Donald Trump, who does not
actually share our views or our priorities on abortion and whose moral
grotesquerie is, while bad enough in its general application, much worse in the
specific matter of its application to women. Anti-abortion leaders who have
spent their lives bristling at accusations that they simply hate women have put
themselves and their movement in the service of a man who simply hates women.
Having insisted for a generation that the anti-abortion movement isn’t just
about old men with weird sexual hang-ups, the anti-abortion movement has put
itself into the service of an old man whose sexual hang-ups are so very weird
that Sigmund Freud couldn’t have made them up in the course of a five-week
ether bender with the Marquis de Sade. Future historians will have a hard time
believing that the most powerful polity in human history up to that point chose
as its chief magistrate a dabbler in pornographic films whose youngest son is
named after the imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New York Post
about his sex life. If the issue were a less urgent one, it would be tempting
to simply give up in some combination of despair and contempt.
But the issue is an urgent one.
And so, whatever happens on Tuesday, the anti-abortion
movement is in an unenviable place: Its leaders are in no small part
self-discrediting power-worshipers and party hacks, its reputation is in
tatters, and its issues are, at least for the moment, Election Day losers.
There isn’t any good outcome to be had. If Kamala Harris is carried to a
swing-state victory on a wave of abortion-rights enthusiasm, the pro-life
movement can expect to be demoted a few degrees down the Republican issue totem
pole. If Donald Trump should win, it shows that right-wing populists don’t need
to be worth a damn on abortion to win, that the anti-abortion movement is a
cheap date (desperately in need of some kind of moral morning-after pill, if
there were such a thing), and that the anti-abortion cause has been defeated
not by the arguments of its opponents but by the contempt and corruption of its
so-called champions.
Having been beaten down to the foundations, we must build
again on those foundations. Or, if the foundations are destroyed, to build new
foundations and build on them anew.
Words About Words
Honest question, New York Times—if it is minor,
is it a crisis?
Headline: “Mexico’s
New President Faces Her First Major Crisis.”
As I have written before, I think minor is a
pretty interesting word. So is crisis.
Crisis is one of those inflationary words, a word
writers (especially headline writers) use when they want to up the urgency.
That desire for drama in prose often leads to error—the conflation of epicenter
with center, the abuse of unique, etc. But, still, there are
crises in the world.
Speaking of which: Crisis is one of those rare-ish words
of Greek origin that we make plural in English by messing with the vowels.
Parentheses, crises, hypotheses, ellipses, etc. Have you noticed a strange
habit that some people have of applying the same principle to the name of
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? People often pronounce it “REE-sees” when they mean
the plural, as though the singular form were Resis, like thesis,
and then Reses, like theses. Funny how we generalize without
thinking about it. Something is at work there that Noam Chomsky might have done
some good work digging into if he hadn’t dedicated so much time to being the
second-most trite and banal political commentator in the English-speaking
world.
(Sean Hannity, of course.)
Do you know what the literal meaning of crisis is?
Or was, in Greek? It is not emergency or pressing difficulty—it is, as someone
once said, “a time for choosing.”
The ancient Greek roots mean “decide” and “decision.” In
both Latin and Middle English, crisis was mainly a medical term, “the
turning point for better or worse in an acute disease or fever,” as our friends
at Merriam-Webster put it. A crisis was the point at which a disease was
set on a final course toward either recovery or death. The sense of crisis
as a decisive point appears in the 17th century, but we no longer
use crisis in exactly that sense, either, or, at least, that is not the
most common sense in which we use it. A crisis for us is just a
difficult and dangerous situation, rather than one that will produce a decisive
outcome. That older sense can still be found in many places, for instance in
book titles such as Michael McCarthy’s The Crisis of Philosophy or The
Crisis of Democracy by Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji
Watanuki.
You can read it in the text of “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
And the afternoon, the evening,
sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here
beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and
ices,
Have the strength to force the
moment to its crisis?
(I recently accidentally wrote malingers when I
meant to write malingerers, and then winced when I heard it read aloud
on television. My bad.)
Sometimes, the moment presents a genuine crisis.
Sometimes, you’re just in a pickle and wish you weren’t.
Economics for English Majors
I have trouble believing that the world economy is really
in huge trouble when Prada’s
profits are up. Oh, I know, the luxury-goods market is only a tiny little
slice of the economy (and a
mixed one at that) but there are other indicators. Car sales were up a bit
in October in the United States, which is and has been a soft market, and the
worldwide automotive outlook is pretty good. GDP growth projections for the
United States look decent and even better for the world at large.
There is more than a little to be worried about in China.
China is a big country with new money and a big economic footprint. The
European Union has gone from being a net exporter of automobiles to a net
importer, driven mainly by slack sales in China. Those weak Chinese sales are
partly the result of Chinese economic woes and partly the result of the EU
mismanaging its trade relationship with China. Luxury-goods giant LVMH has seen
its earnings decline of late, also driven by weak sales in China, where struggling
middle managers are buying fewer LVMH products—fewer
TAG Heuer watches, fewer bottles of Moët & Chandon—than they would in
better times.
We hear a lot from the politicians about the challenges
presented by China as a producer, an exporter, and a competitor for U.S. and
European firms. But China as a consumer is a big story, too. There’s a
complicated relationship. If you are worried about military and economic
confrontation with China, then a richer China isn’t necessarily what you want
to see; but if you sell … cars, soybeans, handbags, mobile phones, financial
services, or a million other things … then a richer China is exactly what you
want. The United States desires to remain a global economic and military
hegemon, but the high-tech, high-capital, high-innovation businesses at the
commanding heights of the U.S. economy tend to make things that are bought by
rich people rather than by poor people. I don’t know without looking it up what
Boeing’s single largest market is, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess
that it isn’t Haiti. (Okay, I looked it up: The majority of Boeing’s
revenue, nearly 60 percent, comes from U.S. sales. I would have guessed that
the U.S. market was the largest chunk, but I’m surprised it is that big a
share.) Capitalism doesn’t make the world a big, happy family, but trading
nations do tend to get rich together and catch each other’s colds.
Of course, we don’t have to be a trading nation. I hear
from a lot of populists who argue against trade and, in effect, in favor of autarky,
which has worked so well for North Korea and Cuba.
Furthermore …
It’s true:
Elvis is still the king.
In Conclusion
Two cheers for democracy and all that. The most important
thing to remember about Election Day is that our duty as citizens does not
begin or end in the voting booth.
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