I am not really picking a fight with Pete Spiliakos, but have less hope on the matter of arguing the abortion question than he does. Actually, there is nothing I would like better than to be able to revivify the public argument about human life. I don’t think the problem is that “Public opinion on abortion is likely to remain ambivalent, incoherent, and somewhat open to persuasion.” People do not want to hear about it because the matter is both too big and too small for concern.
Recently, in Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams says, “So What if Abortion Ends Life?: I believe that life starts at conception. And it’s never stopped me from being pro-choice”. Life? So what? She’s a mother and notes that “The majority of women who have abortions – and one in three American women will – are already mothers.” Anyone who worries about when life begins is a “wingnut”.
But we make choices about life all the time in our country. We make them about men and women in other nations. We make them about prisoners in our penal system. We make them about patients with terminal illnesses and accident victims. We still have passionate debates about the justifications of our actions as a society, but we don’t have to do it while being bullied around by the vague idea that if you say we’re talking about human life, then the jig is up, rights-wise.
I am not sure, but I think she is saying there is no right to life when other things are in the balance, like “reproductive rights” and whether or not there will still be money in the family budget for vacations and Friday evenings out. That reminded me of reading about an MTV special, No Easy Decision, spun off from 16 and Pregnant, and an unforgettable quote that I find repeated in this review, “No one is pro-abortion … but you have to do what’s right,” she concluded. “I wouldn’t choose abortion as a first option for anyone, but it was the best decision for me,” she said. “I know I’ll make it through.”
Of course, the child the girl aborted did not make it through, but there I am, talking like a wingnut again, as if the one life counted more than the lifestyle that would be lost.
Yesterday, I read about “Where Have All the Babies Gone?” from Newsweek, of all places, which is not only about America’s decreasing (and hence aging) population, but also why people are not having children. As one woman quoted in the article puts is, “I feel like my life is not stable enough, and I don’t think I necessarily want it to be … Kids, they change your entire life. That’s the name of the game. And that’s not something I’m interested in doing.”
Postfamilial America is in ascendancy as the fertility rate among women has plummeted, since the 2008 economic crisis and the Great Recession that followed, to its lowest level since reliable numbers were first kept in 1920. That downturn has put the U.S. fertility rate increasingly in line with those in other developed economies—suggesting that even if the economy rebounds, the birthrate may not. For many individual women considering their own lives and careers, children have become a choice, rather than an inevitable milestone—and one that comes with more costs than benefits.
People really cannot be bothered with children. God knows, they are a bother and change your life. People have other expectations, orientations, preoccupations, and do not care if about the humanity of late term fetuses, having accepted the slippery slope that beings at the conception — that is the problem as far as they are concerned and no answer at all. The Newsweek story speaks to the demographic problems that will follow. I do not see that people who do not care about destroying life will care about the future Kotkin and Siegal predict. They are busy worrying about what is right for themselves at the moment. How do we argue against that? If, as Williams said, we can choose for ourselves when we will believe that life begins (and really, who cares) then all things being relative, the demographics of an aging population, much less the morality of taking a human life, all those big things things, pale in relation to the small matter of whether or not a minor medical procedure can prevent a woman from having to change her life, which she can already barely manage.
I would suggest that it will take an awareness of something much larger than the self to make abortion evidently wrong. For a society of people wherein the self is all, we “wingnuts” have no argument in politics.
February 20th, 2013 | 9:21 am
1. People don’t want to think about, let alone talk about, abortion. At all.
2. It’d be nice if when “we” talked about abortion, “we” were at all serious. For instance, “sex ed” and “access to contraception” have NOTHING to do with pregnancy and abortion rates at this point in our history. Teens don’t get pregnant and give birth because they are ignorant or can’t get “The Pill”. Most of the ones who do are just desperate. Not for money. For love.
3. We can’t accomplish #2 because of #1.
February 20th, 2013 | 9:48 am
Kate, excellent, bravo and well done! I enjoyed this piece!
You’ll have to play futurist at some time. What is the result of this ‘turning away from God’ and the resultant moral collapse?
