Marble Falls Reading a recent article in the New Yorker about the emerging strategy of the pro-life movement in these changing and challenging times, I was forced to come to grip with the concept of a “New Right.” Just as there was a New Left once upon a time, why couldn’t there be a New Right? Intellectually, I get it. On the ground, is it really a thing, I wonder?
The reporter Emma Green’s thesis works out something like this. The Republicans, especially President-elect Trump, realized the obvious in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision gutting Roe v. Wade that abortion was a toxic issue and heavy breathers of the pro-life movement’s zealous efforts for total bans was toxic and costing them votes. Trump on the campaign trail was all over the map on the abortion issue. He wasn’t going to commit to a national ban, as pro-life extremists were advocating. He fishtailed around about whether he would or would not sign the Florida initiative. He had delivered to this part of his base, and wasn’t moving any further, he seemed to be saying.
Meanwhile, this new alien being, the New Right, led by among others, the Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance, were hearing the progressive and liberal critique that argued that if they were going to stop women from getting abortions, one way or another, they needed to be more aggressive in implementing measures that were pro-family. Vance, now supposedly Mr. More Day Care and spend whatever it takes to make it happen, along with some other bells and whistles, was all about more family support.
A couple of obvious questions might hit most of us up the side of our heads.
The Old Right is still in control of the House and Senate and even if they have Trump and Vance talking out of this side of their mouth, they are also talking about how to cut Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare to continue to fund Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and push more benes to the rich and away from everyone else, including working families, out of the other side of their mouths. Is there any chance they are going to put money where the New Right’s mouth is? Unlikely. Green looks at the Mississippi Attorney General who brought the Dobbs case and her forays into trying to add some pro-family policies, even as she failed to convince the deep red legislature to finally add Mississippi to Obamacare, while also turning a blind eye to hour impossibly niggardly the state is in providing access to food stamps, welfare, and anything resembling a family safety net. You can’t really square that circle.
Another problem recently is that these pronatalist folks on the New Right, including Elon Musk, who are chanting “more babies now” are also crossing the line in trying to force women to have babies to prevent population loss. Linda Greenhouse in the Times noted with horror that three states, Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho, have joined in taking a shot at the Supreme Court to end medical abortions by claiming that they have standing because they want more people. Yes, this is preposterous, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a shot with this Court.
Women are voting with more than just their feet, as the number of abortions have actually increased since Dobbs, rather than falling. Forced pregnancies are not only a bad political stance, but this kind of real-time Handmaiden’s Tale is breaking bad for the pro-lifers with real women unwilling to be chained to that particular whipping post.
Truth to tell, I’m 100% for more pro-family policies, even if it’s the right thing for some of their wrong reasons. This is a chance to put right and left together on one program. My problem is I’m not sure the New Right can get past the Old Right for all of us to do right.