[Why we need to learn that when we defend abortion rights, we’re
defending democracy.]
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THE POST-DOBBS ABORTION FIGHT  
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Ilyse Hogue
March 15, 2023
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
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_ Why we need to learn that when we defend abortion rights, we’re
defending democracy. _

July 4th Protest in front of the US Supreme Court., Victoria
Pickering

 

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a
decision in _Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization_ that
explicitly stated that no constitutional right to abortion exists in
this country. In that instant, the legal acknowledgement that women
have control over their own bodies ended. This decision also marked
one of the only times in our history that the highest court in the
land rescinded—rather than expanded—a right. That day—50 years
in the making—marks an inflection point in our politics, in the
polarization of our country, and in the prognosis of our democracy.

The decision produced predictable shock across the country.
Anti-choice leaders wept with joy and took victory laps in the press.
Abortion rights supporters took to the streets in rage and vowed to
get their revenge at the polls. Democratic lawmakers condemned the
decision, many standing arm in arm with activists in the street. But
elected Republicans were more muted in their approval; they focused on
affirming the process the Court’s majority undertook to get to its
decision and sticking close to talking points that emphasized states
being now free to decide for themselves (though many women suddenly
were not). Most of them stopped well short of a full-throated embrace
of the substance of the decision. That daylight between many GOP
elected officials and their movement’s leaders and base was a
noticeable indication that the politics were more complex for them
than they wanted to admit.

Six weeks after _Dobbs_, the GOP’s reticence was proven prescient
when Kansas voters soundly rejected a ballot measure that would have
paved the way to banning abortion in that deep-red state. It was now
clear that the Democrats had a potent election issue on their hands
and that the Republican overreach on abortion had finally penetrated
the national consciousness. The rest of the election cycle is
well-documented history. Abortion supporters ran the table on ballot
measures in 2022, with victories from California to Kentucky. And the
historic performance of Democrats in the midterm elections cemented
the understanding that abortion was a winning issue for them. In exit
polling
[[link removed]],
about three in ten voters said abortion was their top issue, and about
six in ten said they were “dissatisfied or angry” about _Dobbs_.

If the electoral response to _Dobbs_ made public opinion on this
issue crystal clear, it also forcefully raised the question of how a
right so popular could have been in such mortal jeopardy in the first
place. And the answer to this mystery portends not only what’s next
for women and reproductive rights but for the promise of American
democracy. Because for decades, an ascendant radical right has cannily
gambled that abortion is an effective Trojan horse for their agenda to
maintain a tight grip on economic, social, and political power for
predominantly white Christian men. This scheme proved attractive to
leaders of a GOP looking for new levers of power; but then, over time,
the radical right subsumed the traditional GOP. For their part,
Democrats failed to recognize the anti-abortion strategy as a
harbinger of a broader attack. They treated abortion as one issue
among many, and often as a handy bargaining chip in cross-aisle
negotiations. While they almost certainly believed this approach to be
in service of the democratic process, it actually enabled the
dismantling of democracy itself. Our ability to fight the growing
threat of authoritarian impulses on the right relies on our ability to
understand the history of their strategy and where we go from here.

The Lost History of Anti-Abortion Politics

In the early 1970s, the New Right—the regressive, populist,
religious wing of conservatism led by figures like Phyllis Schlafly
and Paul Weyrich—was obsessively focused on obstructing the changes
that were reshaping power in American society. The civil rights era
had given way to the Black Power movement. Mandatory school
desegregation was eroding the grip that white fundamentalist churches
had on their congregants. The anti-war movement had infused American
youth culture with an appreciation for drugs and rock and roll, tools
of Satan in the eyes of many religious leaders. The Stonewall uprising
of 1969 led to the first gay pride marches in the early 1970s. And
worst of all in these conservatives’ eyes, advocates for sexual
liberation had ridden the coattails of the women’s rights movement,
aided by the widespread availability of the pill in the mid-1960s and
the Supreme Court decisions in 1965 and 1972 that liberalized birth
control. Now women could have consequence-free sex, and they were
demanding power in relationships and in the workplace. These leaders
were shaken. Their own power was under assault, and so was the
previously unchallenged idea that those who had risen to the top
through the existing social order—read: white, predominantly
Christian men—had an implicit right to rule over issues of family,
politics, and commerce. The moral order that they found sacrosanct was
crumbling in a way that invoked Biblical battles in their collective
mindset.