The price to be paid, for all those dead babies.
February 20th, 2013 | 10:44 am
Kate, agreed.
I think we have to stop denying that the ascendancy of the Left has anything to do with a general moral collapse in this country. It’s not about immigration and the social safety net.
February 20th, 2013 | 10:47 am
Too pessimistic here, Kate, I think. Not about what’s happened, but about the American mindset going forward.
But I also think Pete should admit to himself that all remaining forms of “aggressive incrementalism” after the 90s/aughties push against partial birth abortion are not such sure-fire winners, rhetorically. And even that great strategy could not sufficiently taint Obama, one of the few Dems consistent with the spirit of the main pro-choice stance, one of the few who just said, “hell yeah, you have a right to an effective abortion, even out of the birth canal.”
“Consent” incrementalism inevitably gets us into issues where we pit the male against the female, or the parents/authorities against the young female. Rhetorically, I don’t see many Dems squirming before such fights.
The big thing is to get rid of the core holding of Roe/Casey. And then, we can have all kinds of incrementalist policy battle state-by-state.
But, I wonder if there is a way of going after the Doe v. Bolton decision. As Ponnuru shows in his book Party of Death, that is the decision that, by saying that the medical exception to Roe’s trimester framework gets to be determined by the doctor on the basis of “all factors–physical, emotional, psychological…” actually granted a license for abortion up to the time of birth. Decided alongside Roe, it essentially meant that Roe’s whole trimester framework (itself less than logical) that claimed to balance the right of privacy against other factors, was utterly Potemkin. Find a doc that will agree having a baby will negatively impact your emotional or mental health, and you’ll get your abortion, however late. And PP and such make it certain anyone can find such a doc.
By “going after,” I mean states passing laws that will require stricter definition of the basic health exception. Say that past the third trimester several docs have to sign on, and insert several waiting periods and such. Say that only fairly extreme forms of commonly-diagnosed mental illness count. I.e, laws that will in effect nibble at the holding, and dare the current SC to uphold it. Laws that will take the absurd lying language of Roe at its face-value.
But surely someone has thought of that, and there is some barrier to trying it.
Bottom line: even if Roe gets overturned, we’re only 1/4 of the way to stopping the ongoing silent carnage, and w/o overturning it, our cause is sunk.
So I actually take back my Doe suggestion. Do we really want pro-life law-makers getting into the weeds with voters on the language of Roe, on the proper definition of mental illness and such, by their having to half-pretend they take the trimester framework seriously?
No. Come after the whole bloody thing, the whole b.s. “compromise” of Roe, devised by those godless Solomons back in ’73. Come out quoting Hadley Arkes on why no American who holds there is right to abortion really holds there is a right to life, like the Declaration says we all hold.
February 20th, 2013 | 10:51 am
Robert Cheeks,
The result? “The Abolition of Man”…
February 20th, 2013 | 1:25 pm
I agree with Kate. This is the hard truth about our society today, described with eloquence and sadness. Romney and the hacks who ran his campaign were wrong about many things, but this particular truth had pierced their thick skulls. This is why they did not make much of an issue of abortion. Politically, it was the right choice. Unfortunately, that’s the country we live in now.
February 20th, 2013 | 1:37 pm
I don’t know whether I agree with Kate yet, at least completely. Just got back into town. But it is a spectacular post.
February 20th, 2013 | 3:20 pm
I think Kate has touched on the underlying cultural reality that no matter of political or legal maneuvering is really going to be able to remedy. By dint of three generations of cultural errosion we are left with a society that, to paraphrase Augustine, has curved in on itself.
When Justice Kennedy famously wrote in defense of Planned Parenthood vs Casey that …
“at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
… he effectively articulated the metaphysical zeitgeist of the times. How it is that one can pierce such myopia by force of logic or moral appeal when the recipient is perfectly at ease picking and choosing in the ever passing moment whether something is a life or not a life with the kind of ease with which Ms. Williams asserts above suggests we truly are in very different universes.
