Todd, it is no surprise that a east coast upper class elitist like yourself is not happy with the "vulgar marxist" notion that economic well being matters to people. After all, you probably never enter a Walmart, let alone consider what it would be like to work there. Instead, after a nice stop at Zabars or Dean and Delucca,  you can pontificate <b>and</b> red-bait at the same time. Of course, the weakness of progressive politics in the US cannot have anything to do with the conscious choice of "liberals" like yourself to ally with power and money against the vulgar masses.

There was something that jumped out at me:

When it worked in Kansas, it didn't work for William Jennings Bryan nationally. I'm not sure that the mysteries of politics can be solved in a single-factor stroke.

Something to keep in mind about the populist movement: although the "candidate" William Jennings Bryant didn't win an election - the populist platforms that were absorbed by the Democratic party were eventually absorbed by nearly the entire political spectrum.

The greatest political shock should be that a Republican Vice President replaced William McKinley and set about preserving a public common and going after entrenched business interests that loved the lassiez-faire policies of McKinley.

What the populists failed to bring about in the late 1800s was eventually brought about by the New Dealers. The initial candidates may have lost - but the movement bore fruit when economic populism went 'mainstream'.

In 2002, for example, if I recall accurately, populist Democrats and centrist Democrats got clobbered about equally. In their drives toward the Democratic presidential nominations, Fred Harris, Tom Harkin (for whom, I confess, I voted in the 1992 California primary), and Jerry Brown in his populist incarnation all went nowhere.

The problem behind the "populilst" movements of candidates is often one of not believing in the motives of said politicians.

When you say "populist incarnation" - that's exactly the problem. When someone like a John Kerry or Howard Dean try to speak of the plight of the working class, etc. - it seems contrived. That may or may not be the reality, but the Democrats (by and large) don't do the image marketing that the GOP constantly does. (Bill Clinton was a salesman, seemingly by natural born talent.)

It seems that the populist movement of the late 1800s was born not from a "top down" marketing message, but rather from "the bottom up" with people acting based on their individual cultures and faiths. Perhaps that's why populism was so strong in the Midwest, where the people were largely first-and-second generation immgrants with strong ties to "their" culture. In 2005, "their" culture has largely been dominated by marketing rather than history or family belief. (For example - why is 'evangelicalism' on the rise in the Midwest compared to the traditional European Protestant Faiths?)

Yes, voters care about what they care about.  If, following Frank, we try to tell them they should not vote on abortion but on economics instead, we are not going to win their support.  In fact, we will simply reinforce the core of their negative perception about us.  

By equating their "interests" with their pocketbooks we reinforce two Republican noise machine memes: that Democrats either don't care about values or don't share theirs (by valuing material over non-material moral concerns), and, to add insult to injury, we think they are dumb, or at least confused, to care about what they care about rather than what we think they should care about (the Democrats as know-it-alls charge). 

By now, what part of that do we Dems not get?

I am a safe, legal and rare pro-choice Dem.  But to ridicule, as Frank seems to, the view of those who are politically animated by the deep offense they take to the Roe decision represents, I think, an extraordinary degree of condescension as well as a failure of the imagination.  In language that itself invites ridicule the Supreme Court first found in Griswold a right to privacy as "emanating" from "the penumbra" of the Bill of Rights, before later finding in Roe that abortion is one such protected privacy right. 

Roe dominates discussion of Supreme Court nominees to an unhealthy degree.  It perversely helps insure the relative importance of having a thin paper trail over being a good judge as a valued qualification for nomination. Overturning it and letting the states decide the issue would show respect for people who come down on the other side of this issue--a good and perhaps necessary first step in our efforts to win them back over to our party.  Abortion simply is not the sort of technically complex issue where there is a strong argument for letting those with expertise have a greater say in deciding it.  There will always be exit options for those living in any state which recriminalizes abortion and I suspect that prospect will keep to a small number the number of states which actually choose to do so. 
 
Democrats who want to use support for upholding Roe as a litmus test for any SC nominee need not scratch their heads long in understanding one of the reasons, among many, why the Democratic party has become so heavily associated in the minds of those Thomas Frank is writing about with having judges rather than accountable legislators decide on hot button social issues. 

Changing our stance on Roe by itself would not therefore automatically identify us more with pocketbook and security concerns of voters.  It depends on what we say and do, of course.  But I would hope it would open up the tent, make us a more inclusive and broadly appealing party where people on either side of this issue could feel welcomed by the Democratic party. 

