When purity gets in the way of conservative principle

By Tim Dunkin

As some may recall, off-year elections were held a couple of weeks ago across the country. Electorally speaking, it was something of a mixed bag for conservatism. In Ohio, a petition that would overturn the recently-passed law that restricted collective-bargaining by public sector unions passed, essentially dooming that state to a future of endless efforts by bureaucrat unions to amass to themselves more taxpayer goodies and more-and-more difficult to balance budgets. At the same time, however, Ohio voters overwhelming rejected the "individual mandate" found in Obamacare. In Virginia, the Republicans gained in the legislature, potentially taking the state Senate back from the Democrats, depending upon the final result of one closely-disputed race — at any rate, seats were still picked up by conservative Republicans. The Democrats held onto governorships in Kentucky and West Virginia, while the GOP held onto the mansions in Mississippi, as well as in Louisiana, which was actually decided in an open election on Oct. 22. In Mississippi, a conservative initiative that would require voters to present ID before voting was approved by a wide margin.

There was one other initiative of interest on the ballot in Mississippi that day. This was Initiative 26, the "Personhood Amendment," which would have amended Mississippi's constitution to affirm that life begins at conception, and would have granted to the unborn, from the moment of conception, the same rights to personhood as anyone else. The initiative was defeated pretty badly, however, with 58% voting against it. While the radical pro-abortion lobby was crowing that day about how "reproductive rights" were affirmed, I don't think they should be so quick to assume that there has been some sort of sea change in the hearts and minds of the people in favor of baby killing. What we saw in Mississippi was the result of poor tactics on the part of pro-lifers, rather than broad-based support for pro-abortionists.

To begin, I seriously doubt that 58% of the people of Mississippi — of Mississippi, of all places — have suddenly turned in Planned Parenthood loving, pro-abortion babykiller apparatchiks. What we saw in Mississippi was not a huge swing toward abortion support. Instead, we saw the end result of conservatives, and especially single-issue activists, who put ideological purity over political realities on the ground — even when it is to their detriment and the detriment of their cause to do so.

One thing I've noticed on the Right over the past decade or so is the tendency on the part of many conservatives to completely ignore the practical feasibility of a potential policy approach in favor of chest-thumping about how "pure" they are for supporting it. Anybody who raises concerns that broad, sweepingly radical changes in the conservative direction and away from the status quo might not be received well by the public at large — you know, all those people out there who aren't conservative activists and who often let the nightly news tell them what to think — are summarily labeled "RINOs" and "compromisers." Thereby, getting to pat one's self on the back for how "principled" one is for one's purity on an issue takes the wheel away from actually making progress on moving the conservative agenda forward. It's a war between incrementalism and overhaul, and overhaul is winning — while liberty-oriented conservatism is losing.

An extreme example of this is embodied in a guy I used to see on Free Republic, back when I was participating there. For this guy, nobody was pure enough. ALL of the Republican contenders, for instance, we uniformly a bunch of traitorous, anti-constitution, God-and-liberty hating RINOs. In fact, the entire Republican Party from top to bottom was made up of RINOs (anyone else see the irony there?) They weren't just "wrong," in his opinion, but were anti-American conspirators, by virtue of simply being affiliated in any way with the GOP, as opposed to a third party (one of which he just so happened to have started, donations welcome, hint hint). He didn't like Herman Cain, he didn't like Rick Perry, he didn't like Sarah Palin, he didn't even like Ron Paul. At one point, this guy was even arguing that Michelle Bachmann was a pro-abortionist. How? Well, at one point earlier this year, she was supporting a "fetal pain bill," which would essentially block all abortions after the point at which an unborn baby would begin to register response to pain stimuli (which is pretty early on in the gestation period, I gather). From this, he ascertained that Michelle Bachmann must support abortion prior to the point where the baby feels pain, even though she obviously doesn't.

Not coincidentally, this guy also supported a personhood amendment to the US Constitution as the ONLY way in which anyone who was "truly" pro-life would go about trying to deal with the problem of abortion in this country. Even the major pro-life groups out there — groups like National Right to Life, Operation Rescue, Susan B. Anthony list, and the like — were phonies and traitors since they focused on other ways of stopping abortion besides just pushing for the all-or-nothing constitutional amendment to formally declare life to begin at the point of conception (note, by the way, that I do support the notion of such an amendment, but think we should push for it when the time is right). Anyone who tried to explain to him that the likelihood of actually getting this amendment passed was impossibly small, and therefore that pushing for it alone was nothing more than a waste of time and funds that could be used on more incrementalist goals that actually work to limit abortions, was automatically labeled an anti-constitutional scoundrel who obviously had no principles.

Never mind the fact that the likelihood of getting such an amendment through the process actually would be infinitesimally small, at least in the present political climate, as the evidence from the 58% defeat of just such an amendment in one of the most conservative states in the union demonstrated.

What we need to understand about the American people at large is that, temperamentally speaking, they are conservative (even when they're not ideologically so). What this means is that Americans do not like broad, sweeping policy changes, and they will not generally vote to implement them, or vote for candidates who promise them. Even in 2008, Barack Obama largely hid what he planned to do from the public, and ran on a general "steady as she goes" platform, in some cases even seeming to run to the right of John McCain; he wasn't advertising to the public at large that he was a radical Marxist revolutionary who was going to actively subvert our economy and nationalize our health care industry (as well as several others). This political fact is a large part of the reason why the Left has to rely so much on the courts to implement their agenda, and even when they don't use the courts (such as was the case with Obamacare), they simply use raw political power, rather than consensual public debate, to ram it through, hoping that it will stick.