When the architects of a politically emergent radical right wing
landed on abortion as a political issue in a pivotal conference call
of their leadership in the late 1970s, they were searching for an
efficient proxy for their ultimate war against the forces pushing the
country toward a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. Despite prolific
revisionist history, evangelical leaders had no real issue with _Roe
v. Wade_ when it was handed down in 1973. W.A. Criswell, former
president of the Southern Baptist Convention and uncontested leader of
the early megachurch movement, put out a statement
[[link removed]] lauding
the decision. “I have always felt,” the prominent lead pastor of
First Baptist Dallas (Texas) wrote, “that it was only after a child
was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an
individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that
what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

Then came the 1980 election. Through its advancement of Ronald
Reagan’s successful bid for President that year, the New Right was
able to convince Republicans that railing against abortion to rally
their religious base in a broader moral crusade against a descent into
godlessness could win elections. At the same time, conservatives were
building the organization that would soon be known for advancing
deeply conservative judges throughout the American courts. In the
years after the Federalist Society formed in 1982, its members claimed
to be issue agnostic, instead focusing on advancing legal theories of
“originalism” and “textualism.” However, by the 2000s, it was
next to impossible to find a Federalist Society jurist not staunchly
opposed to abortion rights and much of the rest of the progressive
agenda.

Meanwhile, Democrats were also busy making sense of the new order.
Many in the party had notoriously opposed racial integration all
through the South, and some were resistant to women’s equality as
well. But political realities compelled them to adapt. In the late
1960s and early ‘70s, Republicans had adopted the Southern Strategy,
using racial animus to win over Southern white voters. After Schlafly
effectively defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, Democrats became the
party of choice for equal rights. Democrats, some more
enthusiastically than others, accepted that their path toward
electoral competitiveness lay in embracing the societal changes
underway.

It was at this precise moment, however, that the Republicans embarked
on a 12-year run of executive power. For much of that time, they also
dominated the Senate, which meant that Democrats were largely locked
out of governing despite persistent majorities in the House. To make
matters worse, Reagan was a master of the bully pulpit, waging a
misogynistic and racialized war against abortion, welfare, and
countless other artifacts of hard-won social progress from the
previous two decades. In the wilderness and struggling to come up with
a coherent message in the face of the New Right and Reagan, Democrats
remained committed to their grab bag of issues as they saw them; but
they saw their political future linked even more to moderation or
“triangulation,” as the Democratic strategy of the 1990s came to
be known.

Despite this, by the mid-1990s, the battle lines were firmly drawn.
Democrats were the pro-choice party, and Republicans had effectively
rebranded as “pro-life.” Two days after Bill Clinton took office
for his first term as President, he theatrically lifted the executive
orders limiting abortion imposed by the two prior Administrations; he
went on to pursue a broad agenda of triangulation to fight the
mounting culture wars. Democrats in Congress continued to negotiate
with their counterparts for a middle ground that would never be found.
Instead, the next quarter-century was dominated by an increasingly
radical GOP mounting legal and legislative attacks on reproductive
rights, efforts that were punctuated by bouts of violence and
political terrorism targeting abortion providers and clinic staff when
change did not come fast enough. All of this was just a precursor of
what was to come.

The Perils of One-Sided Democracy

Amidst this struggle, the country had reached a tipping point. As the
New Right took over the GOP, the party itself became less invested in
the continued working of democracy. Its leaders turned to
consolidating power through new means: maintaining a highly engaged,
zealous base; suppressing civic engagement through voting
restrictions; and endlessly vilifying their opponents.