We can discuss all we like how to plug the breach legally or policially, without meeting the underlying cultural myopia the damn will break regardless.
February 20th, 2013 | 4:36 pm
[...] I am not really picking a fight with Pete Spiliakos, but have less hope on the matter of arguing the abortion question than he does. Actually, there is nothing I would like better than to be able to revivify the public argument about human life. I don’t think Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
February 20th, 2013 | 5:27 pm
Several points,
1. I think some of the comments here are too alienated for the truth about public opinion. Even with all the cowardice and incompetence of the Republicans on this issue, public opinion still favors moving policy in a somewhat more pro-life position relative to the ROE/CASEY status quo. http://www.nyc41percent.com/Docs/NY_Statewide_01-31-13_Topline_Release.pdf
Even if the poll is problematic (and it is of New Yorkers) I still think it is getting at something real.
2. Taking the position that you have a right to destroy another human being because of drones in Pakistan and such is an amazingly weak position. This is an opportunity, not a cause for despair.
3. Focusing public attention of the human reality of the late-term fetus IS a form of cultural change.
4. One of the reasons SSM has gotten so much traction among heterosexuals is exactly the belief that humans have rights. The fundamental and evident humanity of the late-term fetus is important here.
5. Any change in public opinion brought about by any strategy is likely to be limited – or we should assume that it will be – and changes in policy will be even slower and more difficult to come by. But incremental progress within public opinion matters.
February 20th, 2013 | 6:07 pm
Friend Pseudoplotinus, I don’t think it’s a ‘cultural reality’ or ‘cultural myopia’ rather, as Voegelin might say, a loss of reason.
And, because true Reason and existence found in an openness to the ground form a nexus we find that in turning away from the ground, man turns away from that which he is and becomes a creature living in “existential disorder.” And, this creature has no problem justifying the slaughter of the innocents.
February 20th, 2013 | 6:45 pm
Pete, your proposal of incremental change just might work, because very few women ever get to the third term of pregnancy without already having made the “choice”. Ms. Williams, et al., would come to identify the fetal child as child by that time, imagination having kicked in, not to mentioned that child having kicked her will have made the life inside feel too real to ignore. Again, that’s all about her and how she feels about being with child.
Part of my point above and most of what I worry about concerning peoples’ attitudes towards those very small people whose lungs haven’t taken in air yet is what some of us here would call the deadening of the soul, which is what comes of, yes, folding in or focusing in solely on the self. However, those people, like Williams or many of my students or other people that I meet or observe, would not agree that their souls are dead, but would say they are alive to other things than I am.
I do think what they miss is God, but I have also had conversations with people who claim to be Christian and claim that God is so sovereign in the Earth and so totally forgiving, that they need have no concern about what they do. Therefore, in terms of what people do, how they behave, there can be no difference between atheists, agnostics, and “everything is relative” Christians.
Remonstrating with folks or pointing out sin even feels rude from the side of judgement. At least I find it so. Carl, or anyone reading, do you go through life noting the evil people do to them? Yet what we won’t do in a personal way, we expect our politicians to do. Or not to do, in order to be more electable, but people seem to hear the judgement without politicians of the right even saying anything. Romney was accused of wanting to limit “reproductive freedom” without his ever needing to say so. As if he could have done something even he had said.
Still, I also wish he had made moral arguments, if only to say that morality lives and it is right (if not Right) to propound them.
Peter Lawler, I would rather not agree with myself, at least completely.
February 20th, 2013 | 6:56 pm
I find that despite the pervasive public rhetoric in the NY Times and elsewhere, many people can and often do become disgusted with a “don’t care about the right or wrong” attitude on moral issues that understands morality in terms of an emphasis on the self as a being which chooses for choosing’s own sake in terms of circumstances right here, right now.
Yes, there is a great love for choice, and many people hold a strongly held conviction that human dignity is somehow bound up with this capacity (rightly so, I think). This opinion is not going anywhere, but things like Roe/Casey don’t help in clarifying the confusion of conflating the dignity of choice with an understanding that sees choice as an end in itself. Roe/Casey and such things do not encourage a focus on the thing that is chosen, the manner in which one chooses, and the consequences that such choices can bring.
