The end of the pro-life party?

I was away on vacation last week and took along the current First Things and two books to do a little reading when possible. It was almost never possible – which means the vacation went really well and kept me busy doing fun, interesting and lively things. But I did get through one article in the magazine, and it was a gem of wisdom that I haven’t seen reflected elsewhere….though my reading time is getting tighter these days.

In the space of a relatively few pages, Hadley Arkes examines the transformation of the two political parties over time to become redefined interest groups, split from within and irrelevent to their traditional followers.

This snip summarizes:

Since the days of Ronald Reagan, the Republican party has become, ever more clearly, the pro-life party in our politics. And, just as clearly, the “right to abortion,” with its theme of sexual liberation, has become the ­central peg on which the interests of the Democratic party have been arranged. Under these conditions, the pro-life movement has become bound up inescapably with the fate of the Republican party.

Until now. While the weather people are busy reporting which way the winds blow, Arkes is sort of a geologist noticing the ground shifts.

What is engaged here is a truth about the nature of political parties that has gone remarkably unappreciated: Parties have the means of changing their own constituencies or their composition. By altering their appeals, they drive some groups out and bring others in.

Specifically, he looks through the lens of the Giuliani candidacy.

But there is in his campaign a sobering truth that cannot be evaded: The nomination and election of Rudy Giuliani would mark the end of the Republican party as the pro-life party in our politics. And that would be the case regardless of whether pro-lifers respond to his nomination by refusing to vote for Giuliani, forming a third party, or folding themselves into a coalition that succeeds in electing Giuliani.

The Republicans are clearly fractured, made most clear by the recent alignment of several conservative, pro-life leaders behind several different presidential candidates -even pro-abortion Giuliani.

If a Republican party, reconstituted in this way, manages to win, the Republican establishment will readily draw the lesson that they can win convincingly without pro-lifers and their bundle of causes: the destruction of embryos in research, assisted suicide, the resistance to same-sex marriage. Indeed, a Republican party shorn of those people and their baggage may seem to offer a stronger, more durable majority than the party that eked out victories by narrow margins in 2000 and 2004.

Pro-life voters may subordinate their concerns and join the new coalition, but the lesson extracted [emphasis added] will be the same [pay attention to this lesson]: “The Republican party can win when the pro-life issue is thrust from the center to the periphery of the party’s concerns. Even the pro-lifers do not see themselves as one-issue voters; they will give primacy to other concerns as the crises before us make other issues indeed more urgent. They will content themselves with symbolic gestures or modest measures rationed out to them. For they know that, when their interest collides with others, the party will have to subordinate their concerns to nearly anything that seems more pressing.” And, for all practical purposes, nearly any interest will trump the interests of the pro-life community.

In short…

For those concerned about the life issues, the ­choices offered by a Giuliani nomination are bleak. This melancholy state of things is deepened by the awareness that there are powerful considerations moving the pro-lifers toward accommodation.

Look at this keen analogy Arkes makes:

During the famous debate between Lincoln and Douglas, Douglas professed to be neutral on the matter of slavery. He professed to have reached no moral judgment. And so, he concluded, people should be free in the separate territories to vote slavery up or down. But, as Lincoln pointed out, he had indeed reached a moral judgment. If he had regarded slavery as a wrong—as Douglas had regarded polygamy—he would have understood that a wrong is that which no one ought to do, that anyone may be properly restrained from doing. To say slavery is something legitimate to choose is to say that slavery stood in the class of things “not wrong.”

This engages critical thinking skills that have to be engaged right now as much as ever. We need good argument skills.

Lincoln said that Douglas was trying to “blow out the moral lights” among us by teaching a policy of “indifference”—that slavery just did not matter enough to stir such divisions in the country. In a similar way, Giuliani is teaching us, in the style of Douglas, that we should not care overly much, that we should treat as a matter of indifference a right to take a human life for wholly private reasons that need not rise beyond convenience. Not that people choose abortion for the sake of a trifling convenience. The point, rather, is that even a decision taken for the most flippant reasons may not be judged by anyone else.

Someone’s values are going to prevail in the next election. We need clarity to determine – as far as possible – what the choices will mean.