Abortion hit all of these goals. Long-standing societal stigma against
talking about sex—specifically, women’s sexuality outside of the
strictures of motherhood—helped Republicans depress resistance to
their efforts. The rise of right-wing media throughout this era,
including talk radio and the establishment of Fox News, created an
asymmetry in the public discourse that the Democrats were not prepared
for.

Their reaction was to quietly pursue negotiations toward common ground
on reproductive rights while focusing public airtime on issues they
felt were better suited for public discourse. This was reflective of
their broader orientation toward advancing the progressive frontier on
the issues that served the interests of the messy coalition they
depended on to get a majority of votes. That orientation is laudable
in principle; after all, social progress is an ever-evolving quest,
requiring consistent incremental steps toward the goal of universal
equality in the eyes of the law. But in practice, this too often
blinded them to the unyielding approach that the New Right’s holy
war had introduced to the Republican Party. Even after Democrats began
to absorb the new reality, they were often paralyzed with indecision
over what to do about it; meeting the GOP in kind would be to admit
democracy was not working.

In order to call the strategy out for what it was, Democrats would
have had to surmount their own discomfort, and yet this issue—which
in their minds was in constant competition with others for their
attention and resources—was never deemed important enough to be
worth getting over that discomfort. So, most Democrats continued to
think of the abortion rights issue as a necessary concession to an
interest group in their coalition rather than the strategic
underpinning of an unyielding political opposition. The GOP gamble
paid off, and American women and American democracy are paying for it
now.

For years, the GOP has made steady progress in curtailing reproductive
rights—bans on government funding for poor women to access abortion,
debilitating waiting periods for women who ask for the procedure,
invasive and medically unnecessary ultrasound laws. At the same time,
they have used abortion as a trigger to stall or block key pieces of
legislation. In the Obama era, Democratic leadership tried to preempt
a long public battle over the Affordable Care Act by accepting an
exclusion on abortion coverage demanded, in part, by some of their own
members. The Republicans still claimed incorrectly that loopholes in
the bill allowed for abortion coverage and nearly derailed the act’s
passage, which was their goal in the first place.

From a political perspective, Republicans were delighted to force
Democrats to cede ground on abortion for nothing in return, to the
growing frustration of the latter party’s rank and file. And
ultimately, the constant skirmishes over abortion obscured the fact
that the GOP was waging a far more sinister war—one against liberal
democracy as a whole—and building an army for a final showdown that
would have dire consequences.

First They Came for Abortion, Then Democracy

Democracy has always been an aspiration as much as a governing system.
It is both the vision of an unending march toward a more just world
and a functioning, participatory system that creates binding rules for
mass adoption. Almost all adherents of democracy as a form of
governance speak in the same breath of its frailty and the dearth of
reasonable alternatives. To retain the confidence of those it seeks to
govern, a democracy must deliver on the promise of progress and the
need for stability, ideals often in tension with each other. To manage
that tension, leaders have to respect the systems and structures of
government but also the rules of engagement—a set of spoken and
unspoken norms that guide participants toward constructive
participation.

This is not and has never been easy, but it has become a uniquely
one-sided effort since the New Right captured the GOP. Instead of
pursuing the hard work of persuasion, public debate, and incremental
change that is the bedrock of democracy, they set about attacking the
base assumptions and norms that are the pillars of its operations.
Paul Weyrich—often heralded as the godfather of the New Right
movement, co-founder of stalwart right-wing institutions including the
Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council
(ALEC)—once proudly proclaimed: “We are different from previous
generations of conservatives…. We are no longer working to preserve
the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power
structure of this country.” He went on to say
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a crowd at a 1980 religious right gathering: “I don’t want
everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They
never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not
now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly
goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

ALEC served as an early and effective arm of this ideology. Through
the 1980s and ‘90s, the organization mostly focused on attacking the
regulatory state—on reducing the power of government by weakening
the institutions that make it effective. But it also promoted the New
Right’s vision of heteronormative white supremacy through policy
papers opposing divestment from South Africa under apartheid and a
full-throated attack on LGBTQ rights in a memo that erroneously stated
that pedophilia was commonly associated with being gay. After Obama
took office in 2009, ALEC shifted many of its resources into advancing
voter suppression laws, dropping all pretense of a belief in full
civic engagement. Right-wing media outlets churned out stories about
attempted voter fraud, most of which proved false. Republicans led the
charge to prioritize prosecution of these cases while also undertaking
steps to gerrymander districts so as to insulate themselves from
political competition and accountability. The combined effect of these
efforts was material, in that fewer people were able to vote and those
votes counted less. But it was also psychological. Fewer people will
make the effort to vote if they believe that action doesn’t result
in impact. In 2016, the United States ranked
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out of 35 democratic nations in voter participation.

