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May 4, 2022
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Yeah, I'm really doubtful about this. Is access to safe and legal circumcision an elementary part of men's health?

Many people commenting here seem to see an elective abortion as a normal, ordinary procedure, like getting a wisdom tooth pulled. I don't think that is all that common a perception in the US.

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May 4, 2022Edited
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Apparently in your view the working class won't care enough about women's rights to vote against Trump and other Republicans. That could well be true, but in that case the working class will have the government it voted for.

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A lot can happen after 10 weeks...

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May 4, 2022Edited
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May 4, 2022
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As someone who serves on the board of an institution into which woke ideology has crept, leadership is requiring that I sign a pledge to support their requirements for DEI even in my private life. I will not sign this pledge and may have to step down from an organization that I love and have given much to for a long time as a result. So, the real world impacts are spreading and crystalizing. You may be lucky enough that it hasn't impacted you yet. But, it will.

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May 5, 2022
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“Don't sweat the petty things. Don't pet the sweaty things.” —George Carlin

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Please have the courage to NOT sign - make them officially fire you.

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It makes sense that they don't want to make any strong political commitments, since the floor keeps moving so fast under everybody's feet.

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Yes! And on the left side, gay marriage came about the same way.

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May 4, 2022
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This has been my impression as well. I'm biased, however, since, as a pro-life liberal, I really *want* it to be true. The Democrats are so united on abortion - more so than anything else, it seems - that since 2016 I've reluctantly been ignoring the issue entirely while voting, because I'm not supporting the GOP no matter what, so the alternative would be not to vote at all.

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May 4, 2022
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They're going to get slaughtered anyway, partly because the left is very bad on women's rights in other ways, and plenty of women know it. The ones who are in stable relationships, raising kids, are more worried about that than they are about abortion. See the Virginia governor's election.

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May 4, 2022
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I'm thinking more of school curricula and parental rights to raise their children as they see fit.

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I spent a lot of time in Democratic politics and I’ve been around a lot of very, very pro-choice (sometimes even pro-abortion) activists and the problem is the same as all activist capture: they force the support of unpopular, fringe positions at the expense of real gains. There’s a wonderful example on the other “side” as conservative activists: gay marriage. Civil unions were popular even when gay marriage was not. Conservatives took an extreme position of opposing them because activists required it. Even Bush thought they shouldn’t oppose it!

So, instead of making a reasonable compromise that would’ve pushed same sex marriage advocates into a more difficult argument (marriage v. civil unions) they took an absolutist position. They may never have won that fight long term as they were standing astride the march of history, but I’m willing to bet they lost quicker and more decisively because they were unreasonable.

Americans are generally pretty reasonable and have a sense of fairness (despite also being very easily manipulated). The difference between “legal, safe, and rare” and “Christian Taliban wants to protect tumors” is pretty massive. I agree with you that I think attempting a reasonable opinion calculated to appeal to voters is probably going to be more successful than trying to engage in an extremist fight to the death.

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I am extremely pro-choice and I agree. Find the compromise so that abortion stays legal for at least the first trimester. Work the long game for bodily autonomy. But we have to keep it legal first. We do need practical heads on this.

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Yep, there's pretty clear public support for European style abortion laws. It's political malpractice to have wasted 50 years without getting that encoded in law. It's baffling to me that there hasn't been more reflection on this.

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I realize this may conflict with the answer I gave elsewhere, but Congress is feckless and will avoid responsibility wherever it can.

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This is also true. Cronyism is the priority - getting rich and building connections that will serve later when out of office. Horrible revolving door.

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May 4, 2022
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How are they going to communicate? The state will know everyone they contact and what's said at all times, unless the completely cut off electronic communication. Even beyond that the camera infrastructure in this country is immense, and if they have a cellphone but don't use it their position can still be tracked. The surveillance advantage is unprecedented. I just don't see it.

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May 4, 2022
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Love this kayfabe persona, KT. Keep it up!

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My friends, yesterday I wrote a post about my intent to remove inflammatory off-topic conversations, which have proven to be a problem. Then, as I probably should have expected, those conversations broke out, first in meta form, so out of frustration I turned off comments. I am prepared to do it again. Argue passionately, even intemperately, for what you believe in. But if you're jamming your pet issue into this post's comments when it's not germane I will be giving you a temporary ban.

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May 4, 2022
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May 4, 2022
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Steve Bannin'?