And that's the other problem with this temperament — once something bad does stick for a few years, it then becomes the status quo, and becomes very difficult to get rid of, especially in one fell swoop. This is why it's so important to get rid of Obamacare now, before it becomes accepted as a baseline reality in the minds of most Americans. Right now, majorities still oppose it because of its radical nature. Five years from now, this won't be the case, and we'll find ourselves stuck with it, having to deal with it piecemeal, one unread provision at a time.

The problem when dealing with the abortion issue is that the pro-abortion side was able to get a jump on pro-lifers. Unfortunately, for a large segment of the US population, abortion is a known and accepted quantity. Indeed, it was becoming so even in the decade before Roe v. Wade. That court decision, contrary to what many might think, was not a bolt-out-of-the-blue precision strike that suddenly legalized abortion. Indeed, at the state level in many of the more left-leaning states, especially in the Northeast, restrictions against abortion were already being rolled back for many years prior to Roe v. Wade. People in America at this time had already become comfortable with the idea of legalizing abortion. This is shown by the fact that the very first Harris public opinion poll gauging support for the new decision in 1973 actually showed that 52% favored the decision while only 43% opposed it. Since then, Roe v. Wade has continued to codify itself in the psyche of the American voter, so that as a general concept it continues to find broad support, even though support for abortion itself drops precipitously in these same polls when the pollsters start asking about specific types of abortion (such as late-term and partial birth) or inquiring about specific policies that limit access to abortion (such as parental waiting periods, laws against taking minors across state lines to obtain abortions, fetal pain laws, etc.)

The old saw goes that the pro-life movement saw its activity increase the most the day after the Roe decision was announced. Well, that's mostly because there wasn't much activity before that — there really wasn't that much of a movement opposing abortion legalization when it was still "under the radar." Pro-lifers back in the 1960s and early 1970s weren't on the ball, and allowed abortion to become "the status quo."

What this means for us today is that abortion is not going to be ended in one fell swoop such as a personhood amendment, regardless of how much ideologically-pure pro-life activists might hope for it to be. This is political reality — deal with it or ignore it, it is not going away.

So what do those of us who are pro-life do? Well, we take the incrementalist approach, combined with good old fashioned hard work to educate our fellow Americans about abortion.

First, the education part. One of the smartest things that the pro-life movement in America has done is to confront the America people with the realities of abortion. Most people who support abortion do so because, for them, it's an abstract and easily compartmentalizable issue. It doesn't affect them in their daily lives, and it's easy to think about it in terms of "utility," without the consideration that there is a living human being's life at stake. When people begin to see what abortion actually does and actually begin to hear the religious, ethical, philosophical, and human rights arguments against it, they begin to support it less, and the efforts by pro-life groups to educate the American people about abortion, and to change the paradigm itself for many folks have been successful. Poll after poll since the late 1980s have shown that statistically increasing numbers of Americans reject various degrees of abortion and affiliate themselves voluntarily with the pro-life position and name, to the point that "pro-life" is forming the outright majority in some recent polls. This has not happened accidentally.

However, to roll back abortion, the only successful approach so far has been to hack away at it, one incrementalist law at a time. While personhood amendments are likely to fail (and have already) everywhere they've been tried, many, many states less Red than Mississippi have successfully put into place all kinds of restrictions on abortion — consent laws, bans on certain procedures (modeled after the ban on partial birth abortions that was passed at the federal level and was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007), sonogram laws, even things as simple as enforcing cleanliness regulations at abortion clinics. These have all helped to limit the number of abortions taking place in America. At one point in the 1990s, there were a little over 2,000 abortion clinics operating. Now there are 748, and their number continues to drop as they cannot sustain a "customer" base and find themselves being regulated out of existence. Just imagine where that number would go if Republicans could push through the incrementalist approach of simply ending government funding to Planned Parenthood? Without the artificial prop of taxpayer money, even more of these death mills would be gone.

And let's face it — isn't that what fighting against abortion is really about? Saving little babies' lives?

It surely is, and is why I would say that anyone who wants to thump their chest and loudly proclaim themselves to be more "pure" on this issue by eschewing that "compromising" incrementalist approach and instead pushing for constitutional amendments that won't be passed, isn't really pro-life. You're pro-life when you try to end abortion, not when you use the pro-life name as a prop to look down your nose at other conservatives. You're "pro-lifeness" should be judged by your deeds, not your words.

As I said before, I agree with the principle of personhood. I agree that human life begins at conception, and that the unborn should have the same right to life that was declared in our Declaration of Independence to be the common property of all human beings as any of the rest of us. That being said, if we want to work towards the goal of seeing personhood amendments put into place at the state and federal levels, then we need to get serious and busy about educating our fellow Americans as to why personhood from conception is a valid and truthful principle. We can't just assume that they should know this and then get frustrated and angry with them when they don't. We have the moral obligation to make the arguments and to change the minds. Simply trying to force through a broad-sweeping change that most people don't presently accept — which is the leftist way — won't work, as we have seen. Once the political climate has changed, because peoples' hearts and opinions have been changed, then we'll be ready for that final step towards formally affirming the ideal of life and liberty for ALL people in our nation, not just those who happen to reside outside a womb.

Until then, it's going to be a long, hard, incrementalist slog. Let's not get lazy and keep trying to take the easy way out.

© Tim Dunkin