The Return of the Bedroom Police
010717-N-1350W-001.Twentynine Palms, CA. (Jul. 17, 2001) Ð Rick Warmack, assistant special agent in charge, reviews a safety briefing, while other NCIS agents prepare for an ecstasy drug sting. The sting resulted in the arrest of several service members for drug trafficking and ecstasy use. U.S. Navy photo by PhotographerÕs Mate 2nd Class Jim Watson. (RELEASED).
Like the latest installment of a bad horror movie franchise, the bedroom police are back. With the apparently imminent demise of Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood, those forces on the right obsessed with the reproductive decision making and what goes on in other people’s sex lives have returned from the dead. Justice Alito’s draft dicta may suggest that the pending decision would not call into question other holdings like Griswold, Lawrence, Loving, or Obergefell. However it’s impossible to take him seriously. If the leaked draft is the decision, how can anyone believe that conservatives would not be happy to regulate decisions about birth control, marriage, or what sort of consensual sexual practices they engage in within their own homes?
I will admit to my own complacency. Witnessing the rapid change of gay marriage from a successful conservative wedge issue to the fastest advance in civil rights in history convinced me that religious conservatism was in retreat. This was furthered by the election of Donald Trump, a known womanizer with multiple marriages, and a persona standing in stark contrast to any notion of chastity or personal virtue. He always appeared to me as the caddish defender of a desperate rearguard action, born of a cynical bargain between defeated evangelical Christians and the most self-indulgent man to ever sit in the Oval Office.
Should the court strike this blow to stare decisis it will be impossible to predict what might be next. While the court has reversed itself before, or narrowed the scope of apparently broad doctrines, this would be the first time it eliminated a well established right. The result may be bringing not just abortion but many matters of a highly personal nature back into the democratic process. No longer will those who value personal discretion in love, marriage, and sex be able to rely on the courts for protection. Instead, they must prepare to win democratically.
Calling for the End of Progressive Self Indulgence
The path to success is the opposite of culture war. Instead it requires an end to the self-indulgence of the progressive cultural movement that metastasized in response to the presidency of Donald Trump. In order to convince people that there really are matters in which the state and our fellow citizens have no business, we must ourselves believe that is true. Further, we must ground our politics in material reality, not high academic theory or internet culture.
I want to start with the most obvious. It is impossible to make the case for a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy if one does not know what a woman is. Contra Julian Castro, trans women cannot become pregnant, and will never, ever, be in a position where one would wish for or require an abortion. I certainly hope that our newest appointed justice has figured out what a woman is in the last few days. Either way she will probably no longer be able to influence this matter as far as the court is concerned.
Additionally, getting out of the bedroom must mean getting out of the bedroom. That includes an end to cultural projects related to bizarre notions of consent based in nebulous theories of power dynamics. It also means getting rid of crazy Title IX tribunals in colleges or arguing for embarrassing affirmative consent rituals.
Further, hard distinctions must be made between those men who commit violent felonies, and those who, along with their female counterparts, engage in questionable but legal behavior in their personal romantic lives. Obviously any individual should be free to make his or her own decisions in how they proceed with another person sexually. However as far as culture goes, one cannot combat the bedroom police if one clearly wants to take up the role for themselves.
The Space for Liberalism
In order for liberalism to win democratically, it must start with a deep respect for the space of others. There must be room to disagree on certain deeply personal matters. More specifically, to be left alone requires a willingness to leave others alone. Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016 broke many things in our politics and culture. Among the most notable in my opinion was the unleashing from universities of an aggressive, progressive cultural project.
Call it wokeness, call it the successor ideology, call it just political correctness returning from its own early 90s grave. Whatever it is, much like the bedroom police on the right, it cares very deeply about matters that in a liberal society must be left to the private discretion of individuals and families. It cares so much that some of its proponents can’t help themselves from going on TikTok to announce their desire to impose it on other people’s children.
These things must be repudiated.
They are deeply misguided and incendiary to normal people. As if that weren’t enough, they lose elections. Most of all, protecting the forms of freedom and privacy in question requires winning. Winning requires a promise that individuals will not only be free of the bedroom police on the right, but of attempts by any group or movement to impose its own personal values on the private life of any citizen.
This does not mean abandoning women or minorities. However it does mean defending their rights and privacy as individuals, as opposed to promoting group based ideologies in constant need of official validation no matter how strange, contradictory, or in conflict with the personal values of others. So, drop the buzz words you heard in your undergrad seminar. Forget the nonsense the DEI consultant told your HR department for $5,000 an hour. Instead, remember the most potent words in the American political lexicon. It’s none of your business.
This premise is utter nonsense. The right is the ‘right to bodily medical autonomy’ (Which the court has confusingly called ‘privacy’), and _everyone_ has it. There’s absolutely no reason why the word ‘woman’ is even vaguely relevant to that right, it is not merely a right for women.
The people who can get pregnant are, obviously, the only people who can get abortions, and thus the only ones who will ever _apply_ that specific right towards getting an abortion, but the exact same right allows everyone access to contraceptives.
Also I was going to point out trans men and many non-binary people can get pregnant, so it’s rather stupid to limit that right to ‘women’.
But instead I will point out that, even completely ignoring trans people, not everyone who gets pregnant is a woman…some of them are _girls_. Some very young. To be a woman you have to be an _adult_, and misclassifying 12-year-old rape victims who get abortions as ‘women’ is, uh…dumb?Report
Although it is really funny how all the talking points about ‘We need to say abortion is a _woman’s_ right, and make it clear that it’s only _women_ who get pregnant’ are clearly coming from the same place, because all of them go on to talk about trans women, which have literally nothing to do with that…it’s trans _men_ and non-binary people who are being misgendered there.
Trans women, rather obviously, don’t care about language that suggests that, if they were pregnant, that they would have the right to an abortion, any more than an infertile women would care. That’s not going to happen, but…okay?
It’s the trans men that do not like being told they must be _women_ to take advantage of the right to have an abortion that is the issue.
And the slightest bit of thought would make ‘this is about trans men, not trans women’ obvious, but the transphobic right doesn’t seem to be willing to believe in the existence of trans people besides trans women.Report
I have typed like fifteen responses to this utter gibberish and I am giving up at this point.
Honestly, I have nothing I can say here that would not just read as a personal insult.
But, AT THIS POINT, do you understand your entire conception of what ‘religious conservatives’ actually want was wrong, and they can best be summed up as ‘white Christian nationalism’?Report
The Right spent lots of decades undoing abortion. That includes openly proclaiming that they wanted to do this, running for office on undoing this, and carefully nominating judges that would do this.
Are there any other issues on your list that even come close to that? Do we have elected officials getting elected on taking away contraceptives? No? Then that’s not going to be an issue.
It is not useful to pretend that the Conservatives snuck in and did this, or that this was some rouge minority that’s did this all coup-like. The Right followed the rules for determining what the majority want. That’s the reality.Report
This is where it makes sense to read the draft opinion. I could envision a Roberts holding that doesn’t expressly overrule Casey, but says they don’t like it, squints at the framework, and says that a 16 week ban is not an undue burden, then leaves it at that. That is not what the Alito draft does. It straightforwardly attacks multiple long standing doctrines.
Second if the Alito draft or something like it is what we get, no one knows what’s going to happen with issues that have been out of the democratic arena for decades. Plenty of things that are unpopular in a Gallup poll are law, and plenty of things that are popular are not. Our system works through representatives and a party system, not popular referendum. Hence the point of the piece, which is to get ready to own a policy position, and fight for its enactment.Report
I am perfectly cool with a “right to bodily autonomy”, either as a Constitutional AM or as a Federal Law. Our entire medical ethical framework is built on that, it wouldn’t be a change for anything other than abortion… and maybe vaccines (although to be fair we haven’t found a way to force adults to take vaccines so maybe it’s not a new thing).Report
Our system is alleged to work through representatives and a party system. In the case of Republican politicians push to toss substantive due process via undoing Roe, its being done openly in violation of the clear stated choices of the majority, and thus are not actually representative.Report
LOL. This is claiming opinion polls are important while the ballot box is not.
They’ve run on the issue for decades and made it clear this is what they wanted. They got enough votes in the doing so to get themselves elected because of this issue.
This is not a bug in the system or even a misuse of the system. This is the actual system and how it’s supposed to work.
That I disagree with the outcome doesn’t change that. We use elections to decide how important things are for good reason.Report
Um, yes. We’ve had that repeatedly, mostly via Republicans trying to blur the line between abortion and contraceptives by making up nonsense about contraceptives.
What a weird question.Report
My own governor was outright asked if Mississippi would outlaw contraception after Roe falls (since we have a trigger law that bans abortion except in cases of rape incest or to save a mother’s life). His answer wasn’t “No that’s settled law;” it was “We aren’t looking at that right now.”Report
Look what you made us do. Chapter 4378.Report
Like so many others – including a bunch of very bright OT folks – your quoted author is misreading both Alito’s draft, and the ultimate desired outcome of the 5 decade path that conservatives have been on (Frankly I missed it to, so don’t feel too bad). What Alito has done is not JUST attack the right to bodily medical autonomy inherent to abortion, he’s attacked the substantive due process route by which that right was enumerated. Conservatives have spent decades trying to undermine the ratification of that process and those rights, while constantly and publicly flogging their support for a select group of enumerated rights in the Constitution. This fight is about “returning” America to a place where a select group gets to make decisions about the rest of America without having to be burdened by pushback or protest. Once you toss substantive due process, that becomes much easier for the courts because there’s no basis to keep Griswald or Loving or Obergafeld in place since the rights those cases enumerated are not written in the Constitution.
OH and while I’m here – if progressives and leftists really need to move away from identity politics, then what does it matter how we define a woman?Report
This fight is about “returning” America to a place where a select group gets to make decisions about the rest of America without having to be burdened by pushback or protest.
That’s literally what Roe v Wade was. Seven lifetime political appointees, totally immune from being voted out of office, decreed that abortion was to be removed from the list of questions up for democratic debate. Ditto for other novel applications of substantive due process.
Being fairly pro-abortion myself, I wasn’t complaining about this too loudly, compared to, e.g., Court-sanctioned abuse of the Commerce Clause. But not being an unprincipled hack, I do concede that Roe v Wade was total BS.
Returning these questions back to the states, where the Constitution says they should be, puts them in the hands of a much larger number of people, the vast majority of whom ultimately answer to voters.
If you want to complain about this decision, you’re welcome to. I sympathize with you on the substantive issues even if I don’t agree on the legal questions, or on the wisdom of giving five political appointees the power to right all wrongs at their personal discretion. But have a little self-awareness.Report
There are a great many SCOTUS decisions that were total BS and still managed to move the Nation closer to its promised goal lines, Roe included. That’s their whole shtick. Sadly for you and a great many others, if they weren’t beholden to politicians – and thus theoretically to the people – then McConnell wouldn’t have quashed the appointment of Merrick Garland. Its also worth noting that the checks and balances you and so many other seem to think are enhanced by returning this to the states are actually breaking down, since the legislative, executive and judicial branches in half the states are controlled by the GOP, who have managed to gerrymander themselves into semi-permanent control of their states.
One very interesting thing to see will be how this intersects things like the commerce clause, in as much as Missouri is debating whether they will declare it illegal for their citizens to travel outside the state to obtain abortions.Report
IANAL, but it seems to me that the allergy the SCOTUS seems to have to making decisions anchored in Privileges & Immunities, as opposed to always falling back on Due Process, is what has allowed a lot of things to be at risk. But, IIRC, using P&I would require undoing Slaughterhouse, which, even though that is considered a really bad decision, the court has long been unwilling to tackle.
And this falls on the left & the right leaning justices.Report
Ahem:
“Slippery Slope!”
There. That ought to deal with that concern.
For what it’s worth, I agree 100% with your conclusion.
We need to return to some sort of idea where we, as a society, have limits on our jurisdiction. Something can even be morally wrong but not appropriate for us to stick our nose into (for example: abortion as birth control).