It would make no sense to me for Democrats to change our stance on Roe without simultaneously reaching out to all Americans to support us on issues where most Americans agree, particularly on the need for greater basic security, emphasizing health care for all in particular.  Although it is not the reason to do so, I honestly believe we will do better hanging our hats on other, particularly economic opportunity and security, issues instead. 

Ruy T and others argue that the long-term trends favor liberal social policies and therefore politicians who support them.  If so, and it clearly is on gay and lesbian issues in particular, what are we afraid of?  Those trends will either be reflected in state policies on these issues, or else states which do not reflect the sentiments of their residents will pay a price for it as people vote with their feet.

Sure, it's an ad hominem, but it's the right ad hominem for the big picture.  
If the left makes fun of Kansas, derides the lifestyle and concerns of Kansans, then how can Kansans trust the left to look out for their best interest?  Why does anyone expect Kansans to vote for a political party that mostly looks down on them?
Unionizing Wal-Mart should be the number one long-term priority of the left.  If we can't raise wages for the single moms who work there, why should the working poor lift a finger to vote for the left? 

Cranky: Am I getting that correctly?

No. Gitlin explicitly draws a comparison between support for one conception of rights - the civil rights movement - and another conception of rights, today's pro-life movement. Each is what you choose to call "transcendant." Each is "political." Neither is utilitarian, which is the essential point here. "Vulgar Marxism" is essentially another version of soulless, 19c utilitarianism.

Politics must and does involve visions of dignity that go far beyond levels of monetary benefits received or taxes paid.  Our problem as a nation is that one party cannot seem to grasp that taxes are essential to upholding the building blocks of social dignity - health insurance access, decent schools and access to higher education, for example -  while the other party cannot seem to grasp that religion matters deeply to Americans, indeed is inseparable from their notions concerning that most important political institution of all, the family. 

In fact, th best way to get out of our quandary is to start focusing on that bedrock political institution and devise a program that speaks directly and respectfully to moderate and low-income Americans' conception of what makes for a strong and healthy family. Dispense with abstract notions and sixties-era frameworks borrowed from students and feminists. Get our hands dirty by LISTENING TO PEOPLE, and realize that their consciousness is far more "true" on matters of how to raise children, provide for the future, preserve marriages and communities.

Sneering at their concerns is exactly the wrong approach, and one guaranteed not to reverse our downward slide in all but the filthy rich counties and the academic towns-with-a-foreign-policy.

There will always be exit options for those living in any state which recriminalizes abortion and I suspect that prospect will keep to a small number the number of states which actually choose to do so. 

I think it's a mistake to think this is true, as I believe many states would quickly criminalize abortion in most or all circumstances.  Most state legislatures are controlled by the GOP or would have a majority of GOP + pro-life Dems (the only kind of successful Dems in many state legislatures). 

I would imagine women want their rights to be universal rights across the country, not rights they leave at the border of certain states.  You have to think about our side's arguments for allowing women to make the final decision about their bodies, not the government, and not just cede the argument to the other side in all of the red states (where I would assume you do not live)! 

I believe many states would quickly criminalize abortion in most or all circumstances. 

I'd be happy to bet you any sum that were abortion to be on the ballot in the fifty states, we would quickly find ourselves ina majority position in at least forty of them within another two years. 

Roe is mush. An abortion of a decision, as it were. We have nothing whatsoever to fear from putting the matter back where it belongs, in front of the people.

Wrongfoot the Republicans for once. Knock down Roe and let the people decide. Bring it on, baby (fetus).

Thibaud,

I meant Harkin, not Hayden. 

Will reply to other comments when I get past a deadline.

TG 

Again, the presumption is that Roe is not important to us. It's not "fundamental." Really? I don't ridicule people who claim abortion to be murder: rather, I fear them as bearers of a warped, sick moral culture.  I cannot conceive it to be ethical that a woman should be forced by the state to carry to term her pregnancy come what may.  What I feel about the possibility is not much different from the horror that fills me at the realization that some relatively well remunerated, retired torturers will soon be walking among us thanks to the Administration's ongoing flirt with "interrogation methods."

If I thought things were that bleak I would find it hard(er) to get out of bed in the morning. 

