If there is one crucial thought presented most frequently here at TDS, it is the importance of sorting out strategic and tactical issues from matters of values, goals and principles, particularly in intraparty conflicts. Sometimes strategic/tactical differences are blown out of proportion into “civil war” topics, and sometimes looking at different strategic approaches helps discern the underlying common ground between factions.
That is the case with the antichoice movement, as I discussed yesterday at Washington Monthly in a post based on the fine work of MSNBC’s Irin Carmon:

[S]upporters of more a more direct strategy and more confrontational tactics often reveal the extremism of party-wide ideological positions that more cautious people would prefer to disguise. So you can learn a lot from paying attention to the loud-and-proud types even if you don’t think they will prevail within their own party.
I say all this as a prelude to Irin Carmon’s piece at MSNBC about a new and abrasive wing of the antichoice movement that doesn’t believe in hiding its light under a bushel of pieties about late-term abortions or “women’s health:”

For the mainstream movement to ban abortion, graphic photos and aggressive language have generally gone out of style. The winning slogans, the ones Republican politicians prefer, are warmer, fuzzier: Thumbsucking ultrasound photos, or “women’s health” used as a pretext to shut down safe abortion clinics, including three in Texas this month alone. The losing slogans involve Akin-like “legitimate rape” and comparing Planned Parenthood to the Klan.
Abolish Human Abortion (AHA) begs to differ. Founded out of Norman, Oklahoma, and with chapters nationwide, AHA activists wear t-shirts emblazoned with “End Child Sacrifice” and proudly display photos of bloodied, fully developed fetuses. They protest outside churches – yes, churches – accusing them of not doing enough to end abortion, and talk scornfully of “pro-lifers” who make peace with rape exceptions to abortion bans.
AHA activists disdain the phrase “pro-life” altogether. They prefer “abolitionists,” with all slavery comparisons explicitly intended, and they want to push the larger movement to abide by their uncompromising positions. That means moving away from the incremental strategy – 20 week bans, admitting privileges laws for clinics – and sticking to banning all abortion without exceptions, equating hormonal birth control (even the daily pill kind) with abortion, and advocating that women who have abortions be tried as murderers. That sort of unblinking absolutism in the face of the messiness of real life decision-making may be what has drawn nearly 34,000 people to like their Facebook page.

But here’s the thing: their basic positions are generally shared by antichoice activists of all varieties. What the AHA zealots are demanding is that antichoicers exhibit some honesty about them:

They don’t care who they offend. They aren’t interested in a political or legal strategy; they reserve their deepest scorn for the incrementalists who have crafted a step-by-step plan to overturn Roe v. Wade. As far as AHA is concerned, those guys are sellouts. But in the end, there isn’t so much that the mainstream movement and Abolish Human Abortion disagree on besides tactics.

That’s very important to know.

There’s a big and fascinating new study of the Millennial Generation out today from Pew, drawing from its recent polling, that poses some interesting questions for Democrats. Here’s how I characterized the strategic issues at Washington Monthly today:

The biggest dichotomy involves the political allegiances of Millennials: fully half self-identify as independents, but the cohort is significantly more likely than older generations to vote Democratic, identify itself as “liberal” (more Millennials self-identify as “liberal” than “conservative,” the first cohort to do so in a very long time), favor government activism, and agree with Democratic issue positions on both cultural and economic topics (there’s a slight divergence on abortion policy, where Millenials are marginally less likely than GenXers to support generally legalized abortion). Yet less than a third of Millenials agree there is a “great deal of difference” between the party they agree with and the party that tends to characterize Millennial views as secular-socialist.
There’s a particularly interesting finding on health care policy:

Millennials are as skeptical as older generations of the 2010 health care law. In December 2013–the most recent Pew Research Center survey on the Affordable Care Act–there were no significant differences across generations in views of the law. About four-in-ten in each cohort approved of the law.
Yet by 54% to 42%, Millennials think it is the federal government’s responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. There is less support among older age cohorts for the government insuring health coverage for all.

Aside from the fact that Millennials are for obvious reasons less inclined to worry about health coverage than older cohorts, this finding suggests that Millennials may be disproportionately represented in the ranks of those who object to Obamacare from the left.
In any event, the study can be read in two very different ways by progressive political folk. Nothing about their views indicates much of an openness to Republican political appeals, at least so long as the GOP is in its current hyper-reactionary and old-white-folks-dependent phase. That would argue for a Democratic strategy of largely taking them for granted and focusing appeals on older generations more likely to “swing.” But insofar as low voting levels (particularly in midterms) among Millennials are a serious problem for the Donkey Party, and in view of their relatively strong feeling that the two parties aren’t greatly different, a more left-bent message might boost turnout and bond Millenials more durably to the party that actually seems to share its values. One much-discussed dilemma in Democratic strategy actually may be an illusion: while Millennials have huge doubts about Social Security’s solvency, and as an abstract manner favor greater emphasis on program benefiting young folks as compared to old folks, a pretty large majority (61%) oppose cutting Social Security benefits as a solution to the program’s solvency issues.
All in all, the study is worth a close look, particularly by those who like to make breezy assertions about “the kids” without much empirical grounding.