But nobody’s going to agree with that. This stuff is going to end one of two ways.Report
It seems to me that Roe was uniquely a triple-threat: a ruling based on bad reasoning, that couldn’t be made on good reasoning, and had a bad outcome (or at least one that a large portion of the country didn’t want). Griswold seems like a decision based on bad reasoning, but that could be made with good reasoning, and had an outcome that people would accept. I haven’t read this whole article yet but I just wanted to make those distinctions.Report
Perhaps at the time, but not now.Report
The problem is we have a large minority that wants to prevent it bad enough to vote on it and organize on it. 20% of the country dislike abortion that badly… or at least want to think that they do. IDK whether those people’s abortion rates are lower than everyone else.Report
No, they were fine with it back then, too.
The backlash to Roe was a deliberately manufactured thing that happened years later, and it not only has never had widespread opposition, but most people claimed as members of that opposition do not actually oppose it.
Abortion opponents have managed to make ‘pro-life’ into an identity and try to claim all people who describe themselves that way, whereas in reality the majority of pro-life people actually do not want abortion restricted in any serious way. (A good chunk of them don’t even want to overturn Roe v. Wade!)
The actual ‘foot soldiers’ of the pro-life movement want to oppose abortion, but do not want to punish doctors or women involved in it, which…I think the term ‘virtue signaling’ overused, but if it has any meaning at all, it’s about a vast political movement who, when polled, wants to _strongly frown_ at abortion.(1)
One side of this debate has always been microscopic, amplified as loudly as possible by the right wing to make this a wedge issue, and they’ve never been able to make any actual progress because, and this is a somewhat obvious fact, humans do not consider the unborn, especially the early unborn, to actually be people at a _psychological_ level, so it’s a pretty far uphill battle as a premise.
1) This is how a lot of politics is. It’s like how liberals strongly frown at the police shooting unarmed Black people. Bad police! Stop it! Be better in the future!
…no, we don’t want any changes to the law to fix this, God no.Report
LOL. Great post.Report
No. Roe was very widely supported at the time. In fact, it’s still widely supported. The right spent _decades_ and bilions of dollars ginning up opposition to it after its passage as a wedge issue. And didn’t even get that far with public opinion, and to the extent they did it was via the identity politics of ‘pro-life’ and not WRT those ‘pro-life’ people wanting _actual laws_ barring it.
There’s no reason they couldn’t do that with contraceptives, and in fact they already have started. Although…they don’t have to. This decision removes literally all existing grounds _for_ Griswold. Technically speaking, they already won there.
Anyway, what grounds exactly do you think are ‘good’ grounds for Griswold besides ‘the government should not be concerned in extremely private behavior of its citizens’? What grounds do you think the current Supreme Court will allow?
Because the statement in the leaked decision is literally ‘Well, a lot of people don’t object to contraceptives or gay rights, so those are safe’, which a) incredibly prone to manipulation of polling in exactly the same way that abortion has been misrepresented over the years, and b) literal nonsense as a constitutional statement, because it’s easy enough to claim that if people elect a government that bars contraceptives, Griswold clearly _isn’t_ popular anymore.Report
IANAL, but my understanding is that Goldberg wrote a concurrence based on the Ninth Amendment, and while White’s concurrence refers to the Fourteenth, his argument would hold even if that passage were removed. Again, though, IANAL.Report
I think its fair to say the thrust of this essay is that the liberals need to abandon wokeness and the identity politics aspects of their movement so as to appeal to moderates and form a majority coalition.
If we were talking about any other conventional political issue group, that would be shrewd advice.
Run on only raising taxes on the .01% instead of the 1%, for example.
But that’s not how identity politics work. Identity is about accepting people as full equal citizens which is a binary. You either have it or you don’t.
For example, the author brings up “What is a woman”?
How exactly would a “Non-Woke”, but still liberal tolerant society define this, regulate this, police and enforce this?
Differently than say, the liberal jurisdictions around the country are already doing.
From what I can see in the writings of the “Liberal but Non-Woke” people, “Non-Woke” really just means “those very loud people on Twitter should stop saying things that I find silly.”
IOW, there is never a serious thoughtful suggestion which can lead to actual policy, its all just style and tone policing.Report
This might be true but it doesn’t get around that you need a majority to govern. The typical center-left majority was a combination of educated moral reformers and the working classes varyingly defined. This was always a queasy coalition because the rank and file bulk vote was always more at a state of unease with social liberalism than the educated reformer branch. There are signs that the Democratic Party is bleeding support from voters who didn’t go to college regardless of race. That’s bad. Keeping together the educated reformers and the working classes was tough enough in a homogenous society. In a heterogeneous society, it gets nearly impossible. The result is that the center-left party could easily end up as a rump party of the educated middle classes.
There is another tendency in the Anglophone left to actively fear power. Rather than wanting to be a governing party or at least in a governing coalition, many would seem to prefer to be oppositional activists that can force the square governing majority to do the right thing rather than achieve power themselves. This seems to have been the case since the 1960s. They want a social democratic government that implements progressive social democratic policy but they don’t want to be part of the governing structure ever.Report
I want to start with the most obvious. It is impossible to make the case for a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy if one does not know what a woman is.
Putting aside the fact that Castro clearly misspoke, and meant to say trans men (many of whom could very well need an abortion at some point), is there anyone out there who doesn’t know “what a woman is”? Obviously, you are expressing here that you believe trans women are not women, but it’s not at all clear to me how disagreeing with that statement makes it more difficult to defend a woman’s right to terminate pregnancy. Seems like a blatant non sequitur to me.Report
I’m still stuck at we have to toss identitarian politics by defining an identity in an inviolable way.Report
The best case scenario is a coalition of people who have agreed to paper over differences and are incapable of prioritizing or being an effective small d democratic force on highly specific issues, no matter how important.
The worst case scenario is a constant alienation of the people you need to win by treating every identity group’s shibbeloths as a zero sum litmus test. Maybe that could be fudged in an environment where the federal courts will every once in awhile do the heavy lifting. It absolutely isn’t when this is going to be in the hands of the mediocrities that populate and run state legislative bodies.Report
So the issue isn’t, in fact, that it makes it more difficult (much less impossible) to make the case for a woman’s right to terminate pregnancy; it’s just that the people we need to make the case to are likely to be put off by calls for treating trans women with empathy and kindness, so we should abandon trans women, in order to have more common ground with the people we’re trying to convince on abortion?Report
If this is the world we will soon inhabit, I think these cases need to be made to voters on their own, intellectually honest merits, not one that ties itself in knots to adhere to an increasingly complicated and not particularly coherent set of orthodoxies.
The case for a woman’s right to chose does not and should not rest on the ability to make it in a way that requires accepting certain highly controversial tenets of gender theory or activist movements.
The case for trans rights can be made quite independently of the specific matter of abortion, though it may, and likely to some degree will, rest on similar considerations of privacy/bodily autonomy and with a dose of equal protection. I think you can get people to accept that, unfortunately sometimes grudgingly, as the price of their own privacy, autonomy, and equal protection, without also asking them to buy into that which they won’t or can’t.Report
In case you’ve forgotten, you said this:
I want to start with the most obvious. It is impossible to make the case for a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy if one does not know what a woman is.
This, more than anything any “woke” person is saying, entangles reproductive justice and trans issues, by saying that it is impossible to argue for the former without taking a strong position on the latter.
Now, down here in the comments, you’re saying that the two are independent, and each can be argued separately. Exactly, ad so far, only you, in the OP, have stated otherwise.Report
I don’t see where I’ve contradicted myself but if you think I have fair enough.Report
From a leftist perspective it’s never rested on that laurel though. For us it rests on the simple premise that women should have the same body autonomy rights that men do. Full stop. We haven’t been and aren’t now the ones raising or conflating all these objections.Report
Then read this as nothing more than a call to avoid any traps, as the issue is put through the legislative process.Report
is there anyone out there who doesn’t know “what a woman is”?
Ninety-plus-plus percent of the time, there is no dispute about who is a woman. The visible plumbing we usually rely on to determine whether someone is a man or a woman corresponds 90++% of the time with the psychological and emotional state of the possessor of the plumbing. The only real issue is what to do in the extremely rare cases of mismatch. While I don’t pretend to understand in any deep way what it’s like when the plumbing and the psyche don’t match, it’s perfectly obvious to me — and probably to everyone else — that claiming a mismatch and seeking to have something done about it is not something one would do lightly. There is no worldly advantage to pursuing such a course — a few medals in local athletic contests are laughably insufficient reward for gaming the system — so I assume that people who claim mismatches and seek to have something done about it are in serious pain and entitled to sympathy and relief rather than scorn.
There are, however, those who do not care, and the “you don’t know what a woman is?” bit is trolling, whether done by a Senator or a blog commenter.Report
Good luck passing legislation where the plumbing is quite intimately involved with that mentality. You may think you shouldn’t have to, and you probably shouldn’t, but no one said the game was fair.Report
It’s funny, the anti-woke complain, bitterly, about the use of phrases like “people who can get pregnant,” but then act as though such simple phrases don’t exist when insisting that trans rights make abortion rights too confusing for most people. “How will we know to whom these rights apply? No one has thought of how to say it!!1!!!”Report
Yes, libs, good lucking finding a way to give rights to everyone instead of a specific gender or sex! Name a single constitutional right or law that doesn’t specifically single out one specific gender, or one specific sex!
*holds hand to earpiece*
What’s that? Almost no laws and literally no constitutional rights care about gender or sex? That can’t be correct, we specifically have one that gave women the right to vote, surely _that_ mentions women?
…it doesn’t?!
InMD, why on earth would we give _women_ the right to an abortion instead of just giving _people_ the right to an abortion? What could that possibly accomplish except create some universe where courts could deny those rights to specific pregnant people on the grounds they were not ‘women’? Why the hell would anyone phrase the law that way?
And we wouldn’t give people the right to an _abortion_, either, we would give them the right to privacy…which people who _can’t_ become pregnant should have also, so they can buy contraceptives and things like that. Sheesh.
Your entire premise there is complete nonsense, where you have decided that the most important issue that the left needs to do ‘defining a category of who will get these rights so the wording can actively excluding people’.Report
A whole lot of conflict comes as a result of confusing “should” with “shall,” “ought” with “must,” and “cultural” with “legal.”Report
That. That exactly.Report
Apparently you think my desire and advocacy on behalf of giving my daughter (who is trans) a good life that is free from persecution and being a political punching bag is “self indulgent”.
Oh, and then you try to be cute and say “well, trans women can’t get pregnant”. My mother, who was an XX couldn’t get pregnant after she had one ovary removed as a young teen due to an infection, and an ectopic pregnancy finished the job. I was adopted.
This is personal to me. This is personal to a lot of people. These are people we care about.
Go fsck yourself.Report
As I read InMD this is not a call for Trans people or others to be made a punching bag. It’s a call to abandon the symbolic, trivial and self indulgent behavior that doesn’t materially improve the lives of those very people in order to allow us as a political movement to win politically and get the power protect the things that are material and vital to the welfare of trans people.Report
What would such a thing even look like?
Like, how would the President, a Democratic governor, Senator or Congressman behave differently than they do now?
What “symbolic, trivial and self indulgent behavior” is being done by which Democratic politicians and what should they do instead?Report
I had a lengthy comment musing on and bemoaning this very thing but for some reason it won’t post. I’m rather frustrated by that.Report
That’s wacky. Email it to me and I’ll see if I can’t get it up.
It was in spam. I freed it.Report
I just emailed it to askjaybird. Thanks bud.Report
Who gets to declare what is self-indulgent and why? Most of the comply of self indulgent seem to come from middle age men who are upset that the stuff they like is no longer considered cool and they get vaguely uncomfortable feeling around young people being different than them. Rufo’s whole crusade against CRT is because it made him feel bad and uncomfortable. And god forbid, he feel anything but great all the time.Report
Wait until you’re the one paying the premium property taxes to live in the good school district, only for them to start making noises about eliminating algebra in middle school because some bureaucrat is embarrassed by the classroom demographics.Report
He does live in that school district.
