Amidst all the talk about the impact of a likely reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, I thought a history lesson was in order, so I wrote one at New York:
Last week, the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have codified abortion rights, died in in the Senate by a vote of 51 to 49. All 210 House Republicans and all 50 Senate Republicans voted against the legislation. This surprised no one, but it’s actually odd in several ways. While Republican elected officials are almost monolithically opposed to abortion rights, pro-choice Republican voters didn’t entirely cease to exist, and this could become a problem for the party if, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the right to abortion at the end of this term.
Though polling on the issue is notoriously slippery, our best guess is that a little over a third of Republicans disagree with their party on whether to outlaw abortion (while about one-quarter of Democrats disagree with their party on the topic). These Americans have virtually no representation in Congress with the limited exceptions of Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (both GOP senators support some abortion rights, but they are still opposed the WHPA and are against dropping the filibuster to preserve abortion rights).
Ironically, abortion rights as we know them are, to a considerable extent, the product of Republican lawmaking at every level of government. The most obvious examples are the two Supreme Court decisions that established and reaffirmed a constitutional right to abortion. Of the seven justices who supported
Roe v.
Wade, the 1973 decision that
struck down pre-viability-abortion bans, five were appointed by Republican presidents, including the author of the majority opinion, Harry Blackmun, and then–Chief Justice Warren Burger. All five justices who voted to confirm the constitutional right to pre-viability abortions in 1992’s
Planned Parenthood v. Casey were appointed by Republican presidents as well.
These pro-choice Republicans weren’t just rogue jurists (though their alleged perfidy has become a deep grievance in the anti-abortion movement). Today’s lock-step opposition to abortion rights among GOP elected officials took a long time to develop. Indeed, before Roe, Republicans were more likely to favor legal abortion than Democrats. In New York and Washington, two of the four states that fully legalized pre-viability abortions in 1970, Republican governors Nelson Rockefeller and Daniel Evans were at the forefront of abortion-rights efforts. They weren’t fringe figures; Rockefeller went on to become vice-president of the United States under Gerald Ford. Pre-Roe, various other Republican officials supported more modest efforts to ease abortion bans; among them was then–California governor Ronald Reagan, who signed a bill significantly liberalizing exceptions to an abortion ban in 1967.
The anti-abortion movement’s strength in the Republican Party grew steadily after Roe in part because of a more general ideological sorting out of the two major parties as liberals drifted into the Democratic Party and conservatives were drawn into the GOP. To put it another way, there has always been ideological polarization in American politics, but only in recent decades has it been reflected in parallel party polarization. But that doesn’t fully explain the GOP’s shift on abortion policy.
Beginning in 1972 with Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, Republicans began actively trying to recruit historically Democratic Roman Catholic voters. Soon thereafter, they started working to mobilize conservative Evangelical voters. This effort coincided with the Evangelicals’ conversion into strident abortion opponents, though they were generally in favor of the modest liberalization of abortion laws until the late 1970s. All these trends culminated in the adoption of a militantly anti-abortion platform plank in the 1980 Republican National Convention that nominated Reagan for president. The Gipper said he regretted his earlier openness to relaxed abortion laws. Reagan’s strongest intraparty rival was George H.W. Bush, the scion of a family with a powerful multigenerational connection to Planned Parenthood. He found it expedient to renounce any support for abortion rights before launching his campaign.
Still, there remained a significant pro-choice faction among Republican elected officials until quite recently. In 1992, the year Republican Supreme Court appointees saved abortion rights in Casey, there was a healthy number of pro-choice Republicans serving in the Senate: Ted Stevens of Alaska, John Seymour of California, Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, William Cohen of Maine, Bob Packwood of Oregon, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, John Chafee of Rhode Island, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, John Warner of Virginia, and Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming. Another, John Heinz of Pennsylvania, had recently died.
Partisan polarization on abortion (which, of course, was taking place among Democrats as well) has been slow but steady, as Aaron Blake of the Washington Post recently observed:
“In a 1997 study, Carnegie Mellon University professor Greg D. Adams sought to track abortion votes in Congress over time. His finding: In the Senate, there was almost no daylight between the two parties in 1973, with both parties voting for ‘pro-choice’ positions about 40 percent of the time.