Of course, Donald Trump was infamous for busting norms. Imposing an
explicit litmus test on his Supreme Court nominees that required they
be committed to overturning _Roe _was one more indication that he
saw a political priority in shoring up an extreme and vitriolic base
over assuring all Americans that he was committed to a stable and
continuous culture of governance.

Still, arguably the most flagrant recent example of violating norms
happened in preparation for the 2016 election, not in the wake of it,
and had nothing to do with Trump. In late February 2016, Mitch
McConnell took an unprecedented move when he announced
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refusal to move forward President Obama’s nominee to fill deceased
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat. Blatantly disregarding
well-documented history, McConnell claimed that confirming a sitting
President’s nominee during an election year would undercut the
ability of the voting populace to decide the direction of the Court.

McConnell gambled on both the confusion and the complacency of the
Democrats, and both proved savvy bets. Many Democratic leaders
appeared to wait for McConnell’s blatant lie to spark sufficient
public outrage to force him to back down. When that failed to
materialize, they reasoned that Hillary Clinton’s election was a
foregone conclusion. Whispers in the halls of Congress and along K
Street were that she might even nominate someone more progressive than
Obama’s choice, Merrick Garland. One way or another, Democrats
believed that mass participation would save them from this
extraordinary act by the opposition. It never came. Progressives had
no real history of mobilizing around the courts the way the right did.
Trump won, and McConnell’s historic coup was made complete when he
publicly reversed his prior claim about election-year nominees as he
rushed to confirm Amy Coney Barrett in the wake of Ruth Bader
Ginsburg’s death just weeks before the 2020 election put the White
House in Joe Biden’s hands.

Meanwhile, the Court itself was getting ready to break significant
norms, starting with the fundamental idea that precedent matters in
its ability to make its decisions binding. When _Dobbs_ came down,
even Chief Justice John Roberts expressed concern about the decision
due to his fellow justices’ disregard for _stare
decisis_ (previous decisions by the Court) in their evisceration
of _Roe_. “Surely we should adhere closely to principles of
judicial restraint here, where the broader path the Court chooses
entails repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously
recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed applying the doctrine
of _stare decisis_,” he wrote in his concurrence. Clearly the chief
justice preferred an incrementalist approach more consistent with
democratic principle.

But Justice Samuel Alito brushed any concerns aside in his opinion,
writing that the Court is free to decide as it likes and, further,
should be insulated from public opinion. Far from being solely about
abortion, the decision demonstrated a full embrace by the majority of
an anti-democratic approach to what they believed was a morally
correct view of how the country must be governed. As _New York
Times_ columnist Ezra Klein wrote
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the immediate aftermath: “America’s age of norms is over. This is
the age of power.”

Gender Oppression and the Rise of Authoritarianism

Reproductive oppression and authoritarianism have always been
inextricably linked. In the last decade, the United States has joined
Poland, Brazil, and Hungary as nations where the ascendance of
strongman leaders and anti-democratic parties has gone hand in hand
with a crackdown on reproductive rights. But rather than these trends
naturally evolving in parallel, the deeply welded connection was
central to the New Right’s plan to consolidate power in the United
States. To say that today’s right is anti-abortion and
anti-democracy is both accurate and incomplete. The truth is that
these two elements of their worldview are inseparable now and must be
addressed as one.