He voted to recall the school board.Report
I am. The issue won’t come up because local schools are controlled by local school boards, which means parents.
The Tar and Feathers won’t be needed because the bureaucrats know who signs the checks.Report
Interestingly, San Fran’s data shows that “eliminating algebra” (it’s not eliminated in any way) actually produces significantly better outcomes, and actually means more kids are ready to take calculus in their last two years than before the change.
People hate change, but our out-of-the-ass opinions about how changes will affect things are usually wrong, and almost always wrong on subject we know little about, like math education.
Which raises an interesting question: should wealthy white parents in a school district be able to force a school to use a curricular track that has worse outcomes overall, but will give their kids an advantage in college admissions (without giving them better knowledge of math)?Report
I haven’t dug into the details and can’t personally vouch for this, but these claims are disputed. If you’re aware of a rebuttal to this, I’d be interested in seeing it.Report
There is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 1/2 decades of research on this (if not more; the earliest studies I’ve seen are from the late 80s). While these people are disputing SF’s numbers, the empirical research is pretty clear. There is some OLD (like, 80s) research questioning the generalizability of the benefits, but I think subsequent research has answered that pretty well.Report
35 years of research on what in particular? Abolishing 8th-grade algebra? Mandatory 8th-grade algebra? Optional? I took a couple hours to look over the literature, which I’ll grant is not sufficient to get the full picture, and the common theme I’m getting is that the evidence on the effects of 8th-grade algebra has been highly mixed.
A 2017 Rand working paper uses regression discontinuity to analyze the effects of 8th-grade algebra in 439 California schools, and offers a fairly straightforward explanation for why the effects are mixed: The effects are more positive in schools with higher average math skills and in schools which set a higher threshold for placement into 8th-grade algebra. This supports the naive expectation that 8th-grade algebra is beneficial to stronger math students, who are ready for it, and harmful to weaker math students, who are not ready for it and at high risk of failing.Report
That is what you’d expect if it’s working.
The idea, then, is that you don’t hurt advanced math kids, and you help the less advanced math kids. For example, we know that there’s not much of a relationship between taking and not taking algebra in the 8th grade and state math test scores, and other studies have even found that 8th grade algebra decreases math test scores across the whole population.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some kids who are well beyond anything a non-algebra class in 8th grade could teach them, and they should be accommodated, but most kids either benefit from, or at least aren’t harmed, by putting algebra off a year.Report
Asking as someone who has taught Calc I from time to time, what do they call the prep classes that teach the students algebraic formula manipulations and transcendental functions before they get to calculus?Report
Dark arts?Report
They can never keep a teacher for more than a year.Report
Still called Algebra 1 and 2, it’s just that Algebra 1 isn’t in 8th grade, and they combine some pieces of the other prep courses for advanced math into the other math courses. Basically, you get everything you’d gotten before, but instead of some kids doing algebra in 8th grade and some doing it in 9th (or later), everyone does it in 9th.
The idea is to keep everyone on the same level until they reach a point (after sophomore year) when the students/parents themselves can better determine whether they are a fit for advanced math courses. The data suggests that this both prepares more kids for success in Algebra 1 the first time through, and puts more kids on track to take advanced math as upper-level students (11th and 12th grade).Report
In my day, the sequence was: algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus or, sometimes, something else. Of course in my day they had just invented calculus.
Now, to judge from the Regents exam prep books at the bookstore, there is something called “Integrated Mathematics,” which seems like a hodgepodge of mathematical concepts taught in various grades without regard to the normal boundaries of algebra, geometry, etc. I have no idea whether this works any better or worse than the old method.
I remember enough of the “New Math” to remember being introduced to what I later understood to be algebra in 3d or 4th grade, though the equations used boxes and triangles to represent the variables rather than X and Y. My guess at the rationale is that kids that young could conceive of the box and triangle as empty spaces to fill up, but would be sidetracked and confused by X and Y, naturally thinking that they stood for some specific thing beginning with an X or Y.Report
Yeah, that’s still the basic sequence, but it starts later, and the middle parts are kinda squished together. Plus California has been adding new advanced math courses, so if you don’t want to take calculus, you can take an advanced high school statistics course, for example. But kids can still take calculus in that system, and all the stuff that comes before it, including all the content of algebra 1 and 2, geometry, trig, pre-calc, etc.
It might be the case that California, or at least San Francisco, didn’t sell this well when initially implemented, and some parents whose children needed AP calculus to get into Stanford were convinced there wouldn’t be an opportunity to take calculus senior year if they had to take algebra freshman year instead of 8th grade, but that’s not actually true, and the continued outrage has largely been either manufactured or built on ignorance of what the changes actually involve (e.g., people still saying they “eliminated algebra”).
Oh, and there are also, at least in San Francisco, new methods of math education which seem to work pretty well. Basically more collaborative classwork built around teachers asking questions and students working, often in small groups, to answer them. Some of the math textbooks Florida rejected were based on this approach, I believe.Report
Coincidentally, we have a guy on the school board in a California district who could say much more about this than I can, but the “the far left is banning algebra!” thing is complete bullsh*t, and the idea that we should get rid of what really looks like an empirically better way of doing math education because conservatives and centrists think it’s wokeness run amok is ridiculous.
Is it perfect? Obviously not, because humans created it, but this stuff is complex and pretending the old way of doing things should never be challenged because it is perfect is also ridiculous.Report
I did things in such a strange order that I’m in no position to criticize, I was just curious. I was part of an experiment in 9th grade: they gave a few of us the book and access to a teacher if we had questions and told us to go as far as we could. Two of us finished Algebra I and II in two semesters. Then changed schools to one where 10th grade was geometry (and lord did it seem like we were plodding along after my 9th grade class). Then they refused to let me take the 12th grade pre-calc when I was in 11th — they gave me a couple of books and free access to the terminal connected to the timeshare computer at the nearest university and let me teach myself to program. (The code worked, but I learned bad habits that took me years to unlearn.) Then pre-calc: transcendental functions and some analytic geometry. I did fine when I got to university and Honors Calc, but it was a weird path getting there.
My misadventures did force the second school to get prepared for Air Force brats who started arriving “ahead” when they moved in, so some good did come out of it.Report
Anyone gets to allege self indulgence against anyone else and then back it up with facts. For instance the most shrill and extreme people on DEI/Identarian twitter have a strong tendency to be mostly white well off dudes.
What is self indulgent behavior in my context? It’s advocacy for (often but not always) nebulous things that offer only symbolic or no practical benefit to(or in some education policy fields actively harms) the minorities it purports to help. It’s self indulgent because while it’s bad for the left and minorities in the big picture context it lets the actor virtue signal and look/feel good within their own granular social and professional circles. What is (very slightly) good for the individual, then, is (in aggregate) very bad for the organization or ideology.Report
Poked my nose back in here, and what do I see? Another front page transphobic piece.
From someone who claims to be liberal.
“First we have to define what’s a woman”. Who uses the death of Roe v. Wade, the stripping of autonomy from half of America, to bash trans women?
Jesus this place has gone to crap. Outright bigotry used to be at least frowned on.
What a mistake. God this place has gone to the dogs.Report
As far as I can tell the policy preferences stated in the article are solidly liberal but the arrows come from the left. Which, I suppose, is the point.
The Center-Left salient… nothing but targets.Report
In fairness I spent like a month and a half in the comments here fighting with people to my left, even in situations where the OPs were to my right. This is me paying my dues.Report
For Lent next year I’m only going to respond with links to Freddie posts. Like this.
Just Stop Apologizing
Admittedly an improvement, but still would require sacrifice on my part.Report
That was an excellent essay.Report
If that’s a link its not working for me. Its red like a link should be. But its not linking . . .Report
Here you go.
(As a subscriber, I read it this morning in my email.)Report
Red because there’s a correct <a></a> tag pair for delineating a link. Doesn’t go anywhere because the reference given in the <a> tag isn’t a valid URL. Looks like a copy-paste went wrong in some fashion — all the information is there, but it’s mangled.Report
eh.
As with the Coffee Lawsuit Lady story, the actual details kinda spoil the conservative rage about that one.
Because when you read the actual details you find that the would-be politician in question called up the staffer in question and confessed to feelings of romantic love and sexual desire for that person. This was not “they talked about hand-holding and it got blown up into this big thing because Woke Brain Poison”, this was “she told one of her employees that she had a massive horny-crush on them”. And the increasingly panicked flailing apologies make sense when you consider them an effort to make that not have happened.
And, y’know. Yeah, maybe people shouldn’t be quite so quick to seize on Salacious Rumours Of A Sinful Nature, but maybe this is less that and more “a major public demonstration that someone is not fit for the level of responsibility they seek”.
“yo, hold up,” you’re saying, “Freddie conservative?” Oh, absolutely! The man is as conservative as Lloyd Bentsen! He just grew up in a place where “conservative” was shorthand for “Baptist-Christian racist homophobe”, and he is none of those things, and he isn’t quite bright enough to figure out a label for “not Baptist-Christan racist homophobe” that isn’t “liberal/leftist”.Report
As far as I can tell, the policy preference stated in the article are solidly liberal and than the writer spent most of the article taking random swipes at trans people and demanding the left take responsibility for the behavior of Tiktok teens.Report
I’m deeply sympathetic to the general thrust of your post InMD but I can’t help but feel a certain degree of frustration with your conclusions even though I don’t disagree with them in particular.
To generalize liberal identarians have adopted a whole lot of tics, gestures and language rules that are quite substantive in a media where communicating and being seen is central (social media) but is simultaneously an inconsequential indulgence in the real world. Via their overrepresentation in media, political consulting, nonprofits and the academy these same liberals are cramming these concepts out of the social media frame and into politics.
The problem that is making me feel the frustration is that this isn’t organizationally actionable. To wit there isn’t an organization that’s committing the things we’re complaining about here. It’s occurring on an atomized individual level. Yes a person on twitter calling everyone transphobes for saying “mothers” instead of “birthing persons” is harming the overarching liberal causes by turning off almost everyone who reads it except for their ideological compatriots. But what can one do about it?
These aren’t actions by the organized leftist party- the Dems are mostly silent on the matters or occasionally mouth the most generally unobjectionable platitudes. You can’t expect the party to go to war with the identarian left. That’s simple politics- you usually can’t win when you attack your own left flank. Usually, it enrages and turns off your own supporters while your opponent’s deem it inadequate.
So if the party can’t take action against these leftist identarian indulgences what can be done? It feels to me you’re talking about changing the whole left-wing culture but it’s beyond me how such a thing could be done. If the whole left gets wrecked in popular opinion for the stuff that a bunch of individuals do on TikTok and twitter that then gets painted across the entire ideological spectrum how do you fight it? There’s no way to prevent individuals from doing these things.
And why is this even a thing? I can’t count the number of times I read some post or article talking about awful things the GOP is doing or proposing to write into laws “but I found this liberal nobody saying this risible thing on twitter so both sides are equally bad”.Report
And why is this even a thing?
In my opinion, this is because it is an iterated prisoners’ dilemma and there are people out there who feel like they have been defected against multiple times and have gone through and come out the other side of feeling, sigh, “gaslit” about it.
There is no trust that the next iteration will not have another defection.
The choices are not playing anymore or defecting back.
(I suppose “collaborate” theoretically remains on the table, but there’s less of an upside to collaboration than you’d think.)Report
Eh, I don’t see much mystery for the right wings media apparatus’ behavior (no need to go into game theory, it’s the only way to keep pumping clicks and money out of their audience) but why the ostensibly mainstream and allegedly “liberal” media indulges in it is beyond me.Report
I want to say that, for the most part, most folks are constitutionally conservative. They may agree that X needs to be changed, but Y is fine, and Z is mostly okay, and Aleph is pretty good the way it is.
BUT X! X NEEDS TO CHANGE!
Which is why intersectionality is such a big deal. It’s an attempt to make Solidarity a thing. We’ll help you with your thing, then you help me with my thing, then we’ll help em with eir thing.
But there are a bunch of people who duck out after X is fixed. X was the problem. Not Y or Z.
There are a bunch of people who think that X needs to be fixed *MORE*.