So I agree with Pete on the persuasive effect that the fundamental and evident humanity on the late term fetus could have. It could refocus the issue on the content of choice and not choice simply.
Kate is right about the need for an understanding of something larger than the self, but I think people can and often do recognize the moral confusion that emerges from the contemporary popular view of the choosing self. They often recognize the failures in understanding that the prevailing language and ideology leads them to because they know differently from everyday life.
One need not change this language, but only point out occluded directions and resources and insights that the language itself possesses, and that may conform more to the reality as it is really lived. This is not easy, but I think many can and do recognize this confusion on a variety of issues–including the abortion issue.
So I am not so sure that public opinion could not be slightly swayed through incremental legislative steps at the state level. But the change would be incremental because the issue is much greater than a problem of legislation.
Persuasion is of utmost importance, but incremental laws could not hurt at least in pointing toward understanding the deeper problem. Such laws might help many (including opinion leaders and office holders) to focus on that problem.
February 20th, 2013 | 7:22 pm
“I don’t think it’s a ‘cultural reality’ or ‘cultural myopia’ rather, as Voegelin might say, a loss of reason.”
Or perhaps to put a MacIntyrean gloss on it, it is pure emotivism. Ms. Williams emotes and the tissue becomes a life, she emotes again and the life becomes tissue. Ontology is ultimately subservient to ones felt needs.
While I appreciate what I think are very constructive points made by Pete and John above, their recommendations assume that the typical person is operating out of some need to be self-consistent. I would like to suggest that this is not necessarily the case, and that we are now presented with the additional challenge of explaining why 1 and 1 is 2 before we can move on to more complicated moral arithmetic.
To use Pete’s recommendation as an example, I agree that there is merit in making a morally forceful case on the late term abortion front. But I suspect that the polls that suggest some resonance with the conservative position are highly situational and that the same folks who are against late term abortion in the abstract would be predominantly for it were they to reflect on it from the position of the woman needing the abortion.
To some extent making a moral case in the present cultural environment feels a lot like pushing on a string, there’s little commonly held moral grammar left from which to build the argument.
February 20th, 2013 | 7:54 pm
“Ms. Williams emotes and the tissue becomes a life, she emotes again and the life becomes tissue. Ontology is ultimately subservient to ones felt needs.”
That reminds me of a conversation I had with a female friend back in the 80s, when we were in our 20s. Regarding the fetus in the womb, she made a remark to the effect that, for the woman, it is a baby if she wants it; otherwise, it’s just a fetus. I don’t think she was stating this as a matter of personal conviction, but merely expressing the conventional morality that had taken shape among highly educated young women by that time.
February 20th, 2013 | 8:01 pm
That’s exactly the problem and how to deal with that through politics is one of the great challenges facing anyone who sees it as a problem. What I meant by “small decisions” is that any given woman in an “impossible” pregnancy might go through any amount of introspection and angst about killing her child. She knows it is a child, no doubt about that. I have known many women who are there and most writing about abortion comes from that point of view. “It is agony, but the best thing for all is that I kill the child.” Using the word “fetus” is a way of deadening truth, or softening the blow or something like that. Ms. Williams may be writing with more confidence, amounting to bluster, or else I would like to believe that because even a humanist ought to be able to say, we do not murder. Of course, she is insisting abortion is not murder even while admitting the death of a child is involved.
Back to one of John’s points, which I agree with, given a preference for the consent of the governed, persuasion is all. One of the arguments about abortion that I set up in one of the courses I teach, about argument, is in the unit on logical fallacies. The textbook I must use has a dozen examples of those, but I (naturally) go further to play with common political arguments. I discuss abortion in “The Argument of the Beard” wherein we can discuss when life begins. If someone offers the birth argument I can discuss premature births and rationales for aborting infants at, say, six months gestation who could be kept alive and are kept alive by parents who want them. Whatever point is offered as “Alive”, I ask about the moment before that happens, or the day before, and continue to argue until the only logical response about “Alive” is sometime around conception — at least in theory.
