Our friends on the left thought they had a lock on the Supreme Court. What they actually had a lock on was a very narrow slice of elite opinion — which was just as good as having a lock on the Supreme Court, right up until it wasn’t.
Progressives have in many ways been victims of their own success: Because they have been so very effective at colonizing critical institutions — the universities, the media, and, for a generation, the Supreme Court — they have not spent much time sharpening their arguments, and where progressives have not faced effective external opposition to their agenda, they have, predictably, become intellectually flabby and morally thin. They howled like wounded coyotes when Dobbs leaked, and then set about arguing among themselves about whether abortion was a women’s issue or a birthing-persons’ issue — and, predictably, they overlooked entirely that American women are about as likely to be anti-abortion as American men are, and that the pro-life movement has long been carried forward under largely female leadership. Abortion is a bedrock Democratic position, but Democrats are discomfited trying to actually talk about it with anybody who isn’t already a true believer.
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