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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The 'Dobbs' Backlash and the Democrats' Choice

Republicans on the Supreme Court overturned the will of the majority; do
liberals have the leadership to fight back?

Roe v. Wade has always been a kind of devil's bargain for American
liberalism. As I explained in my 2008 book, The Cause: The Fight for
American Liberalism From Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama
:

Feminists ... rejoiced at the news, but perhaps what the decision best
illustrated was the degree to which liberals' cultural victories would
be won in the courts rather than in voting booths, thereby inspiring
backlashes against them and the courts that had ruled on them, wherever
they took place. For many people, Roe implied allowing
recreational/nonprocreational sex, which they linked to other changes in
the culture that further fueled the antiliberal backlash. Rising divorce
rates and the increased availability of pornography-especially its
permeation of the larger culture through increasingly explicit movies
and magazines such as Playboy, Penthouse, and the much raunchier
Hustler-turned millions of economic liberals into cultural
conservatives.

Undoubtedly, the loosening of sexual ethics, and simply suggesting that
women experienced sexual pleasure as much as men, constituted a cultural
victory for liberalism. The Germaine Greer style of feminism concerned
itself less with equal access to education or professional advancement
than with orgasms, while Erica Jong's 1973 Fear of Flying celebrated
the fantasy of the "zipless fuck," one based on anonymity and lack
of commitment. But such sexual liberties also presented a danger in
crudely equating individual pleasure with liberation. The ERA's
failure provided sufficient warning about a general popular uneasiness
with the side effects of the sexual revolution and the difficulty of
politically legislated and/or judicially mandated cultural change It
also created a whipping boy for conservative critics who suggested that
liberalism, when it moved into cultural territory, was little more than
mindless tolerance and permissiveness, ready to embrace a "zipless
fuck" in virtually every aspect of public life.

The anger inspired by such reactions to Roe (Ruth Bader Ginsburg
expressed a parallel, though more legally based, set of concerns about
the decision
)
led to the movement that eventually packed the Court with five justices
who were not only wiling to overturn "settled law" on abortion and
lie about it during their confirmation hearings. We now know they were
willing to do so much more, rolling back the clock on half a century of
racial progress, gun control, separation of church and state, gay
rights, workplace protections, honest government, the ability of the
Environmental Protection Agency to protect the environment
, and who
knows what in the future. (This to say nothing of the fact that this
reactionary political movement was also able to somehow elect a
dangerous lunatic
to the
presidency in 2016.)

Since the early '60s, liberals relied on what Samuel Moyn, in a
prescient and tightly argued 2020 essay in Dissent, termed
"juristocracy
"
rather than democracy to win their political battles. Now it has come
back to bite them in the ass. Victories in the courts-which were
reflected in the popular culture-led to complacency about winning
elections. One could easily name a whole host of issues in which
liberals enjoy a supermajority in opinion polls but cannot get anywhere
in terms of legislation or even much in the way of presidential action,
even when one of our guys is president.

Obviously, a big part of the reason for the chokehold on popular
progressive legislation is the power accorded to money in our system
(thanks, in significant measure, to the Supreme Court; I sort of wrote a
book about this
,
too). That explains why billionaires pay virtually no taxes and why
corporations can despoil the planet without sanction. But that does not
explain everything, and it does not particularly explain the loss of
legal abortion, nor the absence of far stricter gun control law, which
both enjoy supermajority support.

The silver lining in the Dobbs decision-likely the only one-is the
fact that, because it reaches so clearly and directly into the most
intimate aspects of the lives of so many millions of people

in a way that perhaps no other issue does, it may inspire the kind of
passion on the progressive side that the right has consistently
successfully ginned up for the past half-century. This is especially
true in a period when both the Democratic Party and the resistance to
Trump were-and are-female-driven
.
It also turns the tables on the juristocracy, with Republicans in the
position of using the courts to subvert popular opinion.

Things have not exactly been looking up for Democrats of late. But on
Monday morning, Axios

reported two snap polls that followed the Dobbs decision: First, a CBS
News/YouGov poll

of 1,591 adults found that 50 percent of Democrats were more likely to
vote based on the ruling, while only 20 percent of Republicans said the
same. Second, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll

of 941 adults found that 78 percent of Democrats said

the Court's decision makes them more likely to vote this fall-24
points higher than Republicans.