Others who think that X needs to be abolished.
And others who say “we’ve worked on X enough, it’s time to work on Y. I’m not going to help with X again until we start addressing Y.”
And the liberal media does a great job of hiring people who care very, very much about X. They got a degree in it, dontchaknow. But Y is unfashionable. And Z is kind of silly if you’ve started, you know, actually working for a living. And Aleph? Nobody cares about Aleph except for humanities majors who have more college debt than a humanities degree can reasonably expect to pay off.Report
“So if the party can’t take action against these leftist identarian indulgences what can be done?”
It’s called a Sister Souljah moment. It alienates the most extreme cutting edge of the party but unifies the moderates and makes the independents / reachable other side have a little confidence in the party.Report
Would that it was that easy, and even a Sister Souljah movement is a very difficult maneuver to pull off.Report
We just had one, Biden saying “fund the police”. The most difficult thing about it is getting the press to stop saying that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, and have them acknowledge that something just shifted.Report
Biden did stuff similar to that during his primary campaign and his general campaign. Yes, he won, but only barely. Likewise he’s generally hewn pretty centrist in office and still gets tarred as extreme left.
I am dubious that Souljah moments have the punch that the eponymous event once had. The entire media/internet ecosystem is totally different.Report
Is it fair to say I want the Democratic party to make a very intentional, deliberate, thrust to the Obama coalition? Now I get it will never be 2008 or 2012 again, and there are certain lessons that must be learned from some of his administration’s failures, among them a willingness to be more economically populist than where the Democratic party was at that time. Frankly I also think he let some stuff go on the administrative side too that hasn’t been helpful. Most of the dissenters are getting at me on the trans language policing but I mentioned the Title IX tribunals which are very much an Obama era thing and part of the same phenomenon. But I think it’s telling that the one person who kind of sort of made some efforts in that direction (to say nothing of his obvious association with it) happens to be the president of the United States.
My biggest fears in politics right now are:
(i) handing over state governments across the country to the GOP from a combination of Democrats allowing themselves to be defined by the right and simply deciding too many people in too many places are too conservative to even try to win them over; and
(ii) a 2024 where Biden is unable to run and we witness a repeat of the last primary, where a bunch of candidates throw their credibility away, except this time there’s no one to step in and save the day.
Now you’re right that the GOP does and says plenty of nutty things to discredit themselves. As we’ve discussed they are their newstainment people now, and I don’t think that’s an advantage. I don’t think the Democrats need to totally go to war with the identitarian left, but I do think they can stop talking like them. I also think they can push back when the right tries to define the entire Democratic party by them, in pretty vocal ways, as opposed to coddling it.
Going back to my OP, I think if we’re now going to be putting a bunch of liberal achievements on private matters of sex and reproduction back into the legislative sphere we’re going to have to try to get votes from people who don’t like and are offended by the excesses. Hech I’m offended by the excesses but I’m also reading and arguing about these issues every day which gives me a lot of perspective. Normie McNormerson does not have that. So maybe at the end of the day it isn’t ‘fight for me’ it’s ‘fight for them’, and have a happy end result that gives space and freedom to those who need it and have historically been denied it. I look at it as a great big taking yes for an answer.Report
The Obama coalition had astonishingly short coattails to where we lost control of the House and Senate and over half of the statehouses.
Have you considered the possibility that your assumed premise is not true?
That there is no significant pool of voters who can be persuaded to vote Democrat simply by changing the tone of Twitter activists?Report
No, because that would require me to think that Democrats can’t ever win outside of big cities and inner ring suburbs. That seems demonstrably false.
I also think one of Obama’s failures was not institutionalizing his brand enough. The losses strike me as more thermostatic than anything else. It’s just a reality and it happens to almost every administration.Report
I was a Democratic party artist while I lived in Orange County, CA 2008-2015 and watched it turn from red to blue.
They won by just being themselves and running campaigns similar to Obama/Clinton/Biden.
But having said that, the change was less about persuading the middle than by activating the base.
Which, not coincidentally is the winning Republican strategy.
They aren’t out there persuading people of the wisdom of abortion bans and low taxes. They rely on base activation and moral panics to goose the numbers.Report
Also, where is it written that liberal tolerance is a winning political message?
Doesn’t history show us that in fact intolerance and bigotry are perennial, tried and true vote getters and liberal tolerance mostly an interlude?
I know this sounds defeatist but this idea that “If we’re losing it can only be that we failed to outwit them” seems even worse, like something an abused spouse would say.Report
The liberal tolerance worked pretty well from the 90’s until sometime in Obama’s term. Liberal tolerance boosters would say that liberal success seemed to wane almost in lockstep with the noisy lefts increasingly intolerant discourse.Report
The most common conservative assessment is that Obama ran as a unifier in 2008, and a leader of factions in 2012.Report
In 2008, I couldn’t tell what he was running as. Not Bush, a Rorschach picture, and first Black President.
If you wanted to see him as “X” you could.Report
Philip just explained that to me. He ran as white. Then in 2012 he ran as black, and white America got angry. It makes sense when he says it.Report
It also seemed to wane with the election and reelection of a balck man . . . .Report
As I just pointed out, it seemed to wane with his reelection…which makes it hard to pin it on race, doesn’t it?Report
Broad strokes, “liberal tolerance” is such a vote getter that it’s won. That’s Team Blue’s problem right there.
Women have the right to vote, you can’t expand that right. In fact the right to vote is so ubiquitous that Team Blue needs to try to incite panic attacks over tiny changes that are mostly virtue signaling.
Gay rights is becoming that, Team Red isn’t much interested in restricting them… so Team Blue needs to incite panic attacks over wedding cakes and if that’s not enough they’ll go for nut picking.
This is why Blue needs to measure Black’s oppression by their results, not their actual oppression.
Trans is a thing, but it’s not widespread enough in society that everyone is up in arms yet.
That leaves immigration, which is complex and we haven’t worked out the fault lines yet.
And abortion.
Politicians have to run on today’s promises, not yesterday’s accomplishments. If they could run on yesterday’s stuff then hands down you’d win and be fine.Report
The socialist Democratic base couldn’t even manage to activate itself enough to make Uncle Bernie give ol’ Uncle Joe a run for his money.
The identarian Democratic base did astronomically worse than the socialist Democratic base did. They couldn’t even unite on a candidate nor make any of the acceptable identarian candidates even contend.
I note, further, that neither base has accomplished even a significant take over of safe Democratic seats, let alone actually nominate and win in a candidate in an actual competitive district.
So how the fish could a base activation strategy be expected to work in the general? The left isn’t the right- I don’t know if it’s just that the right is a cheap date and if you mouth the right lines they’ll follow you into the inferno or something else. Trying to pretend the left works the way the right does strikes me as a fool’s errand.Report
A very true statement.Report
Republicans also win by rigging the game in their favor through gerrymanders and other vote suppression tactics. There is also the matter of the Senate giving them a lot of power.
I’m not entirely convinced that the Democratic Party can activate the base in the same way the Republicans can though. The Republicans have an identifiable base to activate. The Democratic Party doesn’t. The young activist types are notoriously hard to get out to vote. The most reliable Democratic voters are more ideologically moderate than the young activists. Its why both the Warren fans and the Bernie fans were floored by Biden’s victory. The problem is that the activists do a lot of grunt work for campaigns, so politicians tend to listen to them a bit.Report
I do agree, though, that Obama had astonishing short coattails after his initial election and ascribe much of that to the fact that Barack Obama himself undoubtably came to believe his own Hope’n Change press and actively disdained politics which was utter disaster for the party’s organization and strategy elements. Obama was a very good person, an excellent orator and a fine President but he was an absolutely terrible party organizer and, bluntly, a pretty lousy political operator.
I think the main problem that InMD keeps touching on is that, substantively, the left and the Party now aren’t terribly far from where they were in substantive policy terms in the Obama era. All the sea change has been in communication/mannerisms/jargon and, bluntly, most of that change has been in the behavior of private actors (individuals on social media, yes, but also unelected employees, corporate executives and academic types) and a greatly heightened tendency on the part of the media to ascribe their private actions to the Democratic party.
In my more depressed moments, I worry that the current leadership is simply too ancient and scholeric to handle trying to actively argue with the left-wing fringe- especially since most of their staffers are probably heavily in on that same ideology. Were these normal times I’d say that the party would have to face a big electoral loss, a culling of the old politicians and then a subsequent loss by the ideological actors who’d replace them. But the GOP/right is fishin’ out of their fishing minds at the moment so I’m uncertain if we can afford the luxury of a cycle of them trying to helm stuff. I suspect they’re mostly too inept and incoherent to do much beyond cut taxes domestically but who the heck knows what idiocy they’d get into in foreign policy or what mischief they might get into with regards with election administration.Report
Very true. While Mitch McConnell is not a spring chicken, his staff and those working with them in RNC are all Gen X or younger. And they are willing to follow his lead. No rank and file Democrats want to follow Chuck Schumer’s lead.Report
This is what basically David Shor argues. Democratic politicians listen too much to young college educated wonk-activist types because they work for them on campaigns and in their offices. The young wonk-activist types do not actively reflect the policy desires of the median middle aged person that actually goes out and votes Democratic.Report
I think quite highly of Shor and think he’s likely correct on this matter. The traditional corrective for this problem is losing elections. But right now…Report
A great many of us here are the typical middle aged person who might vote democratic . . . .Report
We’re weirdos- political nerds- both unrepresentative and set in our alignments.Report
What specific parts of either the Democrats current legislative push or their current party rhetoric do you think deviates from this?Report
Note to the editors, I am seeing notifications from North that his comments aren’t getting through, including one in the comments that doesn’t look like it posted. Requesting assistance on his behalf.Report
Woah and now it just popped out.Report
Above Chip talks about tone-policing. I ultimately think that a big problem with the current center-left is more of an issue of language rather than policy. The issue is that many seem to be addicted to what I call wonk-activist speak and can’t talk to voters in plain English anymore. Wonk speak is born from a desire to show off your smarts and activist speak comes from not wanting to make real or perceived vulnerable groups feel unsafe or uncomfortable. Both are very removed from how most people speak though. Like a lot of actual Hispanics are either unaware of the term Latinx or if they are aware of it, really really hate it but the wonk-activist insists on using it. So I think the real issue is that we need to start being able to communicate in ordinary English.Report
The Stupid Party is coming back, baby.
(You’re not going to believe how many people there are around or below the number at the median.)Report
Would that be, roughly, half of them?Report
I recall variations of this argument as far back as the early 90s when I was still a Republican.
The liberals need to talk more about God, the argument went, to stop pandering to the Bill Maher type seculars and make an appeal to the churchgoing types.
And they need to step up their messaging on patriotism and flag stuff and stop whinging about the Cold Warriors.
And so along the way all sorts of variations were trotted out.
People like Max Clellan, a triple amputee war veteran, and Joe Biden, a Catholic Senator from Delaware, and Tammy Duckworth, another war amputee, and John Kerry, yet another veteran and a number of other barn coat wearin’, pickup truck drivin’, churchgoin’ sensible reasonable country folk out of a Hallmark country Christmas movie.
And they all failed to catch fire with the elusive Moderate Middle. Except for a certain William Jefferson Clinton, a white Christian bubba from Arkansas.
Oh wait.
Yeah, they hated his guts too.
The idea that there is a deep latent hunger for a Unicorn Democrat who combines all the good parts of the rural heartland with none of the racism and misogyny and pig ignorant meanness is a pure Beltway media fever dream. Its a perfect example of the isolated bubble thinking of people for who feel the need to send reporters on exotic safaris to Iowa diners.
There are in fact plenty of rural Democrats, suburban Democrats, working class Democrats who have all the stated values of Republicans- fiscal conservative, religiously observant, faithful spouses and loving family people.
The trouble is, these people are also black or Hispanic, or Muslim or Jewish, or maybe they are trans or accept people who are, or maybe just pushy broads like Katie Porter who won’t put up with stupid men.
The 70 odd million people who voted for Trump, twice, voted for him BECAUSE of the racism, misogyny, and meanness.
