A Cautionary Tale

Donald Trump and Joe Biden wait to exit the east front steps for the departure ceremony during the 58th Presidential Inauguration in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. (DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos)

I’ve mentioned before that I like podcasts. I do a lot of walking and running, and I often listen to various podcasts at the same time.

One of my favorites is “Cautionary Tales,” a narrative podcast by Tim Harford. I can best describe “Cautionary Tales” by likening it to the shows that dissect place crashes. The podcast doesn’t always deal with plane crashes, but Harford, a master storyteller, usually relates the tale of something gone terribly wrong. The stories often include a surprising twist and a lesson about life.

I’m not nearly as good a storyteller as Tim Harford, but I do have a cautionary tale.

Abortion became legal in 1973 and a pro-life movement began seeking to overturn the Supreme Court precedent that struck down state anti-abortion laws.

They had some success. New technologies showed life within the womb in ways that had not been seen previously. Over the years, the share of Americans considering themselves pro-life rose from about a third to half the country. The number of abortions was in a long-term decline for almost 30 years. There was a pretty strong argument that pro-life was winning the argument by winning hearts and minds.

Then came Donald Trump.

To be fair, what happened next wasn’t all Trump’s fault. The conservative movement had been trying to appoint constructionist judges to the Supreme Court for decades and even many on the left – Ruth Bader Ginsburg among them – agreed that Roe v. Wade was bad law. The new conservative justices overturned Roe. Overnight, states were granted the authority to ban abortion.

And there was a backlash. Since the Dobbs decision was handed down, there have been seven state referendums on abortion questions and the pro-life side lost every one of them. There is also evidence that, rather than the decision being “baked into the cake” as many pundits had argued, abortion was a deciding issue in the 2022 midterms in which the expected red wave was blunted.

My theory is that a lot of pro-lifers weren’t really pro-life when the chips were down. It was easy to oppose abortion when everybody knew that the Supreme Court would block any law limiting abortion that state legislatures passed. In 2022, that changed and suddenly people had to live with the consequences of their legislation.

Ironically, that’s a lot like what happened in 1973. The court ruling short-circuited the process of working out a national consensus on abortion. The same thing happened again in 2022. The same forces that sparked the growth of the pro-life movement have now awoken and invigorated the pro-choice movement.

Now let me take a moment to say I’m personally pro-life. I’ve been opposed to abortion ever since I first heard that it existed in the early 1980s. The very idea seemed inconceivable.

But the country is not where I’m at. There was a sharp jump in pro-choice and a corresponding decline in pro-life identification that tracks closely with the composition of the new Supreme Court and the Dobbs decision. At about the same time, midway through Donald Trump’s presidency, that long-term abortion decline reversed and started trending upward.

Now, the Republican Party has removed the longstanding plank from its platform that had called for a national abortion ban, and the party’s nominee has pledged to be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” Of course, Donald Trump sometimes changes policy positions like he changes his suit so his actual beliefs and goals if he is returned to office are anybody’s guess.

It’s telling that he said that he plans to vote to overturn Florida’s strict abortion law when it goes before the voters in November. Trump reversed himself pretty quickly amid the Republican backlash, but who knows what he will do in the privacy of a voting booth?

But the truth is that this would probably have happened even without Trump. Any Republican president would have appointed similar (or possibly even the same) justices to the Supreme Court. Roe was destined to fall. It was just a matter of time.

There are a few lessons within this cautionary tale. One big one is that you can’t impose an unpopular rule on the country without creating a backlash. Big social changes need to work their way up from the grassroots.

Most Americans aren’t purely pro-life or pro-choice, instead favoring legal abortion with restrictions. Left to their own devices, the states might well have arrived at compromises that allowed early abortion but outlawed the practice at later stages. That’s where most Americans are.

Maybe we would have found a consensus on abortion, but we’ll never know. As it is, Roe is dead and a popular Christian Nationalist account on the platform formerly known as Twitter still asks, “Since Roe was overturned why hasn’t a single Republican governor banned abortion in their state?”

It’s a fair question with an easy answer: Republicans don’t want to ban abortion. It would be political suicide.

A second lesson is that you have to have a plan for victory. It took half a century to reverse Roe and Republicans still became the proverbial dog that caught the car. The Republicans want to press the attack in order to keep the pro-life base engaged but doing so also turns off general election voters and keeps the pro-choice opposition engaged. It’s a trap of their own making. The pro-life movement’s greatest victory has become its undoing.

This is the mix that has led Donald Trump, the heir apparent to the pro-life movement, to proclaim, “I’m very strong on women’s reproductive rights.”

The caution here is that a principled movement needs principled leaders who are capable of communicating their party’s vision and winning over the opposition. Donald Trump has not been that leader for the pro-life movement, perhaps because he doesn’t believe in its principles himself. Trump’s participation in the pro-life cause was transactional and he is ready to abandon it now that it is politically inconvenient.

It is easy to ridicule the Republicans for being out of step with the majority of Americans, but it wasn’t so long ago that Democrats were in the same boat. The Democrats forced their vision of healthcare reform on the country and paid for it with a string of electoral losses.

In the end, there are two ways to advance your agenda in politics. One way is to win people over and form a majority. The other way is to force your faction’s will on the rest of the country from the top down. And the Christian Nationalists want to impose a lot more on the country than just an abortion ban.

The problem here is that if your faction is a minority – and MAGA and Christian Nationalists are a minority – when the majority gets tired of being dictated to, those doing the dictating have to either allow their power to wane or get violent. I think that’s why that same Christian Nationalist account tweeted a message a few weeks ago that said, “Christians must learn to hate.”

If you think that’s a very unchristian thing to say, you’d be right. Jesus said that the greatest commandments boiled down to love God and love people.

When a minority is determined to impose its will on the majority, sooner or later violence is necessary and violence is easier when people are taught to hate. It’s usually easier to teach people to hate than it is to build a consensus. Hate comes naturally to us. At some point, we are ready to kill in the name of God and the cause of life

And that’s the cautionary tale.