After the Supreme Court nullified federal abortion protections with demands that our nation bow to the beliefs of 17th century witch hunters, it took only hours for Republican politicians and lawmakers to repeat their demands that abortion be criminalized nationally. Justice Samuel Alito's arguments were constructed to support such demands, even if he had to ignore centuries of history he didn't like while highlighting only the baubles he did.
So there is zero doubt that the conservative fight now moves to imposing far-right theocratic beliefs on all Americans, whether in red states or not. Similarly, sneering punditry assuring us that conservatism would never bar abortions in case of rape or incest, would never demand imprisonment of those that sought abortions, would never prosecute miscarriages—all of those went out the window immediately. All of those things will be happening and more, and red state lawmakers are already examining their post-Roe laws to make sure of it.
That does not mean that the same voices that helped steer conservatism into anti-democratic fascism are giving up the ghost. No, this weekend's conservative punditry is riddled with very polite suggestions to Republicans that the party please, please, please make some token effort to show Republicanism gives any actual damn about post-birth children or their mothers. Conservatism's once-shepherds are begging the performatively cruel base to show even a single shred of feigned compassion, even as everyone involved knows there's not a chance of it happening.
In The New York Times, we've got Ross Douthat doing the begging. It would be comical if the subject matter was not should we care whether poor Americans live or die.
States in the Deep South will do none of these things. States in the Republican north will do none of these things. Imagine a body of Republican senators pushing for such policies; now imagine what the Republican base would do to them, if those senators tried. It is a fiction.
The Republicans who are in actual charge are wasting no time assuring the public that no, they will absolutely not be lessening the party's fought-for institutional cruelties. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a presidential aspirant, responded to the public note that anti-abortion Republican states are the most vigorously cruel to new mothers and children with the usual pre-scripted fountain of talking points. Not only does the movement not intend to lift a finger to promote actual "life," they do not consider the question to be important enough to even bother with new rhetoric.
A movement that has spent five decades demanding American families get nothing and like it will not change now, and any pundit who claims otherwise is stupid. Simply stupid.
South Dakotans are more likely to find themselves in handcuffs than they are to find themselves with an extra ten dollars for their children's food, because Noem isn't ruling out prosecutions for South Dakota residents who travel to other states for abortions. The federal government can guarantee your right to travel between states, but it can't keep Republicans from passing laws imprisoning people on their return.
Pundit Jonah Goldberg long did his part to defend conservatism's slide into far-right extremism with the usual both-siderisms that posited that Actually, it is liberalism that should be considered the haven of fascism. His career was borne of the submovement that focused on the demonization of conservatism's enemies over any actual policy prescriptions, sharing rhetorical space with the Coulters and Malkins of the movement. He, too, is pretending today that there is some slight possibility, within the vicious movement, of perhaps at least pretending to give a damn about the social consequences of victory.
It will get nowhere, because anti-abortion Republicans have had half a century to implement non-punitive measures to reduce abortions and ease maternal poverty and have not only done none of it, but have rallied relentlessly to make sure every one of those other protections was sliced to ribbons.
There is no Republicanist base for this premise. None. It exists only in the heads of dissembling pundits who have watched their own advocacy embolden more and more vicious versions of their movement, and who still hunt now for justifications to remain attached to the resulting movement even as it embraces sedition, the erasure of elections, the reformation of American laws to enforce sectarian religious beliefs, and criminal corruption. The idea that Republican lawmakers would push for, or even tolerate, help for the poor or the sick is such a buffoonish question that editors should require their pundits pass a field sobriety test before saying it.
The Republicans who remain in the movement remain there despite a majority of Republican lawmakers voting both to nullify the results of a presidential election based on fraudulent hoaxes and to shield the plotters of an actual attempted coup from consequences. What possible moderation exists among supporters of that? What has happened to convince supporters of that that they need to moderate their positions to be seen as marginally less cruel?
Pundit Peggy Noonan remains an absolute disgrace, after a career of covering for the party as it lurched farther and farther into fascist rhetoric. Her own Sunday plea to the base to give at least a token nod in the direction of "life" was met with laughter.
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Noonan does not necessarily care if Republicanism significantly improves the lives of American families; Republicanism is explicitly opposed to the very idea. She only asks for a fig leaf for her fellow partisans to use in claiming that the party has not devolved into one of irredeemable viciousness. She's not going to get it. Republicanism is about destruction, not construction. It is about opposing things, not providing them. It is about reducing rights, not embracing new ones.
The movement that would not abide saving another person's live by wearing a simple mask to curtail pandemic spread will not give a damn whether an ectopic pregnancy kills their neighbor, or whether a child a mile away from their own house suffers from constant hunger. There is no clamor for non-cruelty. There is no sudden demand for new compassion. It is a fiction pushed by the few remaining conservatives capable of feeling shame for what they have wrought, but do not have enough shame to now disown it.
At no point during the last decade has the Republican movement not gravitated towards the cruelest possible thing, or shied away from insisting that their personal comfort trumps the right of other Americans to live. A movement against masks and dismissive of vaccines, a movement forever warning of migrant invasions, a movement continuing to fight vigorously to protect those that attempted to overthrow our government, a movement that labels entire groups of Americans "pedophiles" while gleefully defending sex traffickers in their midst, a movement that will insist over the bodies of children that the real tragedy would be if those planning to commit violence could not choose the weapon that allowed them to commit more of it, faster—this is not a movement that will develop new compassion for the poor or those in medical crisis.
It is not a movement that feels it even needs to pretend at such things.