They refuse to belong to any party that accepts those sorts of people.Report
Yeah, the classic view from the left viewpoint that everyone who didn’t vote for us is a racist/homophobe/*insert appropriate Xist or Yphobe here* is a timeless siren song. If we don’t have to try and get those muddled middle votes then we don’t have to make any hard choices or uncomfortable compromises.
And if we lose, at least we remain pure. Purity is the point after all, not winning. And if we lose and the boot comes down on minority groups, well at least we remained pure. The minorities under the boot can subsist on virtue if they must, small price to pay for preserving our purity and self regard.
I remember when the left finally decided, in the aughts, that same sex marriage was a desirable goal (and not heteronormative and thus evil as they previously thought) and joined the cause. All the arguments with our new compatriots who growled “I don’t want to persuade them. I am so sick of explaining things to them. It shouldn’t be my job to educate them.” Fortunately they mostly lost that internal argument and the SSM movement went on to win.Report
and once again we come back to my central thesis – The Democrats as a political party are not perceived as fighters.Report
If, as I suspect is the case, there are X # of left wing true believers and Y # of right wing true believers and X is both less than Y and electorally inefficiently concentrated in urban areas then being the uncompromising fighters strategy is a mugs game for the left and they have to compromise on purity to rope in enough of the a-political/low info/low engagement Z voters in the middle to win.Report
What sorts of things should “left wing true believers” compromise on, exactly? Like, what are some specific examples?Report
As InMD noted there’re plenty of areas the left writ large could back off that wouldn’t substantively harm the lives of the minorities the left purports to be in support of. A lot of this stuff is just vapid preening and signaling more than it is substantive aid to minorities.
Language change and policing is a specific and area where the left could ease waaay back without actually hurting anyone. I think we’re on rock solid ground with demanding appropriate pronoun use but I don’t think it’s a twitter mob/firing level offense. All the stuff with changing language in an effort to be more “inclusive” is something we could sacrifice in total without significantly hurting actual trans folks. Birthing persons instead of mother? Not only have we no hope of enacting it but this kind of windmill tilting actively harms the left over all while not actually helping trans people in general. It’s cheap internet preening and in many cases, it isn’t even being requested by the minorities it purports to help so much as being invented by posturing internet academics. See latinx.
If we roll on over to Virginia we could endorse parental notification of their children’s sexuality issues and discussions of sexuality in classes and then be on strong ground when adding a caveat to allow concealing it if there’s material reason to believe the kid in question will face abuse if their parents find out (also if you honestly think one of your students will be abused if parents find out about their sexuality issues then merely keeping their sexuality issues secret is grossly negligent- you should be calling child protective services and/or the police).
DEI education stuff is another area. It’s like 99% heat and 1% corporate pap for fashionable social justice causes. Kendi and Diangelo’s grifting ilk making bank to lecture zoned out corporate drones about DEI has never, ever, materially improved the lives of anyone, anywhere except the lecture providers. Holy agnostic Jesus, how could we on the left have watched the Christian Gospel grifters eat the GOP out from the inside like parasitic wasp larvae in a caterpillar and then in this decade say “You know, we should make our own version of those people for the left*”.
*In full fairness to DEI lecturers, to my knowledge, none of them have sexually abused the people they preach at.Report
Re: the paragraph beginning If we roll on over to Virginia Who on earth thinks children should be educated about anything whatsoever without their parents being able to know about it? Is that even a thing. Can you point me to some examples that haven’t been handled appropriately my existing systems, and in which leftists supported hiding what children were being taught from their parents?
DEI stuff is trickier, because no one who gets up in arms about it seems to have any real idea what is in it. I’ll defer to Kazzy, not exactly a left wing extremist, on that one.
Re: pronouns and language change. I recognize that some people are to alter their pronoun use, but I find this utterly ridiculous. It’s so easy to do, and it is a genuinely kind thing to do. I’ll give you an example: we were at an event this weekend, and my 2-year old was plowing through the crowd trying to get to her mother. Someone in her way was taking a photo of the crowd, so I said to her, “Let’s wait for them to take a picture.” The person heard me, and a few minutes later came up to me and said, “Thank you for using a gender neutral pronoun.” Like, just saying “they” instead of “he” or “she” was enough to cause a stranger to come up to me and thank me. It’s just that easy to make people feel respected. Why not do it?Report
You seem to have entirely misread me on pronouns. I said I think we’re on pretty solid ground with modern pronoun use so long as we don’t get fundamentalist militant about it.
As for education… uh… talk to our liberal compatriots, particularly ones who work in education? In Virginia’s last election the GOP successfully made it an issue and, yes, the identarian left was emphatic that parents shouldn’t be informed about things their kids learn or do in school regarding sexuality for the protection of kids. It turned a traditional Democratic advantage (education) into a Republican advantage and helped not a single minority child or adult.
And we can find plenty of other examples in education. A portion of the left has a big fondness for eliminating advanced placement tracks, SAT’s and other paths for academic excellent on vague equity/inclusion grounds even though such policies not only don’t help but actively hurt minority students.Report
Can you point be to a single person arguing that parents should not be able to know about what children are learning? Not a liberals of TikTok teacher who was swiftly corrected/punished by admins for saying something stupid, but people actually arguing that this should be a thing?
And SATs/AP/etc have been the topics of rigorous debate inside and outside of education circles for decades. The idea of eliminating them is in no way new, nor are the arguments for doing do.Report
This is an example of the four arguments used by bigots throughout history.
1 is to badly say the minority group is unequal.
2. Is to assert that science says they are unequal.
3. Is to spark a moral panic about the minority group, like Jewish bankers conspiring against the nation or teachers grooming children for sex.
4. Is to simply point to the popularity of bigotry as a fait accompli.
The thing about #3 is that sometimes people of good will can be duped by it, but only for a short time until they realize their error.
When people continue to indulge the lie it’s because it is what they want to be true.Report
From Volokh on the lawsuit I referenced below:
The complaint also details how state and county officials involved in discussions that led to the reforms voiced various negative stereotypes about Asian-American parents and students, including that they put too much emphasis on test preparation, and that having too many of them damages TJ’s “culture.” In one particularly egregious example, state legislator Mark Keam denounced the “unethical ways” Asian-American parents “push their kids into [TJ],” when those parents are “not even going to stay in America,” but instead are “using [TJ] to get into Ivy League schools and then go back to their home country.”
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/03/16/important-new-lawsuit-challenges-attempted-racial-balancing-at-prominent-selective-virginia-public-high-school/?amp
But yes, it’s always the parents who are racist in these little dust ups.Report
This, too, is a non sequitur, not only because it’s not really an example of left wing true believers, but also because I doubt most people care that much about such cases. I’m not saying they shouldn’t care, just that it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that’s gonna lose Democrats elections.Report
I’m not even talking about the merits of this case or that.
I’m objecting to the assertion that some bad behavior here or there is the driving cause of people voting Republican.
It isn’t.
To take your case for example.
A principled person can oppose the racist action, while still voting Democrat.
The decision to vote Republicans is a choice freely made independent of the case. The appeal to the case is just a fig leaf justification.Report
I don’t think it makes them vote GOP. It simply makes the Democrats less attractive.
Given that the vast majority of people do not share your opinion that every member of the GOP is “Evil” (i.e. all the swing voters), anything that impacts the strength of the appeal of DNC candidates makes GOP candidates more attractive.
PS This works both ways.Report
The weakness of authoritarianism is that it refuses to hide behind the veil.
Authoritarians can’t resist ripping off the mask and screaming out their name.
The way that Putin kills people in bizarre and almost comically obvious ways, or that Trump goes out of his way to brag about his crimes.
All of which has an effect of clarifying and making our choices very binary.
One party promises to end democracy as we know it and subject America to minority rule of religious zealots.
The other doesn’t.
No, not every voter feels this way.
Yet.
But more and more do, and soon the horror stories are going to begin filtering out of women jailed for suspicious miscarriages, desperate women dying horrific deaths from self induced abortions, parents of trans children arrested for child abuse.
The lib on titktok is going to be a fart in the hurricane.Report
As you often say, authoritarian regimes hold power by not upsetting the bulk of the population.Report
Abortion and contraception are more like homosexuality than racism, in that it is trivially easy for an authoritarian regime to suppress a racial minority.
But anyone can discover that their brother or sister is gay, and anyone can find themselves with a difficult decision to make about reproduction.
In the pre-Roe era, they got around this by the use of class where upper class people were free to have private gay clubs or private abortion services.
But in this era of the digital surveillance state erected as a result of the war on drugs and 9-11 security panic, even affluent people leave a digital footprint of their every movement and action.
And thanks to the novel technique of private citizens bounty hunter, there isn’t a friendly compliant town doctor who can be trusted to keep his mouth shut, or the county sheriff who knows who to prosecute and who to ignore.
So no woman is safe from a lynch mob of private bounty hunters scanning her online order for pregnancy tests or Google searches for misopristol, or ferreting out a hospital visit for a miscarriage of suspicious provenance.Report
Good, nothing to worry about, the GOP will implode any day now and the Dems will enjoy single party rule for decades.Report
That’s not my prognosis.
I think things will get worse, much worse before they get better.Report
I think both you and Chris have a critical and pretty big misunderstanding about why people vote for Democrats in the all important blue ‘burbs. They do it because Democrats have for decades been the party of good public services. So you deal with the high cost of living and the traffic but your kids get great opportunities by being in well funded, well run school systems. The ol’ ‘yea, taxes are high but it really is a nice place to live and have a family.’
This stuff represents an attack on all of that. Now, is it going to turn your soccer moms and corporate stiff dads into raging Fox News watchers with hard commitments to the GOP? No, not unless the GOP ever gets its head out of its own ass which I don’t see coming any time soon. But over time if you start undermining what voters put you in office to do it will change the landscape. This is just basic politics, and remember, a lot of these places spent decades voting for Youngkin-like Republicans. Even just not showing up like they have been lately could have major implications if the working class and minority vote is also fracturing.Report
The inability of local Democrats who hold office to deal with homelessness isn’t helping things.Report
Yeah, well, let me tell you about my solid blue state….
Years ago, a family member said that the state had some of the best roads in the country-well maintained, flowers and trees in the media, etc. It was true. Since she left 20 years ago, the roads are crap. Potholes everywhere. I’ve not see a road crew in my county in a decade. They are around because I occasionally see patched holes, but never any new resurfacing. It’s once of the highest taxed states in the union, crime is up, there are now guys begging for money at street corners in all the suburban counties, and the list goes on. But it’s a great place to live if you can afford 500K for a condo in a bedroom community. The state RELIABLY votes democratic with >70% Dems in office…..for decades. When is this alleged disgruntlement gonna take hold?Report
Virginia. Last election.
https://www.yahoo.com/video/mcauliffe-says-parents-shouldn-t-173500644.htmlReport
OK, that’s not at all what you said. You said people were saying the curriculum should be hidden from parents. That’s someone saying that parents shouldn’t get up dictate what schools teach. Granted, he vetoed a bill that would have sent out specific notifications, but this is different from hiding it, and the bill was a bit more insidious than just that.
Oddly, this is something centrists largely agreed with progressives on a couple decades ago when parents wanted to remove evolution from the curriculum, and add creationism in its place.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that parents should have no say in what their kids learn in school, and there are processes, in political and institutional, for parents to provide input and for them to more directly influence the curriculum, but curricula shouldn’t change based on the whims of parents. This seems obvious.Report
Notice how no one seems to want to allow parents to insert CRT into the curriculum.Report
“Without nutpicking, find a single example of X.”
Eh, you can find stuff like the ACLU opposing Curriculum Transparency bills and the like.
I think that opposition to Curriculum Transparency bills is not exactly the same thing of not being able to know what’s being taught, but it doesn’t look good and when Team Good is arguing against it, it looks a lot like being opposed to curriculum transparency (as opposed to merely being opposed to a stupid, stupid law).Report
Argument 4 again.
“I’m not saying this is bad, but bigoted people are looking at it and hoo boy it looks baaad!”