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There's more than one way to shut down Freedom Of Speech. By recurrently dragging a discussion off-topic to suit your own private ends, for example.

fwiw, I've been in online political discussions long enough to know that overbearing loudmouths- sometimes entire swarms of them- enjoy using methods like those to clog up and shut down formerly freewheeling Internet discussions. For the purpose of corraling a conversation toward a desired propaganda goal, those tactics are practically as effective as censorship.

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There are open threads where you can talk about whatever you want

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The God Emperor speaks.

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Surprised - I only show up here once a month but it seems like the conversations are usually pretty good.

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Standards seem quite high to me. At least compared to some other subscriptions I have.

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Please ban those who violate your rules - and let us clearly know when and why (unlike Twitter, say). I'm not one of those who hang out here for conversation with other commenters, but sometimes I read those who are here and act that way - mostly it's better here than in other Dem oriented places.

Plus Freddie, I really admire your clear yet easy and FUN to read explanations for your ideas.

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Suggestion based on what seemed to work (albeit requiring extra effort) for Scott Alexander, at least in the SSC days:

Publicly (though briefly) explain the reason for the ban, preferably with link(s) to the offending comment(s), along with the norm that arguing against the ban is potentially a banable offense itself. Your blog, your rules, your decision is final.

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Completely agree. Been thinking practicalities since the draft was leaked. I wonder what you make of an idea for those liberals and leftists who live in deep red states: organizing them into a voting block in Republican primaries. I know it's not a new idea but I wonder if it might be an idea whose time has come.

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Ive been thinking about this for the last few cycles. One thing Trump demonstrated is that it's a lot easier to ram through an insurgent candidate in the Republican primaries than on the Democratic side, because there are less roadblocks to votes counting.

House leadership taking the days immediately after the leak as an opportunity to double down on re-electing Cuellar just makes it more thinkable.

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I don't think there are 5 votes for that scorched earth opinion. Seems to be the assumption that this is fully baked. Even before public outcry, I don't think that's right. The rumor at the time was the whole point of the Kavanaugh nomination was that McConnell felt he wasn't a vote to overturn Roe. Maybe the 15 week threshold stands with Roberts & Kavanaugh writing something separate.

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This is why I honestly think there’s a decent chance this is a conservative leak to keep Kavanaugh on board. It will look much worse for him to defect now rather than if the decision was released normally and he declined to side with this nuclear opinion that even McConnell doesn’t want to have to actually talk about.

There’s plenty of support in this country for a 15 week ban except in cases of serious fetal abnormality or a danger to the mother’s life. But there is a significant majority opposition to the complete criminalization of abortion, which this decision opens the door to.

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Seems to be where Europe settled.

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And of course both sides will go too far and we’ll wind up with 6 week or total bans in some red states and up to 9 months in some blue ones. The reality is most people don’t like abortion but are ok with legalization through the first trimester and in the case of birth defect or health of the mother.

I don’t think this is the political win that some democrats are hoping it will be though. Most of the states that will ban or really limit abortion have effectively done so already and some states only have one or two clinics as it is.

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This is my opinion as well though I concede it may just be wishful thinking.

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Yes, it is definitely worth keeping in mind that this is a first-draft opinion from February, which may have been revised, or may not be able to get five votes. It ain't over till it's over, as a great wise man once said.

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Even though Roe was severely flawed, I am betting this way too.

I'm thinking this was an initial draft assigned to one justice, and another one's floating around written by another justice supporting the 15 week limit.

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With respect, if you think that opinion is "scorched earth" then you don't understand pro-life dynamics. A "scorched earth" opinion would have held, as this (https://bit.ly/38T5CsT) amicus brief presented to the court for consideration in the Dobbs case argued, that not only is there no Constitutional right to abortion, the Constitution's 14th Amendment positively compels a nationwide total ban on abortion *for any reason*.

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And that depends on definition of person. Which of course is the true crux of the entire issue.

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To your point, even leaving aside the legal arguments, I don't think I understand the culture of pro life movement very well as it's pretty far from my personal context. My priors were that the conservative elite understood that overturning Roe would not only be unworkable but also electoral poison. This draft punched a big hole in that view.

