With the first wave of “what should conservatives do next?”
essays out of the way, climbing routes up the Cliffs of Insanity
have closed for the season while Rodents of Unusual Size plead
with their cousins in Congress for bailout money. Those of us who
wade through commentary can now follow the example of
beachcombing birds, and my own flock still finds good hunting in
the tide pools to the right of the Ronald Reagan Memorial
Lifeguard Station.
For every Newsweek reporter who wondered why
there was no “central debate” over abortion in the presidential
campaign, thousands of other people saw that debate spotlighted
more glaringly than ever before in the warp and woof of the rival
tickets, with a pair of pro-life candidates facing off against
their decidedly ambivalent counterparts.
Like other conservative bloggers, the winsome “Bookworm”
knows that the biggest fault line in our society runs through
Roe v. Wade. She recently posted an essay about how to
heal the rift between pro-life conservatives and those who think
abortion looms too large in American politics.
Newsweek-level campaign analysis might suggest that
abortion came up only three times (in Obama’s pledge to approve
the “Freedom of Choice” act, in the “pay grade” answer he gave
Rick Warren at the Saddleback Civil Forum, and in the last of the
debates), but all three of those instances combined with the
well-known positions of the people running for office to
reverberate through wide swaths of the American electorate.
One wonders how Newsweek would explain the name
recognition that little Trig Palin now enjoys. Or, to put this
another way, had abortion not been a significant campaign issue,
the endorsement of Obama by Catholic law professor Doug Kmiec
would not have made the splash it did. Instead, Kmiec abandoned
past service in Republican administrations to parlay
off-the-scale approval ratings from Planned Parenthood for Obama
into a cottage industry, defending the idea that electing a
president who has never supported even modest restrictions on
abortion rights would somehow reduce the level of abortions
nationwide. (With arrogance masquerading as magnanimity, Kmiec
now
says he would change his mind if the Pope personally
corrected him.)
The preeminent position of legalized abortion in any catalog of
national blemishes cannot be denied. In James M. Kushiner’s angry
summary, “Roe v. Wade, like Dred Scott, and slavery, is a
contradicting of the constitution of the organism in which it
thrives.” Kushiner is right and Kmiec is wrong, which is why I
question the practicality of federalist solutions to the rift in
conservatism.
Bookworm proposes a neo-libertarian approach to rebuilding the
Republican brand, with local governments doing a lot more,
national government doing a lot less, and social issues
quarantined because they play out on at least fifty small stages
rather than on one large one.
Another favorite blogger put the challenge similarly:
“Conservatives would do well to frame the debate in a way that
both educates the public and focuses on what Congress and the
President actually do,” she
wrote, in the apparent hope that with the federal government
“out of the business of legislating personal and sexual
morality,” conservatives can argue questions about abortion and
gay marriage as “freedom issues” while holding fast against the
kind of one-size-fits-all thinking that looks to the Supreme
Court for social policy.
But emphasis on smaller government will not by itself resolve the
tension between militant and conciliatory wings of the
conservative movement, not with abortion enshrined as the status
quo in too many precincts and a self-consciously progressive
administration coming to power. Another commentator has it more
nearly right, I think, in ignoring intramural differences to
spotlight people who are not socially conservative themselves,
but trust the rest of us to keep the home fires burning.
We live in an “ambiguously Christian Babylon” (the phrase
comes
from Fr. Richard John Neuhaus), so trying to stifle or reframe
abortion talk amounts to a dereliction of duty. It was not
pro-life activism that took abortion to the Supreme Court, or
convinced a majority of the justices to look more to King Herod
than to Pontius Pilate for precedent in deciding Roe v.
Wade.
Apart from its moral weight, the pro-life point of view also
serves as a useful proxy for other conservative positions,
winning allies of the kind who say things like “Look,
if I were playing the Wishing Game, I might suggest that
conservative judges give a pass to Roe v. Wade (just to
not upset the political applecart) while ruling conservatively on
every other issue. But I’m not playing the Wishing Game. In
reality, judges who favor Roe v. Wade favor just about
every other example of liberal judicial legislating, and judges
who are against Roe v. Wade are against every other
example of liberal judicial legislating.”
There is more than a hint of truth in that observation. It should
also be noted that if reframing arguments is a prerequisite for
conservative victory in subsequent elections, then reframing
ought to proceed on our own terms rather than those of the
progressive Left. We could start by arguing that the protection
of human life at its most vulnerable is never a matter of
“legislating morality,” because the state has no business
mandating good behavior, but compelling reasons to curb suicidal
behavior.
Anyone who needs a refresher on the difference between incentives
and disincentives might look to the Bill of Rights, where
imperatives (“shall make no law,” “shall not be infringed,”
“shall not be construed to deny or disparage”) function more like
guardrails than like harnesses. Surely Sarah from Alaska is not
the only conservative who understands that.