It “looks bad” only to people who really, really are wanting to justify a pre existing belief.
If there is a coherent argument to be made, it doesn’t need to hide behind what it “looks like”.Report
It “looks like” opposition to “Curriculum Transparency”.
You seem to understand this concept when you ask “How could someone be opposed to antifa?”
I am asking you to apply that simple, simple concept to Curriculum Transparency.Report
I don’t think anyone spreading lies about teachers grooming children for sex has any reason to be taken seriously, not ever about anything.Report
Then you shouldn’t have a care in the world.Report
Parents everywhere have the ability to learn every single thing their children are learning. That teachers shouldn’t have to post it all online for conservative groups and grifters like Rufo to comb through to spur outrage seems obvious to me, and I’m no way harms parents’ ability to access the information.
Not gonna engage you on this, or any cultural issue. I absolutely do not believe that you’re engaging in good faith (I believe both North and InMD are), or that you ever will, making these conversions pointless.Report
Sure. But if you want examples of someone teetering on the tightrope of “Can you point be to a single person arguing that parents should not be able to know about what children are learning?” and “teachers shouldn’t have to post it all online for conservative groups and grifters like Rufo to comb through to spur outrage”, I can find you a guy who said both of these things on the same day.
After that, you only need to find an example of a Liberals of TikTok teacher, even one who was swiftly corrected/punished by admins for saying something stupid!, to shift the debate prior to an election.
At that point, “but they’re saying something that is only technically true and they’re saying it in bad faith!” becomes an exceptionally principled position indeed and should expect to be rewarded the way that exceptionally principled positions typically are.Report
Upthread, you were claiming that none of the people complaining about DEI stuff know what’s actually in it. Here it seems like you’re opposed to making it easier for them to find out.
“People with an axe to grind could take stuff out of context and use it to spur outrage” is an equally valid argument against any kind of transparency. This is why cops don’t like people filming them.
And in point of fact, people are already taking stuff out of context and using it to spur outrage. If the materials were online for everyone to see, we would be able to see the context for the things Rufo posts. Is it your belief that this would make people more, rather than less, angry?Report
There is a lawsuit in Virginia right now because the local school board eliminated blind testing so they could racially gerrymander a public magnet school. They admitted in their texts intent to discriminate against Asians for reasons of racial equity. All of this is of course unrelated to ideas that expressly call for this sort of thing.
https://www.fairfaxtimes.com/articles/fairfax_county/federal-judge-rules-new-tj-admissions-process-is-racist/article_6a95cf10-9b23-11ec-b7d7-d3cf5863c4e0.htmlReport
If you start from the premise that gaps in outcomes are proof of privilege and oppression, then it follows that Asians and Jews are even more privileged than white gentiles. Antisemitic and anti-Asian leftists aren’t falling short of Anti-Racist (sic) ideals—they’re taking them to their logical conclusion.Report
Following the ideas to their natural and quite obvious conclusion is exactly right. But when you notice it suddenly you hear the beeping of construction equipment arriving to relocate the goal posts.Report
It’s hard to be a fighter when the media won’t report on your fighting. The reactionary rightists will obviously not do this but getting Democratic political efforts air play in regular media is also difficult.Report
Its also hard to fight when you don’t, actually fight. Take Kristen Sinema. She’s done zero, zilch for her party, or her state, much less the nation. But because she goes around making contrarian statements occasionally she’s viewed as both a contrarian for Democrats AND a “fighter.” She’s keeping the Dems from going too far or some such.
But she hasn’t been publicly disciplined by Schumer, and while some of the aligned PACs are making noise about primarying her, I doubt it will carry over to the next election when she will be up. democrats are viewed – I think rightly – as impotent wimps because they won’t scorch earth her like Republicans will do. That’s a problem of their own agency, not the media.Report
Ummm Sinema will and should be primaried and replaced. No one will mourn her. Schumer is using her to maintain his majority- as he should. Making an example of her would make us liberals have happy feelz for about thirty minutes and then cost us the majority whereupon Cocaine Mitch would shut down Bidens ability to place judges and staff federal agencies. I mean talk about a literal example of longing for symbolic stuff at the expense of material stuff.Report
Let’s cool it with the antisinemitism.Report
Well done. No hits on Google – looks like you’re the first to come up with it.Report
Should Cocaine Mitch take back the senate later this year all those will happen. One way to prevent that is for Democrats to stop kowtowing to the bullies.Report
What does that mean? In terms of action plans?Report
Trash the filibuster.
Pass the Women’s Health Protection Act
Pass a reinvigorated voting rights act
Take the Fight to Republicans on the campaign trail and show demonstrably how GOP’s policies will hurt regular Americans.Report
You’re going to get rid of the filibuster (which you don’t have the votes to do), to pass a bunch of laws that you don’t have the votes to pass, right before the GOP takes over the Senate?
That’s the plan?Report
Its a better play then the current rending of garments and lamentations . . . .Report
The GOP will never be able to get 60 votes for a national right to life. 50? IDK. That is a lot more doable.
Be real careful 50 votes for everything is what you want and an improvement.Report
We’re likely six months away from “trash the filibuster” changing to “filibuster the trash”, and vice versa.Report
Based on McConnell’s track record, he will ditch the filibuster the moment he believes it is in the way of securing conservative white minority rule. And then it will be too late to do anything that would stop him.
I’m weary of Democrats always fighting on their rear flank. AT some point you have to advance toward the enemy.Report
And what “one” vote could he take that will do that?
He’s been in the Senate for 37 years. He’s seen the minority party switch sides a dozen times or so.
He knows that past accomplishments don’t create future majorities. That’s why he’s been focused on judges for so long, it’s a far more stable and assured way to have influence.Report
So throw away six+ months of appointments, judges et all for *checks notes* nothing except feels and your foundationless belief that being more assertive will somehow cause the Dems to win in November? I don’t think you’ve thought this through Philip.Report
When Harry Reid decided to nuke the filibuster for Obama judicial appointments, I said it was a bad tactical move on his part. Because Republicans would weaponize it. Turns out I was right. That’s why Merrick Garland is a tepid attorney general and not a Supreme Court Justice.
More importantly however, the weaponization of the filibuster is something that lazy, scared Democrats in the Senate can hide behind. “Oh look, we ignored state level races for 20 years, lost the ability to generate majorities in the Senate, and so now, oh well, we can’t do anything to help Americans unless we beg the Republicans – and even then that pesky filibuster means they don’t have to help us, much less their constituents. So lets go right on doing the thing that keeps us from accomplishing anything.”
We are running out of choices and chances North. Republicans have made it clear that when they are in power they will do as they please. They don’t care about the rules or decorum or precedent.
Why should we if we actually want to save democracy?Report
For me, The Simpsons ended around the “Tomacco” episode. What an awful season that was.
I understand it kept going on, though. There was a recent episode called “Days Of Future Future” that had this exchange between an adult Bart and an adult Nelson:
Nelson: Chear up, Bart. You work with dinosaurs!
Bart: Oh, I miss my kids.
Nelson: Come on, you’re free and sleazy! I know some adult dancers that work with my mom!
Bart: Isn’t your mom eighty-seven?
Nelson: With social security a thing of the past, she can’t afford to retire.
Bart: I don’t know how that happened in a senate with ninety-nine Democrats.
Nelson: That one Republican is great at getting his way!Report
I thought it was republicans who had no agency?Report
both groups have agency. Both are using it differently. Democrats are using it poorly because they want to keep acting and fighting under rules that Republicans abandoned years ago.Report
So embrace the politicians fallacy? Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this?
I have outlined the real, absolutely will happen and material consequences of Reid drumming Sinema out of the party right now. You can offer no concrete assured benefits from this action to the party or to our ideology for doing this that would be worth suffering those six+ months of guaranteed paralysis and lost appointments.
It’s incoherent. I don’t disagree with it because I’m not as left wing as you are (though I’m not). Even if I agreed with you on every element of political philosophy on the left/right spectrum I’d still disagree with you on this particular strategy because it’s, frankly, stupid. Give up something for nothing? Thank goodness Reid isn’t doing this- it’d be political malpractice.Report
Harry Reid is recently dead, so he’s not doing anything. Chuck Schumer is not doing a lot of things.
If the election goes as predicted – with Dems loosing the House and Senate since its a midterm and we can’t break that cycle we loose those things anyway. And we won’t get them back. Democrats have agency right now. Failing to use that agency guarantees further assaults on our democracy by the GOP. Using that agency as I suggest may or may not guarantee it. But it would be something. Given the number of legislative days left on the calendar before the general we are fast running out of time.
And now that I’ve spent a lot of pixels laying down my markers, and defending them, what’s your idea? What benefit do democrats get from plodding along as they have?Report
I sit corrected on ol’ Reid, thanks.
If I were Schumer and Pelosi I’d certainly want to be taking some tough calls. Specifically those tough calls would be actually stripping all the liberal wish list items (whoever rolled out the idea of Biden being transformative with 50 Senate votes should be smothered in a closet) out of the various past efforts and passing whatever Manchin is actually willing to support (and nailing him down on what exactly that is isn’t an easy task either, alas). The actual voting leftists congress folks have been extremely sensible and Pelosi should be bringing her heel down hard on the trouble making corporate moderates in her caucus hard. They aren’t Manchin- they’re neither irreplaceable nor are they integral to the current house majority.
As for Manchin and Sinema. They are, alas, inviolable in our current state of affairs. Manchin is genuinely the best we can hope to get from WV and Schumer should work with him to get what he will support. Sinema is obviously bought out at this point and needs to be simply endured while plans are laid down for her to be primaried out and never, ever, get Democratic support for any office anywhere ever again. Sinema, I note, is originally from the Green Party.
Your own preferred strategy of drumming Sinema (and maybe also Manchin?) out of the party now and immediately setting in stone our legislative paralysis and loss of ability to nominate judges or appoint administrative positions in a timely manner would net the party and our idealists absolutely nothing and would demonstrate an astonishing depth of strategic idiocy to anyone watching. Small wonder Schumer doesn’t seem to being doing anything.
Cutting off our noses collectively would also be doing something. It’s not odd that we’re not leaping to do so.Report
I also think that Joe Manchin really disproves the Democratic Party is rejected by Red America because they aren’t perceived as fighters. Joe Manchin is the only Democratic politician that could be elected in West Virginia and he is literally running as a sort of right-leaning neo-liberal rather than a Sanders style fighter. In fact a Sanders style fighter from the DSA went down in flames in West Virginia.Report
Is Sanders, or a Sanders style DSA candidate a “fighter” though? Is Manchin? He’s certainly a spoiler – and see my note about Sinema above. If Democrats were fighters then Build Back Better would have been broken up into its component parts and been vot-o-ramaed in the Senate.
But Democrats aren’t fighters. They aren’t brash, they refuse to trash norms that no longer suit them. They aren’t unified in messaging. They won’t trash the members of the other party who are doing unethical and or illegal things. All of which Republicans do and do routinely.Report
What does being a fighter mean in this case beyond invoking magical green lantern powers that don’t exist?Report
People don’t want to admit the truth when it is depressing. Admitting that Joe Manchin is the probably the last Democratic pol that can win in West Virginia means compromise and not getting the DSA unicorn and pony wishlist. But green lantern wish thinking allows leftists to do what they really want; hate Democrats more than Republicans. Republicans might send them to Dachau but voting Democratic means accepting compromise and incremental change. How boring. How adult.Report
“Who gets to declare what is self-indulgent and why?”
“Republicans might send them to Dachau”
Report
Slow incremental progress has gotten us a roll back of the Voting Rights Act.
Slow incremental progress is about to get us the abrogation of Roe – and substantive due process upon which it and all the other late 20th century rights victories were built.
Slow incremental progress has gotten us Mitch McConnell who is now on record that he is willing to both tank every judicial appointment Biden might make in the next two years, further cementing Republican control of the judiciary.
Slow incremental progress has gotten us GOP control of 26 state governors and 24 state legislatures – who have then proceeded to eviscerate rights at the state level.