I do think people are persuadable as to theory. What’s the saying about hard cases making bad law — all know hard cases and we have decided this point of law on the basis of hard cases.
February 20th, 2013 | 8:15 pm
“To some extent making a moral case in the present cultural environment feels a lot like pushing on a string, there’s little commonly held moral grammar left from which to build the argument.”
Yes, that’s exactly the situation.
However, we still have two millennium of experience and knowledge, wreck wasteland though it may be, upon which to rebuild. Not to mention a remnant to rally.
It will be this remnant that moves among the cannibals teaching them to pray and to engage in each and every act of immortalizing, because, in time, the cannibals will again seek the meaning of existence.
But, before that, the price for the our nation’s participation in the slaughter of the innocents will be, I fear, horrific.
February 20th, 2013 | 9:23 pm
Pseudoplotinus
“But I suspect that the polls that suggest some resonance with the conservative position are highly situational and that the same folks who are against late term abortion in the abstract would be predominantly for it were they to reflect on it from the position of the woman needing the abortion.”
That does not seem to be our experience with public opinion on the subject of partial-birth abortion. Remember when I was the pessimist around here?
February 20th, 2013 | 9:40 pm
If all that many people were outraged about partial-birth abortion, wouldn’t Obama’s support for it have marked him politically? No one who voted for him cared about that.
February 20th, 2013 | 10:24 pm
What fraction of the public knows what partial birth abortion is anymore (it has been six years or so since the Supreme Court decision upholding the ban)? Of those, what fraction knows Obama’s policy preferences on the issue? Of that no doubt minority, how many have seen any emotionally powerful (though shrewd rather than crude) message about Obama and partial birth abortion? You cannot overstate how much Republicans have failed to communicate with large swaths of the public. Not that this issue would, by itself determine the presidential election (it cannot substitute for a relevant and attractive economic agenda), but at the margin, it would help the GOP if the Democrats were more widely seen as the party of partial birth abortion in the same way that it hurts Republicans to be seen as the party of “legitimate rape.”
February 21st, 2013 | 12:09 am
Pete,
Isn’t it possible that Republican politicians and their advisors have made a reasonable political judgment, based on empirical research, that making a big issue of late term abortion would hurt as much or more than it would help them? I realize that there’s little reason to have faith in these schlemiels generally, but could it be that they’ve actually done their homework on this particular issue? To be clear, this is an honest question – I don’t know the answer to it.
My intuition (FWIW) is that the strategy you recommend would be a wash, if not a net vote-loser in most states, simply because of the position of the media, and of elite opinion generally, on this issue, which is pretty much identical to the NARAL position. But I’d be pleased to learn otherwise.
February 21st, 2013 | 12:14 am
Pete: Um, what more exactly do you think the GOP should do/have done re:Obama’s abortion extremism, considering the MSM, the Dems (but I repeat myself), and Obama himself openly lied about his position, brazenly and repeatedly? I really don’t know what can realistically be done, given the state of the MSM at this point.
February 21st, 2013 | 1:59 am
“Remember when I was the pessimist around here?”
Hahaha. Those were good times weren’t they?!
For what it’s worth, arguing that the challenge before us is more complicated than just making compelling policy arguments doesn’t make me a pessimist, but just a little more realistic than most about our political obstacles.
As essential as policy arguments are, they aren’t in my opinion sufficient. There is a cultural component that makes our key audience less receptive to pure policy advocacy than perhaps some of us more wonkish sorts would like to admit.
To wit, I am sure you are familiar with the following segment of data which originated from the WaPo 2012 Exit Polls:
https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/266570635927498753
What can one make of this if not that a significant segment of the voting electorate has succumbed to the worst form of irrational emotivism? While this doesn’t necessarily condemn us to a future of Obama-esque administrations, I don’t think the emotivistic demographic is likely going to get smaller. To which the logical question then becomes, how to make a compelling case to an electorate that appears to be rapidly receding from any preference for political leaders with actual leadership qualities aside from playing the role of therapist in chief?