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When I think about the time and cost of leaving the MW to protest in DC various times for various things and compare it to the time and the cost of buckling down to the less performative work of being a precinct captain--HANDS DOWN local beats national. I felt excited about those protest in DC. The local precinct work was like shopping for lentil soup ingredients. But guess what? A very bad ordinance was overturned in my county when we got the right person elected. The national protests didn't get us anywhere except on the TV news.

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May 4, 2022Edited
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100%. I have an assignment that students have to attend a local government meeting. Most never have (City Council, County Commission). Our laser focus on presidential elections allows things to happen locally that can be terrible. But it (local) is so dull to most. Yet take a county in Florida--2-3 million people. That's a big territory ignored while we hand-wring about who will be president.

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Local interaction, over the course of time, also means that people who disagree on one issue may realize that they strongly agree on some other problem, and so develop the trust needed to find imperfect but acceptable compromises.

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Yes, this is absolutely right and it doesn't happen online.

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Theoretically. But Republicans are poised to take control of Congress and the Presidency sometime in the next 8-12 years, and I could see them passing a national anti-Abortion law. I wouldn't put my confidence of that higher than 50%, but it could happen. And there's nothing about this Supreme Court decision that gives me any confidence they would overturn it. Alito's writing anyway makes it pretty clear that he thinks abortion is a moral crime with no precedent or protection in American history, so it would be on one of the other conservative justices to defect. Not sure I trust any of them to do that.

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Did anyone else attend the 2004 March for Women's lives? I went as a college sophomore. In retrospect, it was impressively on message. They had craploads of signs that said "Who decides?" and "Keep abortion legal." I came home excited to fight for abortion and participated in some state-level lobbying.

Since then, there hasn't been a coherent national protest for abortion rights. I didn't go in 2017 (because I was hugely pregnant) but from what I saw it seemed like the message was "We hate Trump" with a bunch of lefty causes all mashed together.

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What has changed a lot since Roe v Wade is sonograms and better medical procedures and survival of premature babies. This isn't an argument against choice, just an observation. And YES, the 2017 demonstrations (I went to a large one in ATL) were more anti-Trump than pro-women, although women were the largest contingent.

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Viability moving under 24 weeks has been huge as has been the technology that allows younger and younger fetuses to survive and even trhive. Sonograms, especially the 3D sonograms, humanize the babies.

Mothers are also fighting back. I read a story about how a mother forced the hospital to transfer her to a hospital that would undertake life saving efforts for her 21 week old fetus and 8 years later, her son was alive and doing well, though with some disabilities. I know this is only one woman but if I had realized I could have done the same, I would have.

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I was there with you, Carina! I was also a college sophomore.

Ships in the night, ships in the night.

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I disagree that this will be a major issue driving elections.

We've been told that the Current Thing is of existential importance perpetually over the past five years. Voters are inured.

There are reasons that loan forgiveness has been much more prominent on the radar the past few years - downwardly mobile affluents in the Accela corridor and on the West Coast are parochial and don't care as much about broad social isseus that affect the less fortunate as they profess to.

And, abortion restrictions will be popular in many areas of the country. Evangelicals flocked to Trump in part because the establishment GOP 'couldn't deliver.' Well, they have.

I don't want to bang the drum endlessly, but this was a totally unnecessary outcome. RBG not retiring, 'Her Turn,' Reid escalating politicization of judicial appointees - all of these factors were contingent.

After Trump getting elected and now this, it's not clear to me why anyone should listen the progressive legacy media millennial *thought leaders* at all.

People will order misoprostol by mail. They will get on the bus to go to a different state. But the laws won't change until people's minds are changed, and the Left seems particularly bad at that.

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My impression is that the Left has largely given up on persuasion

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May 4, 2022
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May 4, 2022
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Yes, but there are those arguing to eliminate the secret ballot which would bring cancel culture to the voting booth: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/06/want-to-improve-democracy-abolish-the-secret-ballot/

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unfettered voting

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Sorry. Not understanding. Elaborate?

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That's because the FAR Left is operating from a position of perceived absolute morality.

When you believe it's not possible you could be wrong, persuasion is not needed. It's probably seen as weak to try and persuade because it implies compromise, which in turn implies fallibility, which again is not allowed. Forced compliance is the only option for true believers.

It's not all that different from the Christian Right if you think about it.

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Exactly the same. Which is my conundrum. If I vote for pro-choice, I am empowering woke ideology, which I loathe. What to do?

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Complain loud and clear like you're doing about the wokies. I've even thought about showing up to the local Democratic Party.

