I have more pictures and thoughts about the spring garden…but they will have to wait. Today, alas, we must talk about politics. Since you are looking at the internet, you almost undoubtedly know by now that somebody at the Supreme Court leaked the draft of Samuel Alito’s high-handed opinion striking down Roe vs. Wade. It is a real document. Perhaps the final language will change somewhat, but unless everything changes immediately in some crazy way, abortions will be illegal or effectively illegal in red states by the end of June. It is surprising, but it is also unsurprising (since progressives and moderates have been watching Republicans strategically building towards this outcome for decades).
So far, I have read all sorts of opinions about what this means to the nation, to women, to Republicans, to Democrats, to the legitimacy our worthless kangaroo Supreme Court, to our terrible health-care system, etc. None of these writings have satisfied me, because none of them said what I wanted to hear. Therefore I guess I am stuck writing the essay which I keep looking everywhere for. You will have to judge whether it is true or not. Perhaps you will have to judge whether to make it true, since, in the end of things, that is how politics works.
Ok, here is my thesis: obtaining what they have claimed to want will be a much bigger problem for Republicans than they care to let on. They are like the proverbial dog chasing a van who finally catches it. If abortions are illegal in red states, it will quickly threaten the GOP’s already tenuous political coalition through several ways. First of all, the same religious fundamentalists, scolds, and absolutists who have obsessively made this a single-focus issue will want abortion outlawed everywhere in the nation. Republicans will now have to work towards that goal, unless they want all of those single-issue voters to harumph and stay home. Yet, as women start dying left and right, politics in those same red states will change more quickly and in more unnerving ways than Republicans are ready for.
I suspect that strategy-minded Republicans such as Mitch McConnell never really wanted to see Roe end for exactly this reason. The pro-life zealots were already maximally engaged. This will not create more of them or cause them to show up at the polls in greater numbers. After an odious victory lap, they will either tune out of politics or demand that Republicans do stuff which is even more unpopular. And ending Roe (and its reproductive freedoms)–especially in this draconian way–is quite unpopular with 55-70 percentage of the electorate (depending on how the questions are asked). That number is likely to get much larger as snoozing Democrats and progressives wake up and notice that the United States is quickly becoming a farcical fascist dystopia .
So Republicans are back to their true play. Either they must comprehensively end representative democracy once and for all and replace it with an autocracy masquerading as a democracy (like Hungary or Turkey) or they will have to eventually face voters, a majority of whom do not like their policies. Republicans have become so wily at avoiding voters and at painting Democrats’ attempts to govern the nation as extremism, that we have lost sight of how deceptively weak and unpopular their fundamental positions are. Now they are running on a platform of raising taxes for working people, destroying Social Security, making healthcare more expensive, AND abolishing reproductive choice for all Americans. The fact that they are doing as well as they are is testament to their astonishing ability to lie and prevaricate, but the truth is slowly creeping up behind them and dawning even on the most misinformed voters.
So the next two elections of 2022 and 2024 will be the GOP’s best chance to use structural advantages to finish off the democracy as a functioning entity. That was already the case, but perhaps today’s leak will remind confused people who had tuned out of politics (dully repeating the Republican line that “all politicians are equally bad“) that they need to turn back in and fight off these ghastly autocrats and religious zealots. Otherwise today’s assault on freedom, dignity, and privacy will neither be the last nor the most jarring.
ferrebeekeeper 
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May 4, 2022 at 6:23 AM
K Hindall
And the thesis that they speak for the unborn is garbage, by the way. If abortion had been safe and legal in Ohio in 1965, I would not be here to type this. But that would have been the right decision for my family AND FOR ME.
My mother’s life may not have been in danger, but it was clear that she was going to suffer major painful injuries as a result of the pregnancy quite early on. And she did. She has been in continuous severe pain since. I doubt my parents’ marriage would have survived in any case and she would never have come to terms with having daughters, but she would have been without pain and able to function. Maybe she would have been more civilized to my sister and me. I can tell you that never being born would have been better than being a female child at her nonexistent mercy for twenty years and all the misery since then. (PTSD does not happen only to soldiers.)
Sadly, I think I may have to stop reading your blog, my friend. It is nice to know that I am not alone in my opinions of the country I am forced to live in, but I am otherwise able to avoid confronting what has happened to this place in my lifetime. Since the only thing I can do about it is the very weak vote, it seems rather pointlessly agonizing to keep in touch at all.
May 4, 2022 at 11:46 AM
Wayne
Oh no! I am so sorry to stir up traumatic memories of unhappy family circumstances. After yesterday, the whole internet needs a trigger warning (which I failed to put on my post).
I recognize that there are no right answers when it comes to this sensitive and personal topic. Yet some answers are much more wrong than others. Speaking of which, don’t downplay the power of your vote (nor overlook the fact that a majority of fellow citizens dislike smarmy imperatives from out-of-touch and un-elected reactionaries who style themselves as the nation’s supreme kingpriests).
May 4, 2022 at 6:06 PM
K Hindall
Oh, goodness, if it hadn’t been you, it would’ve been something else. Fewer things trigger me now, nearly forty years since I had contact with my mother (she’s still alive, though), but it happens multiple times a day. Among other things, my sister and I share a house, and so we often trigger each other.
It’s just one of the (many!) things about the Republicans that infuriates me. Speaking for the unborn, no less! I’m not saying that every person whose mother wanted to terminate the pregnancy wishes it had happened, but I can say for sure that the Republicans don’t speak for all of us.
I think the woman herself knows what’s best for herself, her fetus, and her family. She certainly is the one best positioned for that.
As a therapist once said when we were discussing whether it was ethical to have an in utero test for autism, given that most couples would choose to terminate, “You have to let people have the children they want and not the ones they don’t.” I’ve never seen a study, but I believe if one was done, it would find a higher incidence of child abuse among children whose mothers wanted to terminate but were not permitted to.
And note that adoption would not have accomplished what my mother needed: avoiding crippling damage from the pregnancy. Even if my mother had not vented her rage on me, she still would’ve been unequal to coping with a normal life, let alone two small children (I have an older brother) and the third one she later had.
It just boggles my mind how anyone can believe forbidding abortion is a good idea.