Political Realism, Populism, and Pro-Lifers

I n light of the Republican platform watering down strong commitments to the pro-life cause, and in light of two Catholic senators and potential veeps endorsing Trump’s position on abortion (no federal ban, and each state writes its own law on abortion), I offered a comment on X:

Sohrab Ahmari, feeling accused, has responded that while he takes my view seriously, he doesn’t feel the need to apologize to anyone.

“No apologies” is always the bolder and more exciting stance. But I’m not sure my friend quite squared the circle. Ahmari is known for supporting Trump on counter-revolutionary terms, seeing him as a man who breaks with a liberal consensus, re-politicizes our debates, and reorients our politics around “cohesion” and ultimately toward the Highest Good. It feels like a letdown to read his current missive, which boils down to “Look at the polls and get real about who is more on our side.”

I do know I’m better off with Republicans than Democrats on the issue. But I don’t quite accept Ahmari’s history in which Trump is the one who delivered, by overturning Roe, where everyone else failed. If we dismiss everyone before Trump as GOPe (GOP establishment), there’s still the matter that GOPe supplied as many anti-Roe Supreme Court justices as Trump did (more if you count Scalia, who didn’t survive to join Dobbs). It was the Federalist Society, a pre-Trump conservative movement institution par excellence, that supplied the talent that Trump chose for the Court. It was the pro-life movement exerting influence that turned the Republicans from the party of Prescott Bush to the party of Jeb Bush. When I have cryptically said that I believe political effort for the good is “coordinated from above,” this is what I mean: It took everybody to overthrow Roe, Trump included. Trump put Mike Pence on his ticket and made that unique pledge on justices because he feared and respected the pro-life part of the party. Pro-lifers can’t help but notice that now, he demonstrates no fear, and perhaps even a little condescension. How would I have reacted if Bush told me, “Follow your heart, but you’ve gotta win.” I’d be mad. I get mad every time Trump says it. I hope he stops.

The real target of my complaint is those who urge pro-lifers to stuff their complaints and show loyalty to Trump. If that’s the case, then I prefer the Bush years, where pro-lifers were taken seriously enough and seen as separate enough from the president that we’d never get demands to shut up and be loyal, to give every utterance and sentiment to our leader. Second Amendment advocates also suffered similar losses in the new GOP platform, and they aren’t too embarrassed to complain. Their anger is galvanizing them for the next round in their generational fight.

It’s more honest to say that Republicans are beating tactical retreats, as previous generations of Republicans did, to avoid being hewn by the buzzsaw of popular opinion.

So I’ll be honest about my own evolving views, which have been driven by my perception of the “conservative populist” coalition and by my obsession about plunging fertility rates and the erosion of family life.

I used to skewer Bush-era Republicans for talking a big game on pro-life issues while routinely acting as if we should be happy to have seats on the back of the coalition’s bus. I questioned whether John McCain would appoint anti-Roe justices, given that he would be seeking justices who would save McCain-Feingold. And even though he was never my guy, I was thrilled when Mike Huckabee told a 2008 Values Voters conference not to settle, and to believe that one of their own could lead. I was glad that Trump, in debates, showed his physical disgust with late-term abortion and that he attended, and spoke at, the March for Life.

Two decades ago, I believed that “country-club Republicans” were the chief obstacle to a more robustly pro-life party. So their eclipse by a more populist-oriented GOP could, I thought, open the doors for a broader pro-life agenda — an agenda sold alongside less-orthodox family policy, a rebalancing of public expenditures away from the elderly and toward those forming families. This was too hopeful.

My beliefs started changing around 2008. The victory of Obama showed me that the voters I thought a more populist GOP could win someday — the ones Obama won by criticizing NAFTA and “saving Detroit” — were fine with the most pro-abortion candidate in history to that point. I started to accept what was clear in some of the more populist political writers: that huge portions of the so-called Middle American Radicals were not motivated by traditional Christian culture-war issues such as abortion, obscenity, school prayer, school choice, etc. They were motivated by issues that touched on their national identity: the flag, the status of English, high regard for our nation and its history, and respect for their folkways. Many of these voters were repelled by a Republican coalition that seemed to ask them to become more like modern Southern Evangelical Christians.

It has been obvious that a shift was underway early in the 2016 primary, when Trump started winning unchurched Evangelicals and a considerable number of non-religious Trumpers began identifying as Evangelicals. It’s also been clear for much longer than a decade that churchgoing is dying among working-class Americans and downwardly mobile whites. It is the preserve of already highly social achievers in the suburbs and exurbs. Churchgoing is for America’s affluent “heretics.”

So my view has been that a more populist GOP would have greater tensions between its more socially conservative leadership class and its less socially conservative base of voters. In a reversal of the 1980s, when Republican staffers were secular and hearing from the audiences of televangelists, today you’re far more likely to find Republican offices staffed by people who listen to religious podcasts, and they take calls from constituents who broadly fit under the label “Barstool Conservatives.”

I’ve concluded that the problem for pro-lifers is not really addressed by elections alone. The American way of life in 2024 is deeply hostile to “life” as pro-lifers conceive it. The vast majority of people would find the norms, expectations, culture, and practices that sustain a real pro-life society, governed by pro-life legislation, literally foreign to them. Of course, in such an environment, the pro-life convictions of both parties were likely to degrade. That’s the short-term political view.

And yet, I don’t really despair. Because this way of life is literally unsustainable, socially, economically, and politically. It is also a factory of miserable social atomization. A culture of death is self-extinguishing. The pressure to change is already upon us. And eventually it will exert overwhelming influence over everything, even the Republican and Democratic parties, should they still exist.

And while many people will be employed to come up with the right slogans, calibrated poll-tested legislative proposals, and will try to inflict tiny cuts on the hydra we face, the choice before us is much larger than the one between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The choice is between rebuilding that culture that sustains human life — literally, one that sustains humans making larger families than they do presently, generation after generation. Or just quietly reconciling ourselves to the death of our nation and civilization.