Perhaps nothing defines the present moment as clearly as a gathering
in New York City late last year. In early December, hundreds of people
filed into a ballroom in Manhattan, dressed in formal attire for a
night out at the New York Young Republican Club. The attendees were
a who’s who
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the far-right wing. Speakers included Donald Trump Jr. and Georgia
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Far-right activist Jack
Posobiec—best known for promoting a 2016 conspiracy theory about a
supposed pedophile ring in the basement of a pizzeria involving
Hillary Clinton, which ended in a man firing a gun inside the
restaurant—spoke from the stage. Over cocktails, Steve Bannon
mingled with three incoming Republican congressmen, including George
Santos of New York. Peter Brimelow, who founded the anti-immigration
website VDare, was there, as were members of European far-right
parties. From the dais, NYYRC president Gavin Wax proclaimed
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thunderous applause:

_We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared
to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the
ballot box. And in the streets.__ _

In her own speech, Marjorie Taylor Greene joked that if she had been
in charge of the January 6 insurrection, it would have been armed and
successful. The crowd was buoyant as they seemingly celebrated
democracy’s descent into divinely ordained civil war.

The fact that the attendees were all virulently anti-abortion would
merit no notice. That credential has long been the price of entry to
the Republican Party. Greene has claimed that
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is the work of Satan whispering into women’s ears. During his
campaign, Santos compared abortion to slavery, describing them as
similarly “barbaric.” Brimelow’s VDare website is full of claims
about the supposed “great replacement” orchestrated by the
left—an alleged white genocide that some have invoked to justify
draconian anti-abortion laws. But perhaps no one demonstrates the
convergence of apocalyptic rhetoric and anti-abortion sentiment better
than Posobiec, who claimed last year that arguments in support of
abortion rights are a precursor to the left’s “transhumanist
agenda,” where God’s will is replaced by a nihilistic worship of
machine science. Another right-wing commentator
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up these comments, excoriating the sinister worldview purportedly
underlying defenses of abortion as “an abomination against the
creation” and “a lie against the Creator.”

The themes of holy wars and mortal threats to the divinely ordained
way of life are not new; in fact, they are the exact themes that gave
rise to the New Right. But the new generation of far-right leaders has
grown increasingly brazen in broadcasting them. The Big Lie that the
election was stolen from Trump in 2020 metastasized in many
Americans’ minds, and right-wing outlets, led by Fox News, amped up
the rhetoric about an inevitable showdown between “good patriots”
and those stealing the soul of the country. Still, abortion’s
integral role in this narrative has long been overlooked by pundits
and politicians.

Trump’s election reignited the innate connection between the white
nationalist groups and the more respectable anti-abortion movement.
Leading white supremacist group Patriot Front openly commanded members
to attend the annual March for Life in Washington, DC, to look for new
recruits. The anti-immigration sentiment that was the bedrock of
Trump’s campaign provided social permission for right-wing
candidates to ground anti-abortion efforts in the idea that white
people are being replaced in America. Now-defeated Republican Iowa
Congressman Steve King said
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2017: “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s
babies. You’ve got to keep your birth rate up, and that you need to
teach your children your values.” And in June 2022, Illinois
Representative Mary Miller responded to the fall of _Roe_ by calling
the decision a “victory for white life” at a rally with Trump.
(Miller’s campaign later stated that she meant to say “victory for
right to life.”) And when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on
January 6, 2021, it was easy to spot known clinic protestors
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avowed anti-abortion activists among the crowd. It’s imperative to
understand these forces as one and the same in order to effectively
combat them.

In September 2021, roughly a year after the contentious election and
the assault on the Capitol, the Public Religion Research
Institute conducted a poll
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The results were sobering. Republicans stand alone in believing that
God has given America a “special role in human history.” White
evangelicals, as the driving force in that party, believe this most
fervently. They also believe that this special role is under threat. A
majority of Republicans say that the American culture and way of life
have changed for the worse since the 1950s, and 57 percent of white
evangelicals believe that the United States should be made up mostly
of people who follow the Christian faith. White evangelicals are the
religious group most likely to believe political violence might be
necessary to save the country. While these sentiments have probably
always been present in this demographic, what has changed is their
grip on our governing system. The idea of an impending righteous
war—grounded in apocalyptic narratives native to
fundamentalists—has become inextricably linked with the future of
our nation.