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That's not a bad idea.

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It will only aid turnout for the Dems, and will probably undo the gains the GOP made with the suburban vote (like in VA) due to handling of COVID.

Inflation is in the elephant in the room.

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I think the economic issues way outweigh this.

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Abortion has broad social and economic effects, beyond women's rights (which I support without qualification). Making it illegal is going to quickly accelerate the growth of the welfare state. This will place more stress on already over-stressed support systems like child and foster care, and will affect labor supply. People who have read Freakonomics will have a suspicion that the fatherless children growing up in poverty will be more predisposed to criminal behavior later. This is a social disaster waiting to happen. Educated folks in the suburbs are more likely to be able to foresee such trends.

This is why it's dangerous to have religious people like Alito in positions where they can do such damage on behalf of sustaining their myths.

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To be fair the constitutional question is whether or not there is a real basis for protecting abortion. RBG famously thought it was a stretch, at best.

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To be fair, in the states likely to outright ban abortion once Roe is overturned, it is already effectively impossible to get an abortion there already.

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I have complicated feelings about abortion myself, so I really try to take anti abortion arguments in good faith and assume they really want to protect babies. But I do have trouble believing that the majority of anti abortion politicians really believe they will make a significant impact on the number of aborted babies, rather than just making it harder on women and clearing their own consciences. If they REALLY believe there would be an influx of real human babies being born into difficult situations they would have to grapple with consequences. But I don’t believe THEY believe that will actually happen.

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Never discount a zealot's view of the world!

Chopping off the hands of thieves didn't stop theft, but it sure did make a pile of armless hands.

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Yes. Economics, crime, then immigration, public school curricula.

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I'm still so annoyed by Ginsberg and her fan base encouraging her to stay on the bench in her 80s. The right strategized and stayed disciplined while we were buying Notorious RBG thongs to wear with our "nasty woman" t-shirts and pink pussy hats.

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"Slay, queen! You do you, gurl!"

Two years later, abortion is illegal.

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Don’t forget- not just in her 80s, but a cancer survivor to boot. Which is what ended up killing her.

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I agree. How likely is it that a low-income black person, in a blue state where abortion is pretty much guaranteed, is going to vote blue even though blue has not delivered on minimum wage, healthcare, paid family leave, etc etc.... in order to protect the right to abortion of some far-away person they’ll never meet in a different state? Unlikely...

That said, it’s clear how the leak might’ve been a blue strategy to galvenize voters. It seems that Covid has solidified blue as the party of 21st-century, technocratic, upper class elites, and it’s clear that there really is no “blue fight” at the federal level for basic economic securities. So the only thing that’s left is protections of civil rights and identities, while the right tries to attack civil rights & identities. But both parties are unequivocally failing at the economic level; but the GOP never claimed to help people out economically, and blue did. That’s why the culture war is so prolific. It is truly the only fight remaining, seeing as both parties have consolidated around explicit, blatant bribery and corruption.

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The left has not delivered on health care? The Affordable Care Act is twelve years old and counting, and has helped millions of Americans can health insurance. That's what I call delivering like Dominos.

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From a country with what seems like a much better system with much better outcomes for the less advantaged (Australia), I can understand people not being impressed with an improvement from really quite bad for an advanced economy to just slightly less bad.

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I'll bet the millions of people who suddenly qualified for Medicaid, formerly unable to afford *any* policy, were pretty darn impressed.

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Yeah I'm sure there have been improvements for many, and from outside the country it's hard to get an impression of the net benefit overall so I'm not super confident in my thoughts here. But it does seem like there would be plenty of other things to do to make the US system significantly better.

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You'll get no disagreement there. In my view, the ACA is just a stop on the way to Medicare for All.

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True, but for millions of us its the difference between having some health insurance and none.

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I believe it was a "blue strategy to galvanize voters." I have not proof but the move is consistent with extreme left behavior over the past few years.

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The boy cried wolf so much people stopped listening. Then the wolf *actually showed up in town*.

There are a lot of pro-choice people where abortion was only a top ten issue, not a top 3 or even top 5. I think it'll move up in priority for them now.

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This wouldn’t be happening if the 2016 nomination had gone to Martin O’Malley. But noooo it had to go to Hillary.

And don’t get me started on RBG. Really you fuckin’ fossil you couldn’t retire at an appropriate time? What the hell were you thinking?