“But that quickly changed.
“There was more of a difference in the House in 1973, with Republicans significantly more opposed to abortion rights than both House Democrats and senators of both parties. But there, too, the gap soon widened.
“Including votes in both chambers, Adams found that a 22 percentage- point gap between the two parties’ votes in 1973 expanded to nearly 65 points two decades later, after Casey was decided.”
By 2018, every pro-choice House Republican had been defeated or had retired. The rigidity of the party line on abortion was perhaps best reflected in late 2019, when a House Democrat with a record of strong support for abortion rights, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, switched parties. Almost instantly, Van Drew switched sides on reproductive rights and was hailed by the hard-core anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List for voting “consistently to defend the lives of the unborn and infants.”
With the 2020 primary loss by Illinois Democratic representative Dan Lipinski, a staunch opponent of abortion rights, there’s now just one House member whose abortion stance is out of step with his party: Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, who is very vulnerable to defeat in a May 24 runoff.
If the Supreme Court does fully reverse Roe in the coming weeks, making abortion a more highly salient 2022 campaign issue, the one-third of pro-choice Republican voters may take issue with their lack of congressional representation. Will the first big threat to abortion rights in nearly a half-century make them change their priorities? Or will they still care more about party loyalty and issues like inflation? Perhaps nothing will change for most of these voters. But in close races, the abandoned tradition of pro-choice Republicanism could make a comeback to the detriment of the GOP’s ambitious plans for major midterm gains.
I am one who is convinced that passage of the Citizens United decision essentially ruined the efficacy of our two party form of democratic government. The result has been unbridled flow of commercial money to support the conservative agenda resulting in a preponderance of legislation that blindly favors increased profit margins for American business, principally those businesses in the financial sector.
Ethical oversight and regulation is all but defenseless under the current regime. The only sustainable way forward is through a parties advocating peaceful revolution and a return to ethical precepts of government for and by the people.
Not only are new parties required but also new sytems for ensuring that the prevailing majority rules following every public voting process.
According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, California has the highest poverty rate in the nation at 23.8% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_poverty_rate). That is half again higher than in Mississippi and it is double the poverty rate in states like Iowa and Nebraska. Yet, Teixeira calls California “a model for the country’s future.” Donald Trump may be crazy, but not even Donald Trump is crazy enough to call a 24% poverty rate a model for the other 49 states.
The American political conversation is dominated or even monopolized by two groups who hardly represent even the majority in their respective parties, liberals among Democrats and libertarians among Republicans.
The broad majority of people of other persuasions have usually mixed/syncretic ideologies and in the end don’t actually care for the war between the liberals and libertarians but just want solutions to their everyday problems. Liberals and libertarians do this because they are ideologues and because the kind of conflict they provoke is good for their financial backers and for the media that covers them -usually one and the same-. Most billionaires don’t care for a politics of solutions and when they do they are usually involved in philantropy more than financing parties.
The fundamental misunderstanding between liberals and libertarians is that liberals want a big government that will pay for education, healthcare, housing, etc.
Libertarians want good jobs that will allow people to pay for that themselves.
The liberal solution requires high corporate and personal taxes. Corporate taxes mean less international competitiveness and losing jobs. High personal taxes mean you can’t afford everything.
But high wages also mean losing international competitiveness. In order to compensate for that you need education, healthcare, etc to be relatively cheap. Here comes deregulation.
Libertarians don’t want deregulation and low taxes out of a whim, they just believe it is the best way to arrive at high paying jobs.
Liberals don’t want high taxes out of a whim, they just think that the public buying collectively things like education, healthcare, etc lowers the price for these and allows lower disposable income to go a longer way. They also think that issues like the environment can’t be sacrificed in order to have jobs because the environment affects things like health too much.
Right now one can say that Scandinavia represents the liberal model and that China represents the libertarian one.
In truth in the Western context it is hard to say that any country even approaches perfectly representing either model. The United States has always been a mixed economy. It has always mixed strong capitalism with a strong dose of state intervention in investments and in providing public services.
Given that there have never existed “real” capitalist, libertarian, liberal or socialist societies it is speculative to affirm that any model is the best or perfect one.