Preparing for the Future

Savvy Republican leaders and operatives understand their conundrum.
The 2022 elections were proof that they had alienated too many of the
voters they need for durable majorities, and yet, their work on
abortion is not done. Their base demands a nationwide ban, which was
the clear message at the 2023 March for Life. One of the first bills
put to the floor of the House after the GOP reclaimed their majority
was an anti-abortion bill. All this despite the clear signs they are
on the wrong side of the electorate. It’s this needle they seek to
thread as they advance toward the crucial presidential election in
2024.

In red states, advocates are demanding increasingly authoritarian
measures to enforce existing laws. Leaders are publicly demanding jail
time for violations of abortion bans already on the books and ramping
up efforts to restrict the distribution of abortion pills that make
self-managed abortion safe and hard to track.

“Everyone who is trafficking these pills should be in jail for
trafficking,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser
[[link removed]],
president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. She claims to be in
talks with multiple Republican governors about this topic. Such a
claim by the head of the most politically influential anti-abortion
group in America, combined with news about investigations and scores
of new restrictions and bans, could have a chilling effect on the
number of people seeking abortion, due to fear of prosecution.

Where fear doesn’t suffice, mandating silence might. A Texas state
lawmaker recently introduced legislation
[[link removed]] that
would compel internet providers to block access to websites that
distribute pills and information about abortion and abortion
medication, a level of censorship more associated with the government
of China than our own. Anti-abortion activists invoke the Comstock
Act [[link removed]] to prohibit
sending abortion pills through the federal mail system, an initiative
explicitly designed to override abortion protections in blue states.
Still others are seeking to curtail travel out of state to access
abortion, a measure acknowledged as unconstitutional even by some
abortion foes. Conservatives could also pass laws restricting the work
of abortion funds that help people obtain reproductive care, or
requiring them to hand over information to the government.

What all of these proposals have in common is an acknowledgement that
state legislators don’t expect voluntary compliance and are willing
to sacrifice democratic principles to get their way. They hope to
instill not just fear and silence, but the sense that resistance is
futile, especially as they gear up for the rest of the war that was
always endemic to their goals. As Justice Clarence Thomas reminds us
[[link removed]] in
his concurrence on _Dobbs_, abortion is the beginning of this front,
not the end:

…in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s
substantive due process precedents,
including _Griswold_, _Lawrence_, and _Obergefell _[decisions
affirming the rights to privacy regarding contraception, to consensual
sexual activity between people of the same sex, and to gay marriage].
Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably
erroneous,” we have a duty to “correct the error” established in
those precedents.

But Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion lawyer involved in crafting
state abortion bans, acknowledged the tension between “true
believers” and transactional politicians when he said, “Especially
after this election, a lot of Republicans will want to change the
subject, and going after abortion pills is not the way to change the
subject.”

And therein lies the key to a counterstrategy moving forward. The
midterms offered definitive examples of how Democrats can regain
command of the narrative and start the process of restoring rights and
reinvesting trust into the slow, plodding work of democracy.

First, break the silence and call the GOP’s bluff. It took the fall
of _Roe_ for Democrats to harness the power of abortion, but this
election season saw them go all in. By mid-September, Democrats had
spent
[[link removed]] $124
million on television ads referencing abortion, almost 20 times their
spending on such ads in all of 2018. In the first five months of the
year, which included the month after the draft of
the_ Dobbs _decision was leaked, Democrats’ spending on Facebook
ads dwarfed
[[link removed]] Republicans’
spending by 14 to one. Meanwhile, most Republican and right-leaning
groups spent little to zero. UC Berkeley political communications
professor Dan Schnur observed
[[link removed]], “It’s
pretty clear that Republicans don’t want to talk about this.”

