What is your definition of a liberal. Is it just pro-choice? Or pro universal health care, universal free college, lower taxes for individuals, jobs for all, minimum wage of $15 per hour. So, if a person is not pro-choice, he/she is not liberal even if he/she is for everything else. Wouldn’t that place the liberals in the same position as the religious right, who willing to accept anyone even Trump, just because of a Supreme Court appointment to support pro-choice, even when there are so many other issues that impact more lives. For what it worth, I sometimes hope that the Supreme Court stops abortion, I am sick of the issue. I am old enough to be in college when the decision was made, and I saw how good liberal people could not accept that decision. I think Trump has shown that these people voted to stop abortion, to the determent of their Christian souls. The abortion fight would be in each state government, not federal government. I am sometimes curious about what good things these Christians could do, if they just didn’t have that issue pulling them to the Republican party in national elections.
You’ve got to be joking.
Are you truly unaware of the number of court and state legislative cases and bills that have been presented AND passed in the last two decades that are all about taking down Roe v Wade, brick by brick? They number in the hundreds. HUNDREDS. Another GOP led state just passed another draconian anti-choice bill last week. They have never stopped, and will never stop. Yet another reason why every single vote in every single election counts. Because GOP led state houses are the majority in the US. This fight has never ended.
You leave the issue of a woman’s reproductive rights up to the states entirely with no federal jurisdiction, Roe is gone and so are women’s rights. Period. Welcome back to the dark ages of coat hangers and back alleys.
Women’s reproductive rights do NOT deserve to be shunned as though they are not also a civil rights issue. They are also an economic rights issue. The sooner people who dismiss it as background noise ( cough BernieSanders cough ) understand that, the better.
I agree with you, at least in part, but a DINO won’t help the Democratic agenda, be it liberal or centrist if they want to hold things up by voting contrary if your “majority” is in name only as well. DINOs are not beholden to the Democratic Party, so you really can’t make them vote your way. Or am I missing something?
Referring to Lipinski’s win as simply a function of the “Democratic Machine” completely ignores the core issue of open primaries.
I think Rep. Lipinski is a dinosaur. But it wasn’t only Democrats who voted him in here. Recognize that for what it is, and try to fix the REAL problem.
Also recognize that the entire Illinois primary yesterday had such poor turnout numbers across the board that you can also safely and confidently state that you get the government you vote for, or in this case don’t bother to vote for. Maybe they need to work on GOTV and ground game efforts there too.
Again, you’re misunderstanding what I’m saying, and then leaping to the nearest conclusion based on that misunderstanding. Lipinski is Conservative on several issues. Abortion is only one. He voted against O’care, he’s against even a $12/per hour minimum wage. As near as I can tell he’s not particularly liberal on any issue, but his
district is. That’s why it’s a shame that the more liberal candidate, the one with views that better suit the district, didn’t win. On the other hand, I’d be happy to see him win a district in Eastern KY where he’d be a vast improvement.
Judging by the fact that the religious right has abandoned almost every single moral principle they’ve claimed for the last several decades while pledging fealty to PP, I don’t hold out even a glimmer of hope that they’d change their voting habits in the slightest if Roe v. Wade were overturned. They’d just move on to try to outlaw the medical procedure in states where it’s legal and the fight would then move to upholding the anti-choice ruling and ensuring it remains intact.
This is where taking back the House with enough of a majority to render a DINO vote toothless on some issues becomes important. Even having a DINO in that seat is better than a Republican, because while they aren’t going to vote with you 100% of the time, they are not going to vote AGAINST you 100% of the time either.
It’s a numbers game. So GOTV efforts become important to swing the House. Give Nancy Pelosi enough votes to whip then Lipinski becomes the outlier she doesn’t have to convince…and in the meantime, start working on GOTV efforts in that district so that an actual Democrat can win. /mytwocents
Except that’s not true. DINOs, more often than not, put us over the edge to not only capture the majority, which allows us to bring up legislation for a vote in the first place, they tend to vote with the party on most other issues than the handful they disagree with. It’s simple, a DINO might vote with the party 70+% of the time while a Republican may vote with Democrats 10% of the time.
That’s why I love local grassroots movements doing the heavy lifting in elections, which is what the Blue Wave is all about. They understand their local constituencies and automatically have a level of trust and insight that the DCCC can’t match. My favorite example is the transgender candidate who beat the anti-transgender bigot in VA–by talking nonstop about potholes. We have a lot of sensible liberals out in red country; they just need support on their terms and the absence of nutty electoral handicaps like the one Newman had to face.
Support for Trump from evangelicals has risen 6% since January. Stormy Daniels is a plus in their eyes. Christian fanatics simply have to be outmaneuvered at this point. They cannot be placated.
I agree with you, but when the majority of white women voted for Trump, sometimes, I think they should get what they voted for, the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Then if they don’t like what they got, they can fight it in state legislatures or by state referendum. If a state bans abortions, then we could have organizations to help these women travel to a pro-choice state.
It can feel good to make this argument, but following it to its logical conclusion leads to the “makes the whole world blind” scenario and I think we ought to be better than that. Just because people “deserve” something, doesn’t mean they should suffer those consequences. There are less retributive mechanisms to achieve the same ends.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of non-white women voted for Clinton, and we’ve suffered enough due to the stupidity of a majority of white women. We don’t deserve to be further punished because of their actions.