Regardless of whether Americans live in Red or Blue or Purple America most simply do not devote a great deal of time to boning up on public affairs.  It isn't that they are dumb (although there are dumb people around, to be sure) or even necessarily uninterested, just that it's not everyone's cup of tea to do this sort of thing as many of us here do.

The upshot of this is that we have to become far more adept at the use of symbols and other shorthands, which a lot of us more literal minded, reality-based community types either dislike doing or resent doing for those of our fellow citizens who unlike us are not public affairs junkies.  We are just going to have to get over that and keep getting better at doing it.  That, too, is reality.  

The Republicans figured out during the 1990s that coming out for abolishing the Department of Education and having nothing whatsoever to say about health care made them uncompetitive on these two areas of high voter concern.  They figured out they needed to be able to have some talking points, something to say that could be portrayed as showing interest in education and health care, issues of great importance to voters.

They did this.  So we got W with his education bill and then the Medicare farce, and most voters who are not yet having any direct experience with either of these initiatives listen to the candidates and the president and have great difficulty, to say the least, figuring out which candidate is the authentic pro-education and pro health care candidate, or even which one is better on those issues, because the worst piece of crap legislation can be and is sold with well-tested soundbites crafted to appeal to what many people say they believe.

So we need to do much better in communicating with the public, through media, but also through expanding our institutional capability to do FTF grassroots outreach at the neighborhood level (thibaud's notion of actually talking FTF with real live people--what a concept!), and then doing it.  

That clearly isn't enough, though.

Because in addition we need to keep building our own media. 

The best messages in the world could not get through at the mass media level now because right now the media scene is mostly the "he said, she said" or simply coopted MSM on the one hand, and the Republican noise machine on the other.  So the casual observer of public affairs is almost never hearing our case in an appealing, digestible form.

Even bumping up against these realities we damned near won the presidency last year.  We are within hailing distance in the House and Senate although the abuse of redistricting makes us probably need some broad-scale repudiation dynamic for us to get majorities back in '06 or '08.  The Republicans in power, bless their souls, are doing their damndest to give us every opportunity to turn the various bonfires smoldering out there into one large brushfire.  We have to keep building the institutional capability to pull that off. 

So, no, I don't think it's nearly as bleak as you seem to think it is for us.  Not by any stretch of the imagination. 

evolution is a scientific theory, not a "fact."

Well, no, actually -- evolution is a fact about which there are many theories.

Global warming is also a theory,

Ditto. It’s an undisputed fact about which there are many things we still don’t understand.

All this is besides the point (unless the point is just to point out that thibaud is confused or misinformed). thibaud misses and refuses to deal with the main point sohei was making, which is simply that being for people doesn’t mean you always agree with the values, prejudices, or actions of the people. thibaud can’t distinguish between leading, appealing, catering, pandering, or exploiting.

You think that would be the end of it? Anti-abortion forces would simply shift focus to campaigning relentlessly in every state to make abortion illegal in all circumstances, year after year after year

Yes, that would be the end of it in at least forty US states because even the most diehard pro-lifer will agree that there's no point in challenging through electoral means something that well over 60 percent of the electorate is solidly, unwaveringly for.

And BTW, as another poster pointed out, the extreme position of what you call "mak[ing] abortion illegal in all circumstances" wouldn't even win a quarter of the vote in more than a handful of states. Not in Texas, not in any state east of Alabama or (excepting Utah) west of Oklahoma. Outlaw it in Utah and girls and women will hop buses to Nevada; outlaw it in Louisiana and they'll skip over to Texas.

Strike down Roe now. Nothing would do more to put a huge wind in our party's sails than to put this issue before the pro-"SLAR" (safe legal and rare) majority.

thibaud,

The post above that got your goat was a bit much in its portrayal of average Americans. I don’t think people are that stupid. But you’re missing the posters larger point, which was that your original post succumbed to a fallacy that everything that “the people” said was wise and good and virtuous, so you need only listen to the “the people” to understand what to do so as to win elections. Well, maybe if wining elections is all you’re interested in doing. But people can be very narrow-minded and prejudiced sometimes, just as they can be reasonable and calculating, or virtuous and noble.

Like I said above, you have to be able to distinguish between leading, appealing, catering, pandering, or exploiting.  It’s the difference between a progressive vision of politics and right-wing populism.  Between trying to decide what you believe and from there trying to derive a strategy of appeal, persuasion, and victory or simply abandoning any moral compass and going with what the mob says.

