President Trump had some excellent pro-life comments during his State of the Union address last week. It was inspiring to hear him state a scriptural truth that humans are made in God's image:
Trump made a call for building a "culture of life". But in fact, George W. Bush had made this same call nearly two decades ago when he ran for president. This type of call is by no means new; and regrettably, no progress has been made from the standpoint of overturning Roe v. Wade and making abortion illegal in more jurisdictions since Bush made his statements a long time ago.
Why has there been little progress? A couple of articles this week provide a good part of the explanation.
First, Stefano Gennarini at Public Discourse explains the tendency of "conservatives" to lose on many substantive issues such as abortion. I will generously excerpt the reasons this happens:
(T)here is something in the political disposition of conservatives that always puts them at a disadvantage. Conservatives, by definition, are in favor of conserving the status quo. They do not really have a political project and only ever play defense.
Debates between conservatives are almost always about how much ground to concede to progressives—whether or not to fight particular progressive gains. They are never about what can be done to advance a concrete conservative political agenda.
Since conservatives never advance their own positive agenda, when progressives make gains, the progressive agenda of yesterday becomes today’s status quo for conservatives. The political center inexorably shifts further and further to the left. It is as though the political process were rigged from the start to favor progressives.
Under this predicament, a reversal of progressivism’s gains is not just elusive, it is impossible. If the status quo is the end game for conservatives, then there can never be hope for a long-term political victory, only momentary setbacks to the progressive agenda. The most conservatives can ever hope for is a temporary respite from the relentless advance of progressivism...
The capitulation of social conservatives to the rape exception in the abortion debate is emblematic of how eager conservatives are to find a new status quo with every progressive turn. Once thought of as a way for conservatives to restrict abortion with support from Democrats, the health and rape exceptions have now become the de facto position for the majority of Republicans.
By contrast, Democrats went from claiming abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” under the Clinton administration to championing “shout your abortion” and making abortion a litmus test for the Democratic party under Nancy Pelosi. And while pro-lifers squabble over the rape exception and heartbeat bills, abortion groups and their supporters are united in asking for restrictions on pro-life speech and the abolition of any conscience protections for medical providers...
More worrying still, conservatives do not show the slightest proclivity for the kind of social upheaval that leads to political results. While pro-lifers quietly and patiently pray that Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts may one day reverse Roe v. Wade—without any assurance whatsoever that this will indeed eventually happen—angry abortion crowds hurl insults at Kavanaugh as if he already had reversed it.
If conservatives were interested in real change, the March for Life would paralyze Washington, DC for a day each year, like the Women’s March. Instead, it barely gets covered by the media. Conservatives are so calm and polite that Metro Police do not even have to attend the March for Life, or even attempt to estimate the crowd size. While this is not to encourage rioting, pro-lifers need to find ways to make the pro-life cause more visible and effective both socially and politically...
What if the victories of social progressivism have less to do with the ideology of the founding than with the moral failure of men and women in every generation to stop evil from progressing? What if abortion, homosexual marriage, poverty, corruption, and other such social ills came to pass because of the sins of individual men and women who had the chance to do the right thing but chose not to? As the famous saying long attributed to Edmund Burke goes, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing"...
Maybe conservatives keep losing in America because they are constantly betrayed from within their own ranks. Think of the many Christians who failed to take a principled stand against abortion in key political moments, and the clergy who gave them a pass. Think of the conservatives who become googly-eyed every time a Republican is in the White House and fanatically defend Republicans even when they are clearly slow-walking pro-life policy, much as they have abandoned the pro-family cause altogether.
The only way to reverse the gains of progressives is for conservatives to embrace militantly a “thick” version of conservatism, one that is more than just a disposition to preserve the status quo. This much is clear. A status quo conservatism too often degenerates into being concerned only about the economic status quo, leading conservatives to fall back to the minimum common denominator of tax reform.