What we can compare are the effects of different policy mixes in different policy settings.
Dogmatic ideological preferences that fail to take into account history, political culture and economic structure are bound to fail. You can’t introduce too much libertarianism to a welfare state and expect things to go smoothly. Neither can you introduce too much state intervention into a mostly capitalist economy without creating moral hazard problems and other unintended consequences.
As an example, Republicans and Democrats both seem to be wrong about what to do with the healthcare system. Republicans want more market to reduce prices and then expand access while Democrats want more access to control costs by spreading them. Both are dealing with healthcare at the macroeconomics level. But neither party is dealing with the healthcare industry at the microeconomics level. Democratic interventions in healthcare have raised costs if one does an international comparison. Even for economies that are similarly capitalistic the US is incredibly wasteful when it comes to healthcare.
Liberals never talk about how this waste means there are then fewer resources to deal with areas where there is underinvestment like housing, infrastructure or training policies. Less public investment in healthcare and more public investment in those areas would create quality jobs that would also lead to expansion of access to healthcare.
In the US domestic context we are seeing the different models play out again in the North vs South divide. The Northeast has been steadily losing population even as it expands the welfare state. The South has been gaining population and certain types of jobs.
The question of whether the North or the South is doing better is not a clear open and shut case. While many statistics point to the North doing better, people seem to be voting with their feet in favor of the South.
Democrats seem to be in favor of imposing unwanted rule in the South instead of accepting the Republican offer of lowering national taxes. Blue states could then raise state taxes and let the models continue competing.
The problem with this is an issue the European Union has been tackling for a long time. State aid for corporations is a problem that exacerbates the competition between regions. In the European Union the intensity of state aid is limited according to the level of development of the region (more wealthy regions get to spend less on some types of corporate welfare).
In the EU states still compete based on taxes and wages, but they aren’t allowed to compete on the environment or some types of labor law that are harmonized. Consumer taxes are also partially harmonized so that products aren’t sold in other states at a much lower price.
In some ways the EU is more federalized than the US. What the US has developed further are the systems of federal taxes (including social security), immigration, bankruptcy, banking and capital markets. The EU is dealing with all of these as I write (social security will be the only one not to be significantly harmonized).
Meanwhile the US will do nothing to prevent unfair competition between the states. So in response Red and Blue states want to impose their own model via the federal government via piecemeal policy interventions.
The US Constitution originally favored states taking care of almost everything. But ever since the Great Depression and the FDR revolution this is no longer the case. Systems like social security were established via state consent but Red states are increasingly questioning that settlement.
With populations shifting out of the traditional North the South has gained the power to reopen the conversation. Liberals want to consider the conversation closed and to use federal institutions for enforcement and further expansion (eg Obamacare).
Many Libertarians and conservatives just want to acknowledge that the conversation can be had. They want to be convinced that the current model is the best that we can have.
When it comes to healthcare, education, energy and welfare there are hard questions to be answered about substantive effectiveness and cost efficiency. Fixating on debating market vs non-market approaches detracts from the real issues though. No side will accept that the other side completely imposes its approach on the whole US.
The historical reasons for compromise are all still there. The “to the death” approach of US politics achieves very little policy wise at very high emotional costs to individuals and to collective political culture.
Bill Clinton-type triangulation is not centrism or pragmatism though. The Clinton presidency introducted incoherent and opportunistic reforms. The damage from many of the them was only recognized once the bubbles that characterized his presidency stated exploding one by one.
The one positive thing that has to be recognized from his presidency though is that broad based growth does pull all boats up. This is also the case for Obama and so far for the Trump presidency. Although Presidents rarely have enough control of politics to determine whether the state can intervene sufficiently to push for economic growth and given the fact that even then the effects of their policy interventions would be felt later in the economic cycle, this doesn’t mean that decisions don’t matter.
For example, the long term effects of the liberalization of foreign trade can be studied. Policies do matter.
In the end the US is governed from the center. Obama was not a particularly progressive President and Trump has barely been able to deliver on his promises. Clinton had to govern under Republican supervision as Reagan under Democratic one.