February 21st, 2013 | 8:14 am
djf “Isn’t it possible that Republican politicians and their advisors have made a reasonable political judgment, based on empirical research, that making a big issue of late term abortion would hurt as much or more than it would help them?” I think it is more likely that they followed the path of least resistance + working from a dated model of the electorate. It wasn’t sound thinking that led them to focus on the high earning job creators who built that.
Brian, “Um, what more exactly do you think the GOP should do/have done re:Obama’s abortion extremism, considering the MSM, the Dems (but I repeat myself), and Obama himself openly lied about his position” The short answer is anything as most people had no particular clue of Obama’s abortion extremism. The center-right has the resources to get a message out (though techniques need major updating to deal with changing media consumption patterns. What you are missing is that Republicans are already payiing whatever price there is for abortion “extremism” by letting the Democrats frame the issue. The answer to the combination of cynicism, incompetence and cowardice of the GOP on this issue in recent years is not to despair of the electorate – yet.
Pseudoplotinus “As essential as policy arguments are, they aren’t in my opinion sufficient. There is a cultural component that makes our key audience less receptive to pure policy advocacy than perhaps some of us more wonkish sorts.”
A ad program focusing on the life of the late-term fetus is cultural. I’m open to other suggestions too of course.
February 21st, 2013 | 10:12 am
Kate, many great points in the thread. You’re so right about the horrible fact that Obama’s stance on the partial-birth abortion did not really hurt him. That seems to be evidence that good folks like Hadley Arkes were wrong about how powerful the incrementalist strategy of spotlighting that issue would be.
As for the issue of discomfort in talking about the issue, I’m not 100% what the point of your addressing me there is, but I’ll say this: I’m sure I have had many students and not a few friends who have had, or encouraged their partners to have, abortions. Without my knowing it. Without my ever asking about it, either. And so, yes, it’s a very touchy subject. Every conversation you get into about abortion with a non-intimate might be with a person who caused one. And even those you’re closest to might cover one up. One on hand, our culture has tried to get people to think it’s completely normal to have one (in some places, the numbers bear out that it is), but on the other, everyone knows it’s a big deal.
The classroom and politics are appropriate places to discuss the subject–but in getting to know your friends and acquaintances better sorts of conversations, “so what do you think of abortion?” is of course perilous. Global, warming, gun control, even the most hot-button culture war issues, such as gay marriage, are much less dangerous.
So I absolutely expect conservative politicians to say lucidly and repeatedly what I would never say or bring up at a gathering unless directly asked.
February 21st, 2013 | 12:14 pm
Well, one good way would be to drop a bunch of money on guys who can produce these sorts of ads that can effectively convey a rudimentary understanding of how bad policy has bad effects for you and me. If the RNC could do this sort of thing on a weekly basis, maybe folks would have at least the beginning of an understanding of the laws of cause and effect when it comes to policy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQscE3Xed64
February 21st, 2013 | 12:58 pm
Pete,
Need I point out that I was not defending the empty campaign that Romney actually ran, or his use of the “you built that” theme in particular? Also, among other problems with relying on polling data to make abortion a major thrust of GOP politics, isn’t it possible that many of those giving pro-life responses are low-income African Americans and Latinos, for whom this simply is not a vote-determinative (or even vote-influencing) issue?
February 21st, 2013 | 3:43 pm
Pseudoplotinus, yeah something like that, but I think it is better done outside the RNC since I’m not sure that the RNC, for reasons of internal politics is going to be able to come up with specific positive proposals on health care policy, taxes, abortion or what-have-you.
Carl, from the perspective of the average walking-around-not-paying-especial-attention-to-politics American, what spotlighting of Obama’s partial birth abortion position have they seen? Never mind seeing media that connects Obama to the procedure. I saw a lot of (Karl Rove funded) ads about Obama and China (I don’t remember the context and never cared and neither did anyone else as far as I can tell), but nothing at all on Obama’s abortion extremism.
djf, I know you aren’t defending “you built that” but I think the chances that the Romney campaign stumbled on the optimal abortion strategy are much less than forty-seven percent.
