For decades, leftists, with the media and academia on their side, were accustomed to triumphing in the culture wars.
For decades, leftists, with the media and academia on their side, were accustomed to triumphing in the culture wars.
F or decades, Democrats have been grimly warning their voters about the Right’s ambitions to overturn Roe v. Wade. But as that long-foretold day rapidly approached, the party was idling. In late April, just a week before the Dobbs opinion leaked, Politico reported that Democrats were “sounding the alarm that more is needed to engage voters and warn them that the current slate of laws is just the beginning,” adding, “What’s missing, they insist, is a concerted and coordinated message from party leaders to more forcefully go after Republicans.” In spite of a growing sense of urgency from activists and the pro-abortion lobby, the report continued, “only a handful of major Democratic candidates have put the issue front and center.”
When Dobbs leaked, it was met with a predictable flurry of condemnations from Democratic leaders and progressive activist groups. But again, the substantive political response was . . . well, not much. The same was true when the Supreme Court’s decision was officially released two months later. “It’s a little anticlimactic — I think we all expected this,” House majority whip Jim Clyburn remarked. Nancy Pelosi read a poem to reporters and fired off a fundraising email, with the title “devastated” (all lower-case), pleading for “100,000 gifts before midnight” just minutes after the ruling came down. House Democrats gathered to sing “God Bless America” outside the Supreme Court to celebrate the passage of a gun-control bill, over the sound of protesters yelling in the background. Michigan’s Andy Levin tweeted a picture of himself doing yoga, announcing that he was going to “turn inward, just for a moment,” punctuated by the hashtag #AsanasWithAndy. The Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee announced it was going to “hold a hearing next month to explore the grim reality of a post-Roe America.” Biden urged voters to show up in 2022. It was all they had to offer: Just vote harder. Give us more money. Maybe next time, it will be different.
The Left, understandably, was furious. “They just aren’t fighting,” Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.) told the Washington Post. “When people see that, what’s going to make them show up to vote? We can’t just tell people, ‘Well, just vote — vote your problems away.’ Because they’re looking at us and saying, ‘Well, we already voted for you.’” Headlines in Jezebel, Huffington Post, and Vice all echoed the sentiment: “Roe Is Dead and Democrats Want Us to Vote — For What, Exactly?”; “‘Vote for Democrats’ Is Not Enough in a Post-Roe America”; “The Democrats Completely Screwed This Up.”
But at this late hour, what could Democrats have done? This was, as many progressive writers have noted, a ruling that was decades in the making. It was years of pro-life organizing, door-knocking, lobbying and activism in the grassroots, institution-building and consensus-making at the elite legal level, followed by canny political strategy in the Senate (led by Mitch McConnell) and a pro-life president, in Trump, who not only had the opportunity to appoint originalist justices but was committed to honoring his campaign promise to do so. That’s what makes the victory remarkable. But it’s also what makes the Left’s utter bewilderment so notable.
The time to act was then, not now — and they didn’t. Democrats, as many of their left-wing critics have been quick to point out, had years to prepare. They could have codified Roe in the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton swept into office with commanding majorities in both chambers of Congress. But the push to prohibit most state limits on abortion, “once the prime legislative goal of people who support the right to an abortion,” the New York Times reported in 1993, “lost momentum after a determined assault by opponents” and divisions among supporters “over how sweeping a bill” was needed. While campaigning in 2007, Barack Obama promised Planned Parenthood that codifying Roe would be “the first thing” he’d do as president. In 2009 — when Democrats had a supermajority in Congress and, as ally, a president who’d just been elected in a landslide victory — Obama demurred, saying it was “not the highest legislative priority.” Some Democrats have argued that they should have exerted more pressure on Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign when Obama was still in office.
But they didn’t. Why not?
The cynical, but not entirely illegitimate, answer is that Democrats liked to leave hanging over voters’ heads the possibility that Roe would be overturned. It was an effective “get out the vote” talking point, not to mention a fundraising boon. There’s an analogue for this on the right: For years, many Republican elites could have cared less about abortion and had little to no intention of ever actually acting on the issue. But they understood its political potency for turning out their base. Mac Stipanovich, who served as chief of staff to Bob Martinez, Florida’s former Republican governor, recently made a telling comment to a New Yorker reporter:
There was always an element of the Republican Party that was batsh** crazy. They had lots of different names — they were John Birchers, they were “movement conservatives,” they were the religious right. And we did what every other Republican candidate did: we exploited them. We got them to the polls. We talked about abortion. We promised — and we did nothing. They could grumble, but their choices were limited.
In other words, contempt for the base voters who care deeply about abortion is a bipartisan phenomenon. But the difference is that the GOP, unlike the Democrats, finally delivered. I am often a vocal critic of the Republican establishment, but we should give credit where credit is due. This was not something that happened in one fell swoop; it occurred over the course of five decades of work.
Democrats had no comparable counteroffensive. They had the money — Planned Parenthood alone pulls in half a billion dollars from taxpayers every year and dropped $45 million on the 2020 election cycle alone. But at the institutional level, there was an apathy on the Democratic side. They had nothing approaching the fire in the belly that drove the pro-life cause, and that ultimately spelled their undoing.
The root of that complacency is that on cultural issues such as abortion — and in arenas like the courts — the Left is simply accustomed to winning. And why wouldn’t they be? That’s what they’ve been doing for decades. As Michael Brendan Dougherty noted today:
Progressives are obsessed with talking about the Right’s supposed threat to democracy. But what they really fear is the dismantling of their monopoly over powerful non-democratic institutions; namely, the judiciary, academia, and the media.
They still enjoy a stranglehold on the latter two. But their decades-long monopoly over the former may finally be coming to an end. And if the past two months are any indication, they are utterly unprepared to face that reality.