Do we pander to people’s worst fears (the economy down? let’s attack immigrants! global terrorism? let’s launch misguided wars of occupation! worried about job security? let’s attack affirmative action!) -- or do you hope, as Lincoln said, to appeal to the better angels of our nature?

CH

PS I don’t want to get into a long polemic on global warming and evolution, but your approach to these two topics seem true to form -- much asserting without any argumentation, evidence, or deep understanding of the subject at hand.

Of all the things we still don’t understand about global warming, that the climate has changed because of human actions that have led to an erosion in the ozone layer is not one of them. That’s undisputed. If you know of any scientific publications that say otherwise, please post some citations.

Biological evolution is a fact, but there are many theories about the mechanisms by which it has occurred. Stephen Jay Gould said it best, so let me quote from him at length: 

In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.

Nobody said it was silly to care about religion. Certainly Frank does not make that argument. Frank makes the common sense observation that the right has used religious/cultural coloring to cover the scent of their economics. Gitlin reacts by redbaiting - as if the mention of economic self interest on the left was the sole domain of Marxists or was necessarily an argument that nothing other than economic self-interest should matter. That's a bad faith response, and it is imbued with a deep contempt for those dumbass trailer trash and their quaint religious leanings. On my part, It appears to me that Gitlin and the DLC are in fundamental agreement with the neo-trotskyites in the PNAC - that the key to politics is to find the right symbols by which to bedazzle the sheep.

 

thibaud,

So, you don't have any data for the 40 state claim, is that correct? That's all I was asking.

If you asked me how many states would still have safe abortions I could no more say than you could, because like you I haven't done any research into the topic. 

I do know of one book that claims the number to be 20, but I haven't looked at it yet, so for now I can't make any definitive claims. That's me -- I try not to make very strident comments about things I'm still unsure about, and when I'm just making a random guess or I'm uncertain about something, I try to be open about that.

You said that abortion would remain legal in 40 states. I wanted to know how you derived that number.

Now, what exactly is so confusing about all this?  

By the way, the book What if Roe Fell? I mentioned is available online as a PDF here. It’s 140 pages long but looks like an easy read, so I’ll take a look at it soon.  It has a state by state analysis, and a clear and crisp explanation of the methodology behind its conclusions.  If anyone else has a chance to read it, maybe we can get a discussion going about it.

I think you’re being unfair to the study. At the very least the study clearly outlines its assumptions and its methodology, and has a good state by state summary. I find it more convincing than your more impressionistic opinions. Like I said, I’ll try to get some thoughts on this posted soon.

I do think you are right about the opinion polls -- they do show that the majority of Americans want to keep abortions legal, safe, and rare. But public opinion isn’t entirely consistent on this score. Yglesias has a post on this subject not long ago.  Notice how confused people are about the issue.  

The other issue to keep in mind is that it isn’t as if keeping abortion legal or not is going to be put to a straight up in popular referendum in every state. It’s not just a question of public opinion but also one of political organization. A majority may tell a pollster they want “safe, legal, and rare” abortions yet not be riled to political action when the state legislature passes a ban on all abortions after the first trimester, or when the legislature places some other type of heavy restriction. Again, note all the confusion that exists on the issue.  

For example, while you and I would both respond yes to the question, “Should abortion be safe, legal, and rare” we obviously disagree widely over what the acceptable level of access is. That’s evident in the use of your term “partial-birth abortion,” which is not a medical term but a propagandistic term.  Indeed, these types of bans often seek to restrict abortions as early as the second trimester, which is why they’ve been overturned by the courts -- which wouldn’t happen anymore if Roe were not the law of the land. You can read more about this here, here, here, and here.

In the end, what this boils down to is that you’re willing to live with substantial restrictions on abortion, and even the complete outlawing of abortions in some states.  The advantage of Roe is that it protects abortions up to the second trimester in the entire country. And even with that constitutional protection, there are many states where access is severely limited.

Now, if Roe is overturned, then pro-choice forces will have no other choice but to regroup and fight the issue on a state by state basis. And maybe things will turn out better than expected.  But one thing would be undeniable -- the constitutional protection that covers all women in the entire country equally would be gone and replaced with a patchwork of rights, restrictions, and bans. What surprises me is that one would actually hope for this development.