Conservatism must be about more than just conserving the present configuration of political and economic power in society. It must have substantive aims and concrete political targets. For this to happen, conservatism must be rooted in perennial principles of the natural law and religious traditions. Only through these principles can politics and economics help society flourish...
More importantly, in order to succeed, conservatives will need men and women of principle. Moral apathy is a spiritual condition. It is the reason for the complicity and complacency that have allowed the sexual revolution to spread in our society...
If conservatives quietly retreat on social issues rather than attempt to upset the political balance of society by challenging progressives with moral demands, conservatives will continue to be on the wrong side of history; and the left will only make more and more of its own moral demands for sexual autonomy. Conservatives will just default back to tax cuts and the economic status quo as American society continues to disintegrate.
The irony is that the economic prosperity to which American conservatives cling so effectively was, in large part, created thanks to the great influence on American society of institutions like the family and churches, as Tocqueville famously observed. These conservative social institutions have been the backbone of American society, politics, and commerce. They have never before been under attack as they are now.
As conservatives capitulate to the sexual revolution and America hurtles toward demographic and fiscal collapse almost on pace with Europe, the Psalmist’s aphorism on riches rings truer than ever: “In his riches man lacks wisdom, he is like the beasts that are destroyed” (Psalm 49).
Daniel Horowitz points at the recent decision by Chief Justice John Roberts to stay some pro-life legislation passed in Louisiana. He says it is due to a failure to try to fix systematically the judiciary:
I take no pride in seeing my thesis on the judiciary being proven correct every week, but once again we see that once we regard even lower courts as supreme to other branches on purely political questions, then simply “appointing better Supreme Court justices” will not matter. Much like drinking coffee with a fork, the more we accede to judicial supremacy, only using all our capital to get “our guys” on the high tribunal, the more we lose more of the existing members to the system. John Roberts has long ago become the new Anthony Kennedy, a fact that is now becoming obvious even to conservative court-worshippers...
As longtime readers of this column know, Roberts has been joining the liberal justices for quite some time in allowing bad lower court injunctions to remain in place, surreptitiously ensuring that the left-wing judicial agenda remains untouched despite the supposed new orientation of the Supreme Court. He has done this in other abortion cases, immigration, election law, and with a crazy global warming lawsuit – always refusing to categorically rein in the lower courts for stepping outside of bounds of judicial norms. However, the Louisiana decision takes Roberts’ power play to a new level of active aggression against the Constitution. Unlike in the other cases, the circuit court opinion below him (in June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee) actually got this one right and reversed a trial court injunction on the abortion law. Now, Roberts is actively issuing an injunction that the Fifth Circuit blocked, as opposed to simply allowing a lower court injunction to remain in place. The new Anthony Kennedy indeed. Or worse...
When lower courts issue injunctions against Supreme Court precedent, including decisions Roberts himself recently wrote, he has no problem taking a hands-off approach to those lower courts. But somehow, when a conservative lower court merely allows a state to mind its own business in a case that might brush up against a recent Supreme Court decision he himself disagreed with and now has the votes to overturn, Roberts parachutes in to overturn the lower court.
We are witnessing this trend every day with immigration cases...
For all the capital we have burned trying to get those who burn us onto the court, isn’t it time we use our political capital, messaging, and political power to return the courts to their original job?
Another interesting issue is that we are once again promoting "born alive" legislation. Many of us cheered when similar legislation passed Congress 16 years ago during the Bush II administration. But the Family Research Council explains that law lacked enforcement mechanisms. And so now, sixteen years later, we are trying to pass a bill that has some teeth.
Once again, this is all ultimately a political failure on the part of Republicans who represent themselves to be conservatives. It is also, to some extent, due to profoundly sinful attitudes held by significant percentages of the population. But public sentiment is much more opposed to legal abortion on demand than the media/left complex will even remotely concede.
Let's hope Trump is the leader who will fix this. But it will likely require at least another two or three "conservative" justices because the Republicans in Washington are otherwise worthless.
Yes, let's hope
Posted by: Fred Gregory | 02/13/2019 at 12:40 AM