I vote for democrats – including Biden, Hillary, Obama and even Bill – because I have no choice. Where the DSA chooses to contend something other then the Presidency it doesn’t make inroads – and I’ve only been able to vote for a DSA candidate once for anything below that level.
We are at war Saul. Slow incremental progress won’t stop that war.Report
You really think every Senator supports building some bridge to nowhere in State X?
And without that bridge, you don’t have the vote from State X that you need for your other projects.Report
We got bipartisan support for the Infrastructure bill already. Even Republicans who voted against it are happy to crow about its benefit their states.
BBB has things that can get majority and maybe even 60 vote support. Manchin essentially said so. Call his bluff (or so a great many people here told for months and months)Report
I think the current effort is aimed at getting him to write the bill.
IDK what you do about what’s-her-name. Maybe have her work with him. Maybe hope she’ll sign off on what he does.
The good news is this approach understands he’s as far to the Left as his area will elect (i.e. not very far), so there’s at least some political realism in there.
The bad news is the bulk of that list of things you want Team Blue to fight for won’t be in what he writes.Report
we are 66 days into a 171 day legislative calendar. If the idea was for him to write something, we’d see it by now.Report
Name people who do what yiu are describing above who are actually connected to the Democratic Party as opposed to being nutpicked randos from the internet. Not even the much dreaded squad is like this. It is such a cartoon that it surprising you are not Republican.Report
This is an addendum to the discussion above on Asian-Americans in the current American racial discourse. The main problem is that the conflict between Blacks and Whites, and to a lesser extent Native Americans and Hispanics against Whites in the West, has so overwhelmed everything that Asians really don’t fit well into this conflict. The temptation on both the Left and the Right is to recruit them as foot soldiers but not care if they have any own goals as a group.
So the Intersectional Left might appeal to them as people of color but expects them to basically go along with their vision and give up their belief in entrance exams and public decorum. Basically how Jews were seen, persecuted enough to appeal to but white enough not to need special justice but on a bigger scale. The Right tries to use them as a wedge issue against Affirmative Action and the welfare state but wants them to keep quiet about anti-Asian racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia.Report
There may be some truth to this in a broader national/historical context but it really has nothing to do with the situation in Northern Virginia which is what that exchange is about. The Republicans have been in complete retreat there for 20 years. The only thing giving them any kind of life is the inability of some Democrats to distinguish between obscure academic theories and reality-based world their constituents inhabit.Report
You might see this as an obscure academic theory that doesn’t have anything to do with the reality based world but the advocates believes that a big corrective is necessary to fix the systematic racism against African-Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics in the United States. If Asian-Americans end up on the receiving end than so be it. Entrance exam testing and special schools are increasing not popular among many liberals and they want them gone.Report
If the core problem is culture, and given that it seems to follow culture around but not skin color (immigrants do great), then the advocates are trying to fix the wrong problem.
Then the super special schools will not be special, and parents will create new super special schools.Report
If I’m in the group getting sh*t on to fix a problem not of my making, without being asked if I want to get sh*t on, then I’m probably going to support the side that isn’t sh*tting on me. This kind of stuff can’t come down from on high.Report
IDK. Given that our boarders aren’t to any Asian countries, Asian immigrants might be fine with “control the boarder” laws and such.Report
The law, working exactly as intended:
In Texas, abortion laws inhibit care for miscarriages
One Texas law passed last year lists several medications as abortion-inducing drugs and largely bars their use for abortion after the seventh week of pregnancy. But two of those drugs, misoprostol and mifepristone, are the only drugs recommended in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guidelines for treating a patient after an early pregnancy loss.
The other miscarriage treatment is a procedure described as surgical uterine evacuation to remove the pregnancy tissue — the same approach as for an abortion.
“The challenge is that the treatment for an abortion and the treatment for a miscarriage are exactly the same,” said Dr. Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in early pregnancy loss.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/10/1097734167/in-texas-abortion-laws-inhibit-care-for-miscarriages
I say “working as intended” because the law has cast a pall of fear and uncertainty over the entire field of women’s reproductive health.
Technically, a physician CAN administer miscarriage treatment and stay within the law.
But also technically, the doctor can face a threat of lawsuit, or arrest and loss of their practice just as easily.
Which is the intent of authoritarian regimes, to create the specter of punishment which is vague enough to force people to self-police out of fear.Report
What was I saying about authoritarians being incapable of resisting the urge to rip the mask off and scream the qiet parts loud?
Gibson: “Make more babies” because in “[t]wenty-five years … the majority of the population is Hispanic”
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-nation/gibson-make-more-babies-because-twenty-five-years-majority-population-hispanicReport
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/12/politics/democrats-abortion-rights-2022-midterms/index.htmlReport
I remember some feminists and even mainstream liberals writing many articles in the Aughts about how unprepared liberals and those who believe in reproductive justice more generally were for this, because the way the pro-forced pregnancy movement was laying the ground work, from churches to court appointments, for the overturn of Roe was unmistakable even 20 years ago, and the time to prevent that overturn from being inevitable probably passed sometime in the Aughts as well. Sure, it might have been 4 years from now, or 8 years from now, but the reproductive justice movement’s lack of any real urgency (which has structural as well as political causes that someone could easily write a book or two on) meant that it was going to happen sooner or later.Report
And all those relying on substantive due process to secure other rights also need to get moving. They will most surly be next.Report
Which, despite all the sub-issues discussed, and the other criticisms made, is really the point of what I wrote. That is the need to mobilize voters, including the moderates and Normies, to get legislatures to draw those lines that the courts can no longer be relied upon to uphold.Report
That may well have been what you intended, but it’s not what you wrote.Report
Heh, then I guess I failed. But I do sincerely hope that a better writer than me can convince the vanguards of the progressive movement that in politics its better to win as sinners than lose as saints.Report
The vanguards of the progressive movement would love to win as sinners. Unfortunately, we don’t see a lot of fighting of battles. Even here the Democrats as a moderate liberal political party, are not yet fighting. They have spent 50 years ceding the battle field with concession after concession believing it would somehow stave off this day enough for the winds to simply blow in their favor. That we are here is a strong indication that such a strategy has failed.Report
The forced pregnancy movement shows you don’t need the moderates and normies to radically alter the political landscape on this issue. There is nothing moderate or normal about that movement: it is an openly, and unapologetically radical one. What’s more, it’s really difficult to motivate anyone with moderate ideas. Part of the problem with the reproductive justice movement is that it’s spent much of the last 50 years trying to be moderate, using slogans like “Safe, legal, and rare,” to bring in squishy libs and even moderate cons, and the result is that it’s gotten them here.
I suspect what you’ll see is an increasing radicalization of the reproductive justice movement, as it seeks more and more energy behind mobilization. Perhaps you’ll also see an increasing radicalization of progressive/left liberal politics as a result, just as the radical pro-life movement within the Evangelical right helped to radicalize them. At least a lefty can dream, right?
And of course, for many years, we were told that the Christian right didn’t represent most of American conservatives, or control the Republican party, until it became impossible to deny that it did.Report
I see the fight as asymmetric and believe it’s folly to look at the right for a blueprint. Ukraine isn’t fighting Russia the way Russia wants to fight and the Viet Cong didn’t fight us the way we wanted to fight them.
I also think it’s folly to try to win by fighting the last war. Nothing that’s happened in the last 50 years on the pro-choice side means anything because the issue was decided in a way that wasn’t democratic or via partisan politics.
Now it’s going to be added back to the bundles on offer in the two party system. The way to secure these rights is going to be to get people to pick the bundle that includes them and not the bundle that doesn’t/restricts them. Maybe you guys foresee a new crop of single issue voters that’s going to turn the balance in the critical spaces on the margins where things in our system are won and lost. I think those people are probably already accounted for. Hence my conclusion that you need the bundle that includes these rights to make sense, and be agreeable enough to people for whom they are not a priority, or who have some conflicted feelings about the subject.
I suppose time will tell which of us is right.Report
I don’t think this is merely fighting the last war. It’s fighting almost every war in history. That is, moderates almost never accomplish anything, and when they do, it’s almost always by pulling themselves up by radicals’ bootstraps. In this country, this is true of the gay rights movement (where, amusingly, it was the moderates who won the last victory, gay marriage, standing on the backs of decades of radicals), the women’s movement of the 70s, the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, the labor movement of the first decades of the 20th century, the women’s suffrage movement, going all the way back at least the abolition movement right up through the Civil War and the constitutional amendments it produced.
Obviously, moderates have more votes than radicals in a conservative country like this one, but the only way you get them to vote for big things is by dragging them to that point, kicking and screaming if necessary (as was the case on gay rights, and women’s rights, and civil rights, etc.).Report
I keep posting that same thing from the Guttmacher Institute showing that about 1/3 of states and population have enacted contingent legislation guaranteeing abortion, 1/3 banning abortion, and 1/3 in the middle with some restrictions. I don’t get the unpreparedness argument.Report
Chris’s comment above pretty much sums it up.Report
I’m not getting what a prepared movement would do. Lobbying? The states more likely to support either side already have laws in place to do so.Report
There are a lot of reasons, I think (like I said, someone could write a book, or two), but the one that always irks me is the increased non-profitization of pretty much all liberal advocacy, but reproductive justice in particular. Don’t get me wrong, many of the abortion-related non-profits do amazing work on the ground, and the people who work for them (either as paid staff or volunteers) are some of the most amazing people I’ve me. However, new groups, with different structures, are going to have to spring up to tackle the momentous challenges facing reproductive justice right now, and that’s going to take some time (though it has already begun, as anyone who’s been to a rally in the last week or so can tell you).Report
Good news!
Please do not undermine the Democratic party by concern trolling them on this gameplan.Report
D’s- decision instead of choice.
R’s- groomer, CRT is destroying our kids, teachers are pedo’s, LBGTQ are pedo’s.
That all checks out.Report
I have even better news!
It looks like 78% of the population sees the quality of public schools as a very big problem or a moderately big problem.
As Democrats are the party of Education, they should really start playing this up!
Report
Even better news the R’s in Texas have new bill that skewers the good ol 1st A even more. No not the CRT assault on free speech but this is a new one. And all those cool trigger laws should out law abortion in a bunch of states but that is old news. At least a couple states will try to prevent women from leaving state.
Is D messaging often weak ass. That is old news but nobody here is fixing that. Yammering about messaging is a nifty to not talk about substance. It’s not like every party doesn’t do some sort of messaging memo like this with differences in quality.Report
What’s the bill?Report
Brief description here. The 1stA problems should be obvious just from this.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/court-revives-texas-social-media-law-against-banning-users-views-2022-05-11/
Tweets from Ken White talking about the problems with it.
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1524535770425401344Report
As a bonus
https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1524389137427668993
yearbooks in FL will be censored if they have The Icky Gay in them.
And Missouri censoring the speech of pharmacists
https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/1524782858602172417
But to be fair Dem messaging often sux so whatevs.Report
Betty Cracker over at Balloon Juice had a good post about how fundamentalists lose the ability to speak to ordinary people.
Her example was of a Right To Life guy condescending to explain how magnanimous they were in “allowing” doctors to, in some cases, let the mother live and fetus die.
A complete and total lack of self awareness but we are going to hear a lot more of that going forward.
For every Chris Rufo insisting they only want sensible DEI there is a Mom for Liberty helpfully explaining that no, they really just hate gays.Report
Seems not.
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2022/05/11/dont-be-afraid-to-speak-up-students-claim-victory-in-battle-over-yearbook-photos/Report
This one? https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/html/HB00020F.htm
Little bit of reinterpretation of the term common carrier being done here. Read on for more hilarity.Report
Everybody thinks education is a problem, then rates their school as a good or excellent.Report
That. It amazes me that people can’t look up stats and check things out.
You end up in an excellent school by spending hours researching and then figuring out where to move.Report
The critical question is whether James Carville was consulted.Report
Did you see Paul Begala on Maher the other day?
This isn’t about abortion (student loan repayments) but he touches on Modern Democratic Messaging.