If nothing else, bookmark the study for future reference.

One of the more annoying habits of the MSM (and some progressive media) is the tendency to greet virtually every political development within the Republican Party as signaling the demise of the Tea Party and the renewed ascendence of the Great Big Adults of the Republican Establishment. It echoes earlier efforts to prematurely bury the Christian Right, which, of course, overlaps extensively with the Tea Folk.
We heard the trumpets of doom for the Tea Party blow yet again the morning after this week’s Texas Primaries, where a couple of bad right-wing congressional campaigns against fairly right-wing incumbents got a lot of attention. This is from my post-mortem at TPMCafe:

[T]he story we are hearing from most national observers (such as this headline from the New York Times today: “Texas GOP Beats Back Challengers From Right”) was about the dog that did not bark: tea party challengers to Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Pete Sessions failed miserably, a result that will undoubtedly be used to reinforce an ongoing national meme that the Tea Party is dead or dying and the GOP establishment is riding high.
But if you look beyond the congressional races, that’s not necessarily the right conclusion to derive from the Texas GOP primary results.
In the Lieutenant Governor’s race, incumbent David Dewhurst — the same guy Ted Cruz upset in the 2012 U.S. Senate primary — ran a poor second last night, and will face fiery right-wing state senator Dan Patrick in a May runoff Dewhurst seems doomed to lose. In the primary to replace Attorney General Greg Abbott, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, the first place finisher was state senator Ken Paxton, whose main campaign credential was his coziness with Cruz. In the Ag Commissioner’s primary, the top finisher was former state legislator Sid Miller, whose campaign co-chairman and treasurer is (even after the neanderthal rocker’s “Obama is a subhuman mongrel” comment) none other than Ted Nugent. On a night when for the first time in memory, all but one Texas statewide office was open, the tea folk did quite well, and could do just as well in what should be an extremely low turnout runoff in May.
But beyond the tea party-versus-establishment dynamics, this primary reflected the full absorption of “constitutional conservative” rhetoric by candidates previously associated with country-club Republicanism. John Cornyn has spent much of the last year snuggling up to his junior colleague Cruz seeking cover. Greg Abbott (“typically described as a more conservative version of [Rick] Perry,” says one Texas observer) is running a campaign that has been teetering on the edge of a vengeful culture-war assault on Democratic rival Wendy Davis. And most interesting at all, the scion of that great weathervane of Republican ideological change, the Bush family, is tacking hard right as well: George P. Bush, the half-Hispanic son of Jeb, is running for the statewide position of Land Commissioner after an extended effort to court the tea folk and identify himself with Cruz (notably endorsing the “defund Obamacare” stunt that led to last year’s government shutdown).
The situation in Texas reflects a more general dynamic in the GOP, dating back at least to the concessions Mitt Romney made to “constitutional conservative” orthodoxy (from signing onto the radical “Cut, Cap, Balance” budget pledge, to taking a hard line on immigration, to promising a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act) in order to secure the Republican presidential nomination over weak and divided “true conservative” opposition. The more the tea party movement (itself mainly a continuation of the “movement conservative” faction that has been struggling for preeminence since its breakthrough in the Goldwater campaign of 1964) influences mainstream GOP policy positions and rhetoric, the less it may succeed in intraparty contests with an “establishment” that has largely coopted it, and whose differences are mainly over strategy and tactics rather than core ideology.

Since the Texas primary was the first major primary of this cycle, it offers a good opportunity to discard this habit of wishing away the ideological “fever” in the GOP before it does real damage to our understanding of conservative politics.

There has been a fascinating change of circumstances occurring this last week, revolving around cookie-cutter state legislation sponsored by Republicans aimed at implementing the widely-deployed conservative rhetoric about “religious liberty.” Beginning in 2012, Republicans nationally and across the country adopted the mantra of “religious liberty” to take advantage of conservative Catholic and evangelical hostility to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate. It did not produce the hoped-for defection of Catholics to the Romney-Ryan ticket (the Catholic vote, as had been the case recently, closely reflected the overall national vote), but did provide a rubric for talking about Republican opposition to legalized abortion and marriage equality that avoided messy and unpopular specifics and gave a positive cast to essentially reactionary positions.
What’s happening now, though, is that efforts to provide “religious liberty” exemptions to normal law-abiding expectations is moving the debate in the opposite direction, drawing attention to the extremism of conservative culture-issue positions. Here’s how I summed up this development at TPMCafe:

