Unitarian minister Theodore Parker’s belief that the moral universe bends toward justice ultimately is a hopeful assertion, but in American politics, the flow of things feels much more like lengthy kite string on a spindle that gets itself tangled while going up and down the narrow extent allowed to it. I say this as I and many others await a ruling from the Supreme Court on abortion rights that is expected, thanks to a recent leak of a draft opinion, to overturn Roe v. Wade—and presumably Planned Parenthood v. Casey along with it, leaving the legal ability to terminate pregnancies up to the states to protect or remove. We have had almost fifty years of a federal protection for this right, and in that time, opponents have worked unceasingly to chip away at it with the ultimate goal of removing it altogether.
There are parallels here with gun control activists. Both of these cases deal with a right that was practiced historically to the limited degree that technology at the time allowed, but with little interference from the government, thanks to the latter’s own limited ability to monitor the doings of the population. Control of either only became extensively practical in the twentieth century, and movements to restore free exercise came along in the United States in the 60s and 70s—the Revolt at Cincinnati that transformed the National Rifle Association from a hunting and marksmanship club into an organization that purportedly stands for gun rights occurred in 1977, four years after Roe, though the equivalent Supreme Court rulings took several decades to achieve. With both of these rights, we have experienced a big bang in the expansion of protected exercise, followed by dedicated efforts to erode the legal guarantees, and as I have suggested before, attacks on one right teach the enemies of every right how to act.
What interests me at this particular moment is the reaction that our major political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, have had to these circumstances. The Democratic response to the anticipated court ruling is to offer legislation in Congress that would protect abortion rights for all Americans under federal law. This would require them to change the filibuster in the Senate and would then have to survive any court challenges, making any such law unlikely either to be enacted or to last, at least for the near future, but I do have to ask why are we only discussing this option now?
I raise the same query with regard to gun rights: Why have the Republicans done nothing in the fourteen years since Heller and the twelve since McDonald? In both cases, the parties have run in campaign after campaign promising to protect one of the two rights. They have used threats against either to drive fundraising on the grounds that nothing makes people hand over cash more than fear. Over the last fifty years, the two parties have had periods in which they controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, and at other times, they have held enough seats to insert legislation into a must-pass bill. And yet, neither of them have done much more than talk about protecting the rights that they claim to value.
One obvious block here is the filibuster, a procedural rule of the Senate of which I am of two minds about. It is a blunt instrument that can stop much good from being enacted, but it is also a restraint on bad law. However, both parties have shown their willingness to modify the extent of the filibuster, at least for judicial nominations, leaving the question open as to why they could not add a new exemption for the protection of rights.
Though this question really is not an open one. The answer is clear. Neither party has any interest in settling the matter at hand. They see it as necessary to have abortion and guns available, along with a handful of similar controversies over bathrooms and marriage licenses and the like, to distinguish one party from the other in a political environment in which both are generally permissive of banks, fossil-fuel extractors, and insurance companies. Without the Culture War, who could tell an R from a D?
The two parties have become like corrupted software. After years of attempts at patches and upgrades, it is clear that all the work of reforming either the Republicans or the Democrats is for naught. They do not function for ordinary people.
I have of late become a GNU/Linux advocate, and I see the FOSS (free and open source) model as being of use here. If we are going to get increased protections for abortion and for firearms possession, we will need parties that we build ourselves with foundational rules regarding leaving