Owing to the fact that at least two members of the Democrats'
one-member majority in the Senate (including the vice president's
vote) are really more comfortable with the Republicans' agenda than
their own, they do not have a hope of playing the same sort of dirty
pool that Mitch McConnell used to stack the Court with ideologues who
would march in lockstep with the conservative movement's agenda. They
will have to win back their rights-the ones we've already lost and
the ones we are about to lose if Clarence Thomas's writings and
speeches are any guide (as they have been in the past)-in the streets
and at the ballot box.

It must be a two-pronged effort: first, to save our democracy from theft
by the fascist cult that has colonized the Republican Party and is
planning to undermine the majority rule in 2024; and second, to inspire
people who previously thought that everything-especially everything
for well-educated, upper-middle-class urban and suburban elites-was
going to be all right without too much effort on our part.

I think AOC's approach
is the
right one on this, and 82-year-old Nancy Pelosi-who supported the only
anti-choice, pro-NRA Democrat in the House

against his progressive challenger-maybe not so much. (I mean, a poem
?
Seriously?) I also worry that 79-year-old Joe Biden-who is, according
to "sources," apparently worried
about
Democrats appearing too partisan and potentially threatening the alleged
public trust of the very same Supreme Court that is gutting all of our
rights and endangering our lives and our democracy-is also too much a
man of the Democrats' complacent past to be a man of this crucial
moment. Biden, coincidentally, more than anyone ensured that Clarence
Thomas would be shielded

from his disgraceful past during his confirmation hearings and thereby
approved by the Senate.

Given Biden's poll numbers, and the concerns that one would have about
any person of his age in so demanding a job, I do not think it would be
such a terrible idea if, say, 54-year-old Gavin Newsom

(who, as it happens, has coincidentally just bought advertising time in
Florida
)
decided that the party was ready for new leadership and challenged him
in the primaries running on a more energetic, and yes, partisan,
platform (though I am still going to need an explanation for that
marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle
).

More than 80 years ago, the Frankfurt School theorist Max Horkheimer
, still in his more
radical phase, insisted that liberalism was an unreliable basis of
resistance to fascism, and only socialism would be strong enough to
survive its onslaught. If Horkheimer is to be proven wrong, liberalism
needs to finally become the "fighting faith
" so many of
its partisans have always hoped it would become. Dobbs may very well be
the spark that makes that possible. (John Ganz, I see, has something
similar to say here
.
And Michelle Goldberg has another, interesting point to make here
.)

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Why They Hate Us, Part XXXVI: Shocker-the CIA funded the Colombian
military for decades

while fully aware that it was directing the killings of leftist
activists.

Clever tweet of the week from @jonfasman: "The
plate-throwing detail is unsurprising. Trump said he would be tough on
china."

This guy informs us that
Tuesday was "National Columnists' Day." Isn't that lovely? He
suggests you watch "C-Span's Brian Lamb interview with Eric Alterman
on his book, Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the
Collapse of American Politics (1992), which diagnosed that world years
before Jon Stewart's more famous takedown of Tucker Carlson and Paul
Begala on Crossfire," here
. Smart guy, I gotta
say ...

I saw Baz Luhrmann's Elvis movie this week. I am usually a fan of his
work, but not this time. My advice would be to stay home unless you
really feel like going to the movies and there's only crap playing.
It's entertaining, but far too long, narratively incoherent, and
historically useless. Its saving grace is Tom Hanks's amazing
performance as Colonel Parker. But really, if ever there were an
argument for originalism, the actual Elvis is it: Here
, here
, here
, here

(with the wonderful Ann-Margret), and finally, here
are my favorites of the
King's many magnificent performances. Bonus: Here
's the greatest
performer of any kind in any medium doing an unrehearsed solo "Burning
Love" during a Paris preconcert sound check by request. And here
's an even more
impressive one, also by request (and therefore unrehearsed) with the
world's tightest rock 'n' roll band. And finally, here
he is again, with the
"Philly Elvis," in one of the craziest performances you will ever
see.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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