This began happening first on the contraception coverage front, where the religious objection to the Obamacare mandate had to be justified (in the Hobby Lobby litigation most notably) by the claim that highly effective contraceptive devices (the IUD) and treatments (Plan B and hormonal “patches”) used by millions of women were in fact “abortifacients.”
This is not a terribly common view outside the Right-to-Life movement and the conservative Catholic and evangelical Protestant clergy; it certainly is not in accord with mainstream medical opinion. But the very discussion of angels-dancing-on-a-pin disputes over fertilization versus uterine implantation as the beginning of pregnancy shifted the debate over reproductive policy away from the strongest ground for anti-choicers — rare but controversial late-term abortions and the conditions under which they should be allowed — to the very weakest: “abortions” so early that most Americans don’t consider them abortions at all. So a gambit designed to broaden support for faith-based objections to reproductive rights policies is pulling the discussion in a direction that threatens to isolate anti-choicers and their Republican allies in a small ghetto of extremist opinion.
Similarly, the effort to “protect” religious believers from the consequences of a sudden shift in policies on same-sex marriage began as a reasonable-sounding request for two-way tolerance that might unite the near-majority of Americans who are not presently “comfortable” towards marriage equality with those whose views had recently “evolved.”
But the more the demands for religious “exemptions” from compliance with new marriage laws have become concrete, the less reasonable they have seemed. Nobody’s talking about requiring that religious communities perform same-sex marriages (or for that matter, ordain gay ministers, the most heated issue within many U.S. Christian communities). So the martyr’s cross of the “persecuted” must be found among the small ranks of marriage professionals who refuse to bake wedding cakes with two plastic men on top, or offer to offer planning services to two women.
Perhaps some non-sectarian Americans instinctively identify with “bakers of conscience” or wedding planners who consider themselves in danger of hellfire for booking hotel ballrooms for Sodomites. But like the fight for the freedom to treat IUDs as death machines, the fight to provide the conservative Christian elements of the wedding industry with plenary indulgences from obedience to the law tends to elicit less sympathy than ridicule from the non-aligned.
And that matters a great deal politically. On many fronts in the culture wars, the momentum has usually been possessed by those who can best identify themselves with the ambivalent attitudes of a mushy middle “swing vote”–favorable to contraceptives and early-term abortions but not late-term abortions; increasingly accepting of LGBT folk but indulgent of their parents’ and grandparents’ “ick factor.”
After years of shedding crocodile tears for the victims of late-term abortions, anti-choicers are now finding themselves defending businesses who in open court argue that the dividing line between acceptable contraception and murderous abortion occurs moments after sexual intercourse — when women instantly transition from autonomous individuals to “hosts” for a state-protected zygote. And after years of arguing against marriage equality on behalf of the positive “rights” of men and women in “traditional marriage,” those who actually think gay people in love are abominations unto the Lord are being exposed for who they really are.

So a “religious liberty” statute that breezed through the Kansas House was halted in the Senate by Republicans who feared it went too far. And just tonight, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed even broader legislation that actually passed both houses of her state’s legislature, with both GOP U.S. Senators and even some bill sponsors urging her to do so.
Right now, the once powerful “religious liberty” strategy for dealing with cultural issues is in shambles, with Republicans divided. It goes to show that deception and indirection can only work for so long.

On Friday, February 14, in an inverse Valentine Day gift for labor, after an intensive anti-union campaign not by the employer but by local, state and national Republicans, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, narrowly rejected a unionization bid by the United Auto Workers. Here was my initial reaction at WaMo:

I wish I could say I’ve never seen the likes of the campaign of intimidation that led to the vote against UAW representation at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee on Friday. But I did, as a child growing up in a Georgia textile company town in the early 1960s, where public schools began the year on Labor Day, the word “union” was not said out loud, and people still graphically remembered National Guardsmen being called out to break a strike at Callaway Mills back in 1935–the same year Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act.
I’m a little rusty on my labor law, but I’m reasonably sure that any employer who issued the sorts of threats made by Republican politicians in Tennessee (including Sen. Bob Corker, Gov. Bill Haslam, and a variety of state legislators, backed by national conservative figures like Grove Norquist) against a unionization effort would have been in blatant violation of the NLRA. But that’s what makes the incident such a travesty: it wasn’t the employer fighting the union (VW by all accounts was neutral-to-positive towards unionization, which would have facilitated establishment of the kind of “work council” the company had set up at other international plants to help maintain good employer-employee relations). As Brent Snavely of the Detroit Free Press reported (probably incredulously):

The crusade by anti-union forces in Tennessee, including the state’s governor and senior senator, is as much a fight with Volkswagen management as with the UAW.
Not only are Republican legislators accusing Volkswagen of backing the UAW, some of their leaders on Monday threatened to withhold tax incentives for future expansion of the three-year-old assembly plant in Chattanooga if workers vote this week to join the UAW.

So addicted are Tennessee Republicans to the “race to the bottom” approach to economic development that they are willing to risk the good will of an existing employer in their zeal to make sure their own people are kept in as submissive a position as possible. President Obama’s reported comment during a Democratic retreat last week that the pols involved in this union-busting effort are “more concerned about German shareholders than American workers” is one way to put it; I’d say they’ve internalized the ancient despicable tendency of the southern aristocracy to favor the abasement of working people as an end in itself.
This incident is also a pretty good symptom of the radicalization of the Republican Party. It’s one thing to oppose collective bargaining rights for public employees, or to defend “right-to-work” laws that interfere with the contracting rights of employers and employees and create “freeriders” who benefit from union collective bargaining without paying dues. But now the very existence of private-sector unions, a familiar part of the American landscape for most of the last century, is under attack from Republican politicians.