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The Left is incompetent and bad things happen.

'It's someone else's fault!!! SCOTUS is unfair and very bad! Senate is unfair and very bad!! All the voters we've been calling racist proles don't want to vote for Democrats! etc etc etc.'

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I don't think "it had to go to Hillary" is what kept no name Martin O'Malley from the nomination.

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Right but isn't that what limited the field to that guy.

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The only person who might have made a difference was Biden, but even if he got through the primaries gaffe-free, Hillary still would have won. There was too much energy behind "it's a woman's turn" to let an old white guy win in 2016. It took four years of Trump to switch to "maybe an old white guy is what we need to win".

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I’m thinking more about voters - it’s better to elect a middle of the road white guy who can win than the person you really want who can’t.

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The average leftie, like Freddie, calls that "blue no matter who" and doesn't go for it. That's why the left abandoned Hillary in 2016 in the general, after she crushed Bernie in the primaries. And this is why abortion rights are disappearing soon.

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Exactly - maybe they need to reevaluate.

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If someone doesn't care whether Clinton or Trump is elected, who am I to tell them their preferences are wrong?

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Martin O'Malley got like 1% of the primary vote. If we're going to dispense with democracy, we may as well just make Freddie God Emperor. We could do a lot worse.

RBG didn't matter in the end. Roberts would back the anti-Roe contigent if he needed to, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch are enough for that.

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I used O’Malley as a stand in for random middle of the road centrist governors who can with the general. Because in end, that’s what matters.

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I agree, but first they have to win the primaries. And no such person was going to beat Hillary in 2016 after Obama shoved her aside in 2008.

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Chelsea Manning suggesting that people need more guns to defend abortion rights truly sounds like a Babylon Bee headline.

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It's like if you used story dice to write an article. (Side note: is Chelsea Manning out of prison? Last I heard, she was held in contempt for refusing to testify to some grand jury.)

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May 4, 2022
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And didn't I just read that she's dating Elon Musk's ex? Those story dice just won't quit.

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Wait, what? I mean, good for them, I guess, but that's a fun tidbit.

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Ah, thanks. I lost a few years there, I guess.

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Right, it’s a long slide down from that Virginia Heffernan piece in the LA Times handwringing about her Trump-voting neighbors clearing her driveway for free and whether such a despicable act of generosity could be accepted in good conscience.

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It's the liberal equivalent of the "use my gun to defend against a home invader" conservative fantasy.

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Yes. It certainly doesn't help things does it? Unless you are looking for comic relief. I am pro 2A and even I thought it was over the top. Use of deadly force should be sober, measured, and a last resort.

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My biggest complaint is with those politicians who manufacture anger in these situations for fundraising/popular appeal reasons. Less talk more strategic action.

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There is indeed a lot of anger out there in the United States these days, as the minority exerts a greater and greater degree of political and legal control over the majority. I think we have to wonder: what is going on here? What is so odd about the United States that mass protests toppling a regime doesn't happen? Is it living standards, which are actually quite good by any objective measure? Something else?

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It's the separation of protest from the labor movement.

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I think you've got something there.

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Yes, the fraction of people protesting is very small.

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Because protests alone aren't enough to change a regime, especially when the protesters don't have guns, and when they're not actually interested in prolonged, bloody street fights. They have remote gigs as mortgage underwriters to get back to on Monday; they won't actually start shooting. They'll rage, they'll scold, they'll vote, they'll lose, and the cycle will repeat.

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If you want to know about, and possibly learn from, a movement putting in a hell of a lot of work, strategy, and ruthless realism about the impotence of rage, look at the one that's about to gain the (hopefully temporary) victory in this case.

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Definitely true.

Too many liberals seem obsessed only with pointing out hypocrisy or that these conservative politicians and judges lied.

But who gives a shit? This is politics, not Battleship. They did whatever they needed to do to get the outcome they wanted.

The Democrats consistently seem indifferent, incompetent, or incapable of pursuing policy goals.

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Black and white litmus tests on abortion for all Democrats? This seems extremely counterproductive to a number of other liberal goals that would be well served by the Democratic party competing better in conservative areas. Let Eddie Rispone get elected and block Medicaid expansion because John Bel Edwards is pro-life? Seems bad.

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I was just thinking the same thing, the Dems need to broaden their coalition, not further narrow it, something Freddie usually seems to get.

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