This is a testament to the strength of American political institutions and consistency of its political culture. But also an example of the actual nature of political change.
Most people feel that change takes place either via small reforms or via big revolutions. History tends to demostrate that change comes almost equally via both.
The really trascendental changes seem to come from political or even violent revolutions. But even revolutions aren’t that revolutionary, they tend to stall.
Incremental reforms on the other hand may be either revolutionary taken as a whole (specially when seen retrospectively) or precursors of revolution due to their limited character (again when taken as a whole).
A set of mediocre reforms may trigger a revolution that wipes them all out. Most revolutions trigger counterreforms that diminish over time the revolutionary ethos.
The best reforms/revolutions create a mix of institutions and cultural political practices that survive for generations. It is much easier to reform taxes than reform the notion of universal suffrage or the role of parliaments in law making.
It is both surprising and unsurprising that neither liberals nor libertarians seem to be questioning the institutional and cultural legacy of the Western liberal revolutions. Even socialists copied a lot of this model (though hollowing out their institutions).
Liberal institutions didn’t produce the expected results in many countries (Asia, Latin America), but then there was/is the whole issue of colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism. The West doesn’t need to have serious questions about its institutions and political culture not having ever worked.
The rise of illiberal populism is a direct result not of the failings of liberal institutions but of the imposition of libertarian economic models after the successful development of welfare states.
Liberal institutions have taken hold in many countries successfully while in other countries they are being questioned and not always due to populism. The rise of revanchist nationalism due to the particular histories of some countries (eg China and its history of Western humilliation) must be understood in its own sense.
The cases of Chinese and Japanese nationalism each has its own characteristics but there are similarities all over. Russia and Turkey represent economic revanchism with neoimperialism. Poland and Hungary represent economic revanchism with incomplete liberal cultural transition.
The US case doesn’t represent incomplete liberal cultural transition (except among marginal groups), neoimperialism or economic or historical nationalist revanchism. US populism both on the left (progressivism) and on the right (demagoguery) is basically nostalgic. And the nostalgia seems to be warranted.
But there can be no nostalgia for that which didn’t exist. The US has never been fully liberal or fully libertarian. The nostalgia for the mixed economic model of the post-WWII is a nostalgia for policy interventions that work.
FDR was a radical progressive pragmatist, not an ideologue. He expanded trade, but also curtailed immigration and protected domestic economic interests and labor. He was a hawk in foreign policy while not being a war mongerer or an imperialist. He made many mistakes but always insisted on the importance of experimenting.
Contemporary liberals are dogmatic and against experimentation. In fact they oppose a great deal of the policies that FDR actually implemented.
There is a clear globalist cosmopolitan streak in their discourse and a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of globalization (technological change, wealth, debt, the trade deficit) and the US role in the world and how it affects ordinary citizens.
Too many libertarians on the other hand are embracing the kind of isolationism that the US hasn’t been able to carry out for more than a century due to its status as a global superpower or they are corporate libertarians who think that what matters is to open up foreign markets for US multinationals.
There are few political forces championing any real middle ground on either domestic or foreign issues. While the US first past the post system should eventually take care of this by forcing politicians to the middle, the current set up of political parties is delaying things.
Third parties or movements are essential to make way for changes in the internal dynamics of political parties in bipartisan systems. The competition between the parties for the supporters of the third approach eventually leads to one of the two parties becoming significantly dominant and impose its policies. (Trump may be an example of Buchanan-like policies finally prevailing in the GOP but the internal debates inside the administration make it too difficult to tell.)
Bipartisanship is both a myth or a short term consequence. The bipartisanship that was produced by the New Deal was (or maybe even is) in fact a long period of progressive dominance.
The narrative of the rise of “neoliberalism” is incomplete or misguided. Neoliberalism didn’t rise because in the West capitalism never went away. What matters is not the rise of capitalism but the decline of the New Deal.
So for people on the non-socialist left (the left that doesn’t believe in the state owning the means of production) what should matter is not dismantling capitalism and stopping neoliberalism but resurrecting the New Deal in ways that are pertinent to the problems of our days.
Progressivism means not being nostalgic for solutions of the past. The past should inform current discussions but not dictate future solutions.