I don’t consider it “punishment”. I just think sometimes, that there should be consequences for your actions and your votes. One of the consequences is the reversal of Roe v. Wade, So be it. Deal with it. If not in this election cycle, it will happen. My thought is that it would change the entire political arguments on the national level. What could the Republican run on, if they didn’t have the Supreme Court as an issue for their religious base?
Why are they stupid? You want to make sure they don’t change their minds and vote for what you call “real Democrats” in the future?
This is the kind of arrogant talk that, along with Clinton’s laziness and hubris, cost us the presidency in 2016. The ACA did not help everyone; not everyone gets an immediate or even medium-term benefit from efforts to curb global warming, many people resent having to pay taxes to fund unfunded public pensions when they cannot afford to save. All some people got out of the Obama years was ten more hours a week they had to work at a second job to maintain the same standard of living. If the Democratic leadership, if coastal, liberal Democrats (like me), and identity politics fueled hotheads (I am certain Bernie & Elizabeth Warren, deep in their hearts, despise identity politics and the distraction it creates from an economic message) don’t understand that, the politics of fear will win against the politics of hope every time.
I keep posting this on here, so forgve me if you’ve seen it, but this is SUCH an interesting glimpse into where this all went wrong for the evangelical right.
Those white female Trump voters weren’t all stupid or racist, but they were all conned. The GOP propaganda machine illegally suppressed the vote by fanning racial fire, spreading lies and propaganda, throwing up dog whistles, etc. They did it with illegal hacking, dirty money and dirty tricks. Putin, Mercer, Stone, Manafort, CA - the list of co conspirators goes on and on.
The legitimate political issues you are discussing were thrown under the bus. They are not why Clinton lost.
It’s an interesting take, but I think the author Michael Gerson is missing an extremely important piece of the modern evangelical movement. He talked a lot about the roots of evangelicalism in abolitionist 19th-century thought and lumps all American Protestantism into that same cultural bucket. But that completely ignores the Southern Baptist tradition, which was one of the primary religious pushers of slavery as a force for good (in very similar fashion to the current crop of evangelicals tying themselves to Trump’s yoke). After the Civil War, it was the Baptist tradition that spawned the KKK and formalized Jim Crow in the South. I think this “Christian” tradition bears a significant portion of the causes of the current evangelical crisis.
When I think of “evangelicals” today, most of the most publicly visible seem to originate from the Southern Baptists. They’ve completely co-opted the movement, the loss of which Gerson laments. He repeatedly stumbles into this fact in the article without recognizing what it is. For instance, he notes that, “According to exit polls, 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Roy Moore, while 95 percent of black evangelicals supported his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones. The two groups inhabit two entirely different political worlds.” The reasons for the almost total bifurcation is completely understandable if you factor in the influence of the Southern Baptists’ beliefs that shaped (and continue to shape) the racial animus that is still driving a wedge between people in our society today.
Until reformist evangelicals like Gerson are able to realize how their movement was corrupted and taken off-course by this toxic, racist Christian tradition, I don’t see much hope for its recovery.
Awesome insight.
Yet, as someone with a dear evangelical friend , dyed in the wool not racist, running for Congress in VA, let me tell you there are very good talking points in this article for talking trumpist evangelicals off the cliff.
Everyone needs to realize that no one thinks of themselves as evil.
So punish the many to punish the few? You do know the loss of Roe affects more than just the white women who were dumb enough to vote for Trump, right? (disclaimer: I am a white woman, but not a dumb one LOL)
What you are talking about is Sarandon-esque “revolution will bring us closer to our goal” thinking. Which I’m sorry, is such a privileged position to be coming from on this I don’t know if you are actually being serious or not.
You understand that states ARE banning abortions, right? That clinics are being closed at record pace in many states, and there are women that already have to travel out of state or across their own state to access the dwindling number of clinic providers that are available to them? You understand that not all women in need of reproductive services are able to do so? That they do not have the economic stability to do so? You understand this is one of the many, MANY fronts that the states in conjunction with the cheesedicks in the GOP side of Congress (and Lipinskis of the world) are pushing when they keep trying to defund Planned Parenthood?
Do you also need me to point out to you that the overwhelming number of women this directly affects more than most are NOT white women? Hence my comments about it being both a civil rights AND an economic issue?
Since it’s not quite driving the point home with the facts I’ve noted above…how about this one. This JUST happened in Ohio, where Republican lawmakers in the state have tabled a bill to not only block access to reproductive services like abortion, but to have the LEGAL ABILITY to execute any doctor who performs an abortion. Yes, I said EXECUTE. But you think it’s perfectly okay to let the states take over this discussion with no federal involvement…
This is what you are supporting when you say “maybe we should just let them do away with federal support”. Think long and hard about that position.
What that sentence tells me is that you don’t in any way understand that identity politics ARE an economic message. Trying to separate the two is pure privilege, nothing more.
What’s going to save your country is listening to the people who have been screwed over the most and by that, have become the most pragmatic and common sensed voters out there. Hint: it isn’t the ones lamenting the white working class at the expense of everyone else.