Second, don’t shy away from the issues, but run on the values.
Whether through candidate elections or ballot measures, trust in the
majorities that want to advance our causes but appeal to their
higher-order interests. The campaign against the Kansas ballot measure
called itself Kansans for Constitutional Freedom for a reason, and the
group’s ads were just as likely to stress the personal violation of
“government mandates” as they were the right to abortion.
California Governor Gavin Newsom rented billboards in red states with
pro-choice messages, some of which included the Bible verse _“Love
your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment than
these.”_ (Mark 12:31), asserting that reproductive rights have a
grounding in faith.

Third, drive home that this is not a question of winning on an issue
but rather of competing worldviews that lead to dramatically different
destinations. Josh Shapiro wove it all together beautifully in
his closing arguments
[[link removed]] to
his victorious campaign to become Pennsylvania’s new governor.
Speaking of his Republican opponent, he said:

This guy loves to talk a good game about freedom, right? Let me tell
you something. It’s not freedom to tell women what they’re allowed
to do with their bodies. That’s not freedom. It’s not freedom to
tell our children what books they are allowed to read. It’s not
freedom when [Doug Mastriano] gets to decide who you’re allowed to
marry. I say, love is love.

It’s not freedom to say, you can work a 40-hour workweek, but you
can’t be a member of a union. That’s not freedom. And it sure as
hell isn’t freedom to say, you can go vote, but he gets to pick the
winner. That’s not freedom. That’s not freedom.

But you know what? You know what we’re for? We’re for real
freedom. And let me tell you what real freedom is. Real freedom is
when you see that young child in north Philly and you see the
potential in her so you invest in her public school. That’s real
freedom. That’s real freedom. Real freedom comes when we invest in
that young child’s neighborhood to make sure it’s safe so she gets
to her eighteenth birthday. That’s real freedom.

Finally, we must always remember that our theory of change requires
participation from the majority, while theirs depends on the masses
opting out. We cannot afford to mimic their apocalyptic language, no
matter how tempting it is. Congressman Barney Frank once said, “When
you tell your supporters that nothing has gotten better, and that any
concessions you’ve received are mere tokenism, you take away their
incentive to stay mobilized.”

“It’s a slow, iterative process on the ground in building
[reproductive rights] up,” Alicia Ely Yamin, the senior fellow on
global health and rights at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom
Center, told_ Foreign Policy_
[[link removed]].
“On the other hand, tearing them down seems quite easy.” The same
can be said for democracy. So claiming victory for incremental
change—fighting for perfection, but accepting progress—is
instrumental to keeping the majorities involved for the long haul.

The good news is that there’s good news. Voters in swing states
roundly rejected election deniers running for positions that would
have given them authority over elections. These issues didn’t just
fire up the Democratic base; they were widely repellent. Calculations
of turnout in key counties in Arizona and Nevada showed an advantage
for Republicans, but election-denying candidates were defeated in
pivotal races in both of those states.

“This was the year liberal democracy fought back,” blared the
headline of the _Financial Times_’s Janan Ganesh’s post-
[[link removed]]election
column
[[link removed]],
exulting in not just the rejection of Trumpism but also the election
results in Brazil and France. Ganesh could have celebrated, too, the
emergence of pro-democracy movements in China and Iran. But his final
line should bear equal weight. “There is little reason to be
complacent, and even less to be magnanimous.” Our future hinges on
these lessons.

_ILYSE HOGUE [[link removed]] is an
author, a social change practitioner, and a former leader of multiple
progressive organizations, including NARAL Pro-Choice America._

_If you believe that it's important to reinvigorate progressivism for
the 21st century, then we encourage you to subscribe to DEMOCRACY
[[link removed]]: A JOURNAL OF IDEAS. Dedicated to
the belief that ideas matter in politics, every quarterly issue will
bring you the best bold ideas on foreign and domestic issues along
with thought-provoking review essays of the latest and most
significant new books by academics, journalists, and public
intellectuals._

Democracy: A Journal of Ideas achieves what no other publication out
there attempts: to create serious dialogue among progressives on the
most pressing concerns of the day. You won't want to miss an issue.

_Sincerely,
Michael Tomasky
Editor, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas_

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