When it comes to late-term abortions even many pro-choice self-identifiers (Latinos and African-Americans are more likely to identify and pro-choice I believe) adopt the “pro-life” position.
I agree that it isn’t a silver bullet, but does it hurt or help the Republicans when people think they are the party that believes that a woman who got pregnant from a rape must not have been really raped? There is no reason why a similar (though less cartoonish) dynamic can’t play out on late-term abortion. It isn’t THE answer to the Republican party’s problems. There is no THE answer. It just seems to me like a better way for the Republicans and their allies to deal with a contentious issue as their current strategy seems to include almost all of the costs of focusing attention on this issue and none of the potential benefits of taking on the opposition where the public already agrees with you and the visuals are strongly on your side. If they won’t even take on those kinds of fights, (where the ground is actually much more favorable than say health care reform) then there is zero reason for their existence. If we assume that our fellow Americans who voted for Obama are all a bunch of self-obsessed emotivist swine, then we start off by losing. And deservedly.
February 21st, 2013 | 4:26 pm
“If we assume that our fellow Americans who voted for Obama are all a bunch of self-obsessed emotivist swine, then we start off by losing.”
For the record, “swine” would be going a bit too far in my estimation. A reasonable case can be made that they at least deserve to be included among the family of hominids. But hey, that’s just me.
February 21st, 2013 | 4:58 pm
Yeah, I’m not saying swine. And I will agree that candidates for office must be careful about their rhetoric. But if no one ever says anything, how will the self-obsessed emotivist folks among us know there is another way to be? What’s wrong with someone saying “Head’s up! This way!” Otherwise, we get what we’ve got and will keep getting it.
February 21st, 2013 | 5:05 pm
But what if some substantial body of Obama voters (and he only got just less than 51% of the vote) aren’t “self-obsessed emotivists?” Treating them and talking about them as such might actually be getting in the way. Maybe the things that they are hearing would actually lead a reasonable and decent person to vote for Obama.
“What’s wrong with someone saying “Head’s up! This way!”
Nothing – which is all I have been saying.
February 22nd, 2013 | 5:54 am
Pete, about the lack of ads attacking his abortion record, you’re right.
February 22nd, 2013 | 8:20 am
Pete, yes, that why I was not really picking an argument with you in the first place.
I am noting that there are Americans with closed minds on the topic. Why? See the original post.
It’s just a pity, that’s all.
February 22nd, 2013 | 8:38 am
Lots of great comments.
Carl, you did catch exactly what I meant. I begin to wonder if by not speaking, risking giving offense in personal relationships, we don’t make the politician’s job much harder. Or God has to bring about a national/international piercing of conscience, an awareness of the evil.
Pseudoplotinus, I love the Youtube video on government regulation. Very funny and very true. My husband works with many small businessmen and women and they have exactly the same stories. You’d think people didn’t want new businesses to start.
February 22nd, 2013 | 8:49 am
” I begin to wonder if by not speaking, risking giving offense in personal relationships, we don’t make the politician’s job much harder. ”
Really?
We’re talking about the systemic, politically encouraged, slaughter that makes the Nazi blush at his incompetence. And, its happening in your country, in your state, in your city and you’re concerned with ‘giving offense?’
Well, I guess we don’t want to upset the faculty lounge crew?
February 22nd, 2013 | 9:09 am
Not the any kind of lounge crew, but the classroom (where I do throw some students into shock, see above) or — where? Where do we broach this subject? It is not the stuff of the grocery aisle.
February 22nd, 2013 | 9:23 am
As, I believe, you imply in your blog, abortion needs to be debated and argued long and loud.
It would seem to me the classroom is where we want to begin. How about church? Why not argue at club meetings against funding any organization that subsidizes abortion (Planned Parenthood, et al)? How about Parma City council meetings? How about Democrat Party functions? And, yes the grocery aisle.
