Voting Democratic will not get abortion rights back. Pro-choice advocates will have to do exactly what the pro-life movement did over the course of half a century in order to reverse this devastating loss of women’s rights. Given the fact that there is no organized left-wing movement in the United States, however, the outlook currently looks bleak.
But Restoring Abortion Is Hard
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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The 40-year strategy might work for abortion rights, but it won’t work for the climate problem. We don’t have 40 years for that. And that’s both of the money parties. And some people say “oh, we need a third party,” and they go off and form a new third party to join all the many third parties that we already have competing against each other. What we need is a Great Awakening.
What is holding that back? Personally, I believe the problem is that we have too many problems. We need to unify them. The only unification that I can see is that they are all caused by capitalism, or more broadly by a market-based culture. We’ve had that for so long (12,000 years) that people are in denial about it, like the fish-seeing-water thing.
Lefty,
Another part of the problem — I mean the opportunity, we aren’t allowed to have problems or crises anymore because that’s toxic — is that the pro-choice people really think it’s only just now, a few days ago, that abortion was taken away. The Right chipped away at it for years and years. Dig through the articles. How many have a line that runs something like “the only pharmacy/doctor/clinic that performs abortions/provides medication to induce abortions/provides birth control in the city/county/part of state”? When you can’t get a prescription because the only pharmacist for 10 miles refuses, when it’s a 12-hour round-trip to get an abortion, when the last doctor in the county gets a bullet pumped into his head, you already didn’t have Roe protections.
But don’t say it to the dems. The Republicans hate the truth, but so do the democrats, and they hate it just as much, if not more so.
It’s not just laziness and disinterest. Not only did the Republicans playing a superior long game, the dnc dINOS did everything but rip the copper out of the walls these past 40-odd years. Clintonian centrism, excessive compromise, hollowing out the social safety net, all created the political version of a genetic bottleneck while the upper echelons of the dnc fed right alongside Goldman Sachs at the trough as both groups smallpox-blanketed the democrats.
Those who understood that you don’t surrender your way to victory were branded unmutual and pushed out of the party. Those who wouldn’t leave (yeah, you Bernie Sanders) had the game rigged against them. When the rigging was revealed, the party defended it. “We have to rig the primaries, which are meaningless because we decide who the nominee’s going to be anyway, or else the idiots who vote might pick the wrong person.”
Those who kept helping big business and whose families prospered by coziness/conflicts of interest that would surely get any of the hoi polloi arrested were elevated. As a result, the metaphorical gene pool of the democratic party now not only doesn’t contain the necessary genes for aggression, it also lacks any tolerance for aggressive speech or action to be introduced. There’s no way to get them to stick to a five-week plan (look how fast the Roe protests petered away into nothing), so five decades is a pipe dream.