Burning the Democratic Party to save it

The Poor Man is–for good reason–one of my favorite blogs, so I was hoping that this post was just a Swiftian joke, but apparently it’s not. Lindsay Beyerstein does a good job of dismantling the baffling proposition that advocating the recriminalization of abortion would lead the Dems to victory. Allow me to point out a few other reasons why this is Kaye Grogan batshit nutty:

–The idea that the pro-choice position is electoral suicide for the Democrats is the ultimate variant of Drum/Wilkinson slave morality, where the magic solution for the Democrats is to have them pander (even more!) to moderate cultural conservatives, rather than sending out John Kerry to rip up bibles and piss on the Confederate flag, which what you would think we were doing if you read this stuff (when, in the real world, he pandered relentlessly to moderate cultural conservatives.) Allow me to point out something that both triumphalist wingnuts and self-abasing liberals seem to be forgetting: the pro-choice position is extremely popular. National majorities have been pro-choice since 1967. Roe v. Wade has always been popular. Overturning Roe would be a national catastrophe for the Republican Party. And since, as a number of the Poor Man’s commenters have noted, the de facto position of pro-lifers is “abortion should be illegal but not so illegal that if the daughter of a Republican congressman or the head of the Chamber of Commerce gets knocked up she can’t get it taken care of by the local ob-gyn.” As a result, the pro-life minority Northrup wishes to sell out to is much smaller than polls would suggest. In other words, the only people available on this basis are people who are pro-coathanger but are otherwise OK with the pluralist social values of the Democratic Party (many of which are much less popular than abortion rights.) If we’re going to broaden our base, I suggest a constituency that wouldn’t be able to fit in a phone booth.

–There is a rarely mentioned corollary to Tom Frank’s observation that Kansas social conservatives vote against their class interests: the San Fransisco and Upper West Side liberals who vote against theirclass interests. What makes the Democratic Party nationally competitive (and it is competitive, despite the attempt of hand-wringers to turn a 3-point loss to an incumbent into ’84 or ’72) is that because they’re so dominant in wealthy states willing to elect socially moderate Republican governors–NY, CA, NJ, IL–that they start out with over 100 electoral votes without spending a dime. The most immediate consequence of becoming an anti-choice party would be to, at best, make these states bloody battlegrounds and, at worst, to make them reliably Republican again. So, the GOP starts out with TX, FL, NY, CA–it’s hard to see how this works out for the Dems, even if being anti-choice allows us to take back Kansas and Alabama. (And, of course, it wouldn’t.)

–It’s true that gay marriage is unpopular, so maybe there’s the angle. But, again, as Lindsay notes this assumes that coming out against gay marriage would stop people from thinking of Dems as “cultural elitists,” a proposition that’s quite clearly false. Trying to out-homophobe the Republicans is a hopeless strategy. I think it’s also worth noting that it’s pretty easy for straight white males to suggest that women should give up their silly reproductive rights, gay people should be happy with their second-class citizenship, etc. I’d be more willing to listen to people willing to sell out their own interests.

So, in short, rebranding the Dems as the party with a coathanger in every pot (TM)would be 1)a grossly immoral capitulation of core values that would 2)be electoral suicide. Ah, I think I’ll pass.