We’re talking about murder here and once the state mounts that slippery slope, well the next thing is they come for is the non-productive elderly. And, you know Democrat-progressivists are just salivating at the chance to begin those processes associated with euthanasia. Do you think that when the Dems launch that campaign you will be able to find a place to discuss it?
However, you’ve had the courage to raise the subject here at PoMoCon and generated one of the longer threads in a while here. And, thank you for that.
February 22nd, 2013 | 9:44 am
I’d have to go to another church; unless I spoke about how to talk about abortion in the grocery aisle. Only one girl I know from our church aborted and I only know because she was in my kitchen weeping about it. She knew what she had done. To which, honestly, Bob, the only answer is “Go and sin no more.”
It doesn’t really take courage to talk about abortion, but opportunity. Intruding with the topic only drives people away and into the kind of rationalistic retreat of Ms. Williams, linked to in the post. We do have to talk about it long, but I suggest softly and with persistence, watching for opportunity. If people perceive you as clownish, they won’t take you seriously. That’s important, because we cannot mess up the message by offending. Murder, but legal murder, which means they all think they’ve got a right. Distinctions between civil rights and natural rights get lost. This civil right to murder is unnatural and we can talk about it like that. What to do when people deny natural law, that’s what I am seeing as the problem.
February 22nd, 2013 | 10:00 am
I have a great deal of compassion for any lady who has aborted a child. We are all sinners.
Again, thanks for bringing it up here!
February 22nd, 2013 | 12:56 pm
“But what if some substantial body of Obama voters … aren’t “self-obsessed emotivists?””
Well according to the WaPo Exit Poll it turns out the presidency was delivered to Obama by “self-obsessed emotivists” :
https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/266570635927498753
Among polled voters, Romney led decisively among voters whose concerns were about relevant Presidential qualities, specifically, values, strength of leadership and vision. But Obama all but owned that portion of the voters whose primary concern was that the president “care for people like them.”
That to me is the definition of “self obsessed emotivists.”
So what to do? The answer is this: political/cultural remediation. Conservatives need to find away to expose this growing population of emotional narcissists to the realities of bad policy that is both appealing to these sorts of folks, ie entertaining, yet also edifying at least in a remedial sense. Hence my example above, also noted by Kate.
Conservatives need to find a way of presenting to the broad American cultural a kind of “school house rock” curriculum that can efficiently navigate through the obstacles of political cultural ADD to reveal the underlying reasons why liberal policy fails, and conservative policy doesn’t.
February 22nd, 2013 | 1:21 pm
How about a “reality show” about starting a small business? Or one about working as an abortionist? I don’t know if they would be entertaining programs, unless you found entertaining people to be in them.
February 22nd, 2013 | 3:10 pm
Pseudoplotinus, if you look at the full exit poll results, Obama also won among voters who prioritized unemployment, the housing market, health care policy and foreign policy. Now I think that it is a GOOD thing if voters get the idea that a candidate doesn’t have contempt for them, but even that aside, you might wonder if the in touch with people like me answer is acting as a proxy for something else (that maybe the other party is mostly interested in cutting taxes on high earners or what-have-you.) Some of the people voting for Obama were decent hardworking folks. Finding different ways to call them (or treat them like) selfish, ignorant narcissists is politically counterproductive and unjust.
http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/race/president
“Conservatives need to find a way of presenting to the broad American cultural a kind of “school house rock” curriculum that can efficiently navigate through the obstacles of political cultural ADD to reveal the underlying reasons why liberal policy fails, and conservative policy doesn’t.”
I have no idea of how the particulars might work (and if I did I would be a millionaire), and I would put it differently, that is about the right idea.
February 23rd, 2013 | 5:48 pm
That’s what Ted Cruz was talking about the other night, that people would like to succeed in America and that America once was a place where anyone could succeed. If Republicans only talk to and about people who have achieved success, then they lose.
How about an ancillary message that if you make it in America, don’t have to kill your unborn kids.
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