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They’re going to have to change the name of their caucus.Report
You gotta admit: “Pro-Decision” is not obviously bad.Report
Absolutely. Right up there with the Problem Solvers who solve no problems.Report
I never understood the coat hanger as a pro-choice symbol. Once you acknowledge the brutality of the act, the tool doesn’t much matter.Report
You weren’t the intended audience.Report
If you don’t understand the meaning of coat hanger, you don’t understand the issue of abortion at all.Report
The double speak on “conscience clause protections” will resonate very poorly among normies.
Ironically… supporting conscience clause protections by Team Blue would be the smart thing to do.Report
If you thought “bake the cake” polled poorly, wait until you hear the new version.Report
Were it not so ghastly, I’d game out how badly this will go.Report
Little did the Dems know how badly the RFRA would come back to haunt them. Bringing religion into the law, either for good or ill, has no business in a secular republic.Report
I think this conscience issue crosses over into secular concerns as well… there are a lot of secular people who do not want to participate in abortion either.Report
As is their right. What people are looking for, however, is a choice without consequence. Don’t want to participate in abortion? Don’t have one, or work in a place that provides them.
Religious exemptions are being used as a get out of jail free card.Report
It’s going to cut both ways but I think if played correctly it leads to a place where the vast, vast majority of abortion remains legal. My understanding, and someone can correct me if I’m wrong, is that after around the 16 week mark it becomes difficult to find a doctor who will perform a truly elective abortion (i.e. no current or looming medical crisis). They of course exist but it seems that is where you start running into a blurry and unstated but real line around medical ethics.
That’s important because those ethics are the framework to winning this on policy. It also just happens to be where the vast majority of voters are and a significant majority of abortions happen well before that point. I can’t imagine that outcome being considered a win for the pro-life movement but the pro-choice side can’t shy away from making the case in those sorts of terms if, as seems likely, the courts are no longer going to draw the line.Report
13 states already have trigger laws that say there will be no abortion post Roe, though they do mostly preserve the rape, incest and saving the mother’s life opt outs. Mostly. Interestingly Mississippi has both.
An equal number of others have laws with some restrictions, but I suspect they will begin revisiting those laws under deep pressure for the pro-forced birth movement.
All of which means its going to be tough to get back to a national standard of mostly OK before 13-16 weeks, and increasingly NOT ok after.Report
I guess what I’m pointing out is that Conscience Clauses are already the law, here’s a link to HHS.gov summary.
So specifically ‘targeting’ conscience clauses as ‘denial of service’ is a particularly aggressive stance that I’m quite certain will not be well received by normies. This won’t be seen as ‘choices without consequences’ but as ‘consequences without choices’.
In so far as Team Blue’s goal is elective abortion in first trimester – *expanding* conscience clauses would be a better approach. But, failing that, silence on existing conscience clauses should be the minimum stance. Actively targeting conscience clauses? That’s just part of the tone-deaf maximalist position that only exists for activists and Dem Staffers.
As I say, mostly I’m surprised that this is even a ‘thing’ at all in the talking points.Report
“I can’t, in good conscience, approve this business license for a gun store.”Report
(holds hand up to earpiece)Report
As much as I dislike conscious clauses, there’s a difference between a conscious clause for a private individual and one for a government official performing a government function (like issuing a business license).
Of course, IMHO, a conscious clause for a private individual should be “don’t work in a job that conflicts with your concious in some way”.Report
Agreed, and the reason for this distinction is that government services are generally monopolies.
There often aren’t 5 other officials to take the place of the objector which means that the objection becomes a defacto ban.
Which is frequently the case with abortion. If a large Catholic owned hospital chain refuses to provide service, frequently a patient is left without readily accessible recourse.
And for that matter, why does a pro-choice doctor working for the Catholic hospital not enjoy freedom of conscience to perform an abortion if he wants?Report
Because of who signs the paycheck, which is why this needs to be approached thoughtfully. The way healthcare works in this country involves the government as the biggest payer and thereby de facto standard setter but with supply primarily handled by private, NPO, and religious organizations.
Does this make sense as a system? Maybe not but the last thing anyone should want is to constrict service supply by forcing stands on this or that. It’s far from clear to me who would actually win.
So It isn’t the easy call like the county clerk who won’t issue the marriage license to a gay couple. In that case the obvious answer is find a new job. The answer for the hypothetical doctor is probably also find a new job, or be prepared to lose yours if you violate the rules of your employer.Report
How much control an employer has over their employees conscience is a heavily litigated issue, and in no way settled.
“I cannot in good conscience allow my employees to do X” has a lot of different answers depending on what X is.Report
It will be worse. This activity will be legal in some states.
Worse, those states will actively be passing laws to prevent other states from enforcing their laws.
So mail order pill businesses that are illegal in one state and legal in another.Report
conscious clauses
conscious clause
conscious clause
conflicts with your concious
i am going to find out where you live and go there and fart on your lunchReport
“don’t work in a job that conflicts with your concious in some way”
I think this is sort of at the heart of the issue though – especially for medical professionals.
These are people who are specifically choosing to work in a job that *aligns* with their conscience – abortion is the thing that doesn’t align.
Which means that legal abortion can only ethically be voluntary by practitioners.Report
I guess that works if you are signing your own paychecks. I don’t get to pick and choose what parts of my job I’ll do.Report
I haven’t heard about too many OB/GYN doctors who are forced to perform abortions, or nurses who are forced to participate in those procedures. This usually comes down to pharmacists who work for pharmacies that carry certain drugs that the pharmacist objects to. Which is fine, then go work for a pharmacy that doesn’t carry those drugs, or start your own.
Should a vegan be allowed to get a job at McDonald’s and demand that they only be required to take orders for and serve salads and french fries?
If you are an employee, you do what legal tasks are assigned to you, or you find a new job.Report
I see… you’re going to make me game this out. Ok.
* Dude, just bake the damn cake
* Dude, just stamp the damn paper
* Dude, just abort the damn baby
First two you’ve got normies nodding along (unknowingly) performing complex first/second order ethical material cooperation calculations in their heads.
Third one? Whoah, those people over there.. that’s just crazy. Should work in D+15 districts, though.Report
A doctor saying “I don’t perform abortions but I will refer you to one who does” seems like a pretty reasonable compromise.
A hospital chain refusing to allow any of its doctors to do so seems like an unreasonable infringement on liberty.Report
And the pharmacist in a one-drugstore town who refuses to issue that drug?Report
I don’t have an easy answer to this and no one else does either.
There isn’t any government requirement that compels a pharmacist operate there at all.
But we do compel him to provide service equally to all races and creeds and orientations even if that violates his conscience.
“Conscience” is just a secular form of “religious” which is to say that there is a long history of courts determining which religious practices are genuine and which are spurious.Report
That at least has been mostly addressed by mail order pharmacies. It will also be the other interesting factor in how effective state bans turn out to be. I don’t see why all the usual problems with enforcing prohibition wouldn’t apply.Report
And the pharmacist in a one-drugstore town who refuses to issue that drug?
Is this a drug that you or I would be arrested if we were selling it out of our garage?
If so, the fact that a license is required to sell this product is part of the problem. If you accept the license to sell a particular drug and then refuse to sell it, that’s not a big deal if I can sell it.
If I try to sell it but then get arrested? We’ve got a problem.Report
This goes back to my earlier comment about what a “prepared” pro-choice movement would be doing. The states are divided third/third/third, public opinion isn’t overwhelming for any particular position in the more neutral states, so the pro-choicers should have been prepared to do what? If the plan is to fight everywhere on everything, including conscience clauses, I can’t imagine what the goal is.Report
I’m no fan of conscience clauses, but you’re right on this. The pro-choice stance is like going all in on every hold ’em hand. Just like pro-life zealots (except they’re holding pocket aces).Report
Basically Abortion is an Identity issue for the parties; there won’t be any ‘discussion’ or attempt to navigate some sort of policy that grapples with all the issues.
We’re just going to run the ship aground somewhere, and wherever that is will be what it is.Report
In the first Hellraiser movie, Pinhead understood that most people didn’t want an eternity of sadistic sexual mutilation. That’s what we can call the “old-school” Democratic position. These days, he couldn’t win a primary.Report
Oh, I know they’re already the law, and I know they’re here to stay. The whole reason they exist, though, is to provide cover when one’s job description requires performance of a duty that runs afoul on one’s beliefs. Carving this stuff out is, was, and ever shall be fodder for lawsuits, when all it should really entail is looking for another job.
I’m not writing about anyone’s stance on abortion. No one’s mind is going to be changed, no matter what the Pro-Choice/Decision Caucus calls itself or says. I’m writing about the greater polity.Report
The basic battle lines of abortion haven’t changed much since 1973.
About two thirds of Americans support choice int he first trimester, and that number drops to a minority at the third.
In 50 years of vicious fighting, almost no minds have been changed, no side has made an argument to persuade the other.
So all the skirmishes over this language or that, this buzzword or that slogan are largely just sniping along the trenches.
What has shifted dramatically, is the hardball takeover of institutions like the Republican Party and the courts.
They have learned that you don’t need to persuade if you can coerce.Report
Aren’t you one of the people who frequently talks about the Southern Baptists not opposing Roe at first? That’s got to constitute a shift, right? And don’t rule out the impact of 3d/4d ultrasound, one person at a time.
Also, you’ve got to be fair and admit that the Democratic Party has seen a “hardcore takeover” on the issue as well. And the courts, if there’s been a takeover, it’s been at take-back from progressive activism. None of these statements are ideological either, they’re just factual.Report
The demographics of support have changed, but the quantities haven’t.
What does “hardcore” mean with respect to abortion supporters?
If “hardcore” for opponents means earlier and earlier cutoffs and fewer and fewer exceptions, how has the pro-choice side grown more extreme?
And no one should ever mention the word “activism” ever again without fear of being laughed at.Report
IANAL, and I haven’t read the Alito draft, but I’m pretty sure it states clearly why the original ruling was activist.
As for “hardcore”, I figured you were just using the term for dramatic effect. I still do. But partial birth abortion, the switch from the “life of the mother” to “health of the mother”, the apparent approaching feud about conscience clauses, those sound hardcore. Also, you know, shouting your abortion wouldn’t have been a thing a generation ago. Also, the way the Democrats drove out the pro-lifers, that’s pretty hardcore. And actually, just staying in the same place as the science passes you by (greater understanding of fetal development) can make a person more hardcore.
As for the quantities, it’s well-established that the polling results on this issue vary by the question. If Roe is off the table, and people are asked more concrete questions, the support for particular things should drop.Report
Roe was an a** pull.
The Constitution says X during the first trimester, Y during the second, and Z afterwards? Really?
Let me guess, that just happens to line up with the beliefs of the 7 signers?
What the Pro-lifers have done is less than what happened originally.
If Roe had said something like “the gov can’t interfere at all because if the fetus is human then, because of the 14th AM, humans can’t do this to each other” then it would line up with everything else we do with medical ethics and the Constitution.
It would have been a good ruling, instead of “what the law should say”.Report
I’d think it’ll be successful. People won’t notice it. I dunno, denial of care, probably something bigoted, I hadn’t heard about it but whatever.
The two on that list that I don’t think will work are “safe, legal, and accessible” (for anyone over 30), and “criminalizing healthcare” (when people realize what aspect of “healthcare” is under discussion. “Decision” can’t be used everywhere that “choice” currently is, but they can introduce it and it’ll be fine, and “unexpected” pregnancy should be successful for them, because “want” has a hint of selfishness about it.Report
My guess is that it’s not “replace pro-choice with pro-decision”, it’s about discussing the difficult decision a woman has to make regarding abortion rather than the choice.
Choice implies an act given little thought (sprite vs 7up), where as a decision has weight to it.Report
I think it sounds like dumb corporate speak to skirt around the actual point. In fairness I think pretty much everything sounds like that these days.Report
Of course it’s dumb corporate speak, I’m amazed it didn’t include paradigm or synergy.Report
My favorite lately has been use of the word ‘socialize’ to mean ‘explain’ or really ‘market.’Report
We need to realize our profit and socialize our losses!Report