One Year on From Dobbs: The Dangers of Radicalizing Minority Rule
Reactionaries are pursuing a deeply unpopular political project. But that doesn’t mean they can’t succeed. It means they are likely to embrace ever more authoritarian forms of minoritarianism in order to win.
A thread, outlining some key arguments from my new Democracy Americana newsletter:
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/one-year-on-from-dobbs-the-dangers
Since Dobbs, the reactionary assault on reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy has only escalated. Republican-led states have dramatically restricted the access to abortion – through outright bans or laws that pretend to include reasonable exceptions, but never do. 2/
There is, however, a glass-half-full reading of the situation: By radicalizing the quest to roll back the post-1960s civil rights order, Republicans keep descending further into deeply unpopular territory. Abortion, to put it simply, is not a winner for the GOP. 3/
As long as elections are still being held in this country, this is a problem for the Republican Party. And it is not confined to this one topic. On key issues like gun violence and book bans, the GOP is getting further and further away from where the majority is. 4/
Was Dobbs, the triumph of conservative jurisprudence and crown jewel of the reactionary counter-mobilization against the post-1960s civil rights order, actually a Pyrrhic victory for the Right? 5/
It has become something of a mantra in the (small-d) democratic camp to emphasize how Republicans are about to pay the price for having gone too far, that Trumpism is failing, that democracy is finally and somewhat inevitably on the path to victory. 6/
But rather than seeking solace in the idea that the rightwing assault on democracy can’t succeed because it is so unpopular, I believe we need to reckon with the dangers of this kind of radicalizing minoritarianism, the damage it is likely to cause, and how it might still win. 7/
In this particular moment, the most dangerous ideas in the political discourse are that Republicans will surely moderate once they truly realize the majority is against them; that conservatives are destined to lose if they don’t; that the Right ultimately won’t go *that* far. 8/
People in the pro-democracy camp need to resist the false comfort of the demographic destiny fallacy: Any variant of “We have the numbers” won’t cut it. Conservatives understand the numbers better than anyone else, and they have a comprehensive strategy to succeed anyway. 9/
Let’s remember that the political conflict is not simply a game of chess where we can patiently rejoice while the opponent is making reckless moves. Is time on “our” side? Even if that is the case, this “game” has real consequences for millions of people in the here and now. 10/
In practice, this new post-Dobbs reality has already led to horrible, needless suffering for thousands of women. And it has stripped about half the population of fundamental rights, making them into second-class citizens and irrevocably harming their dignity in the process. 11/
One key problem with the “Extremism is destined to lose” interpretation of U.S. politics is that the political geography of the United States makes the situation a lot more complicated than the “It’s a numbers game” confidence generally acknowledges. 12/
While the nation as a whole is moving away from conservative preferences, many red states are still getting redder. It’s a stark reminder of how much the country is falling apart and that we are looking at fundamentally incompatible visions for what America should be. 13/
Another problem: Even in well-functioning representative systems, power relations will necessarily lag behind cultural and demographic change – and the U.S. system is deliberately set up to disconnect these changing demographic and cultural realities from political power. 14/
The system wasn’t designed to accommodate multiracial, pluralistic democracy - it consistently awards disproportionate power to a shrinking minority of white conservatives; the GOP is basically guaranteed enough power to obstruct Democratic governance at the federal level. 15/
The path towards the abolition of the right to abortion in Dobbs offers a case study in how the conservative movement has navigated the political system and maximized its chances despite pursuing broadly unpopular goals. 16/
The reactionary crusade against abortion rights has never been able to change public opinion, to convince the public. The Right instead devised a long-term path that went far beyond just an electoral strategy. 17/
They set up a complex judicial infrastructure, invented legal doctrines, figured out how to channel radical popular energies and combine them with an elite reactionary project, and bridged the gap between fundamentalist Christian mobilization and the mainstream of GOP politics. 18/
All along the way from Roe to Dobbs, conservatives never concerned themselves with the will of the majority, or wavered in their commitment to an increasingly unpopular cause. As a matter of fact, Republicans have been singularly focused on subverting majoritarian rule. 19/
Professional anti-“alarmists” on the Center and the Center-Left like to pretend that conservatives are merely, and at least somewhat justifiably, pushing back against certain “excesses” of “woke” leftism, and that they will stop once those excesses are kept in check. That’s nonsense. 20/
Rightwingers have been escalating their assault on the post-1960s civil rights order because they don’t accept *any* deviation from what they consider the natural and/or divinely ordained order of traditional white elite patriarchal rule. 21/
@tzimmer_history You might have a point, but ironically SCOTUS just made a high-profile decision in a civil-rights-adjacent case that is in line with popular opinion. 😂 (Affirmative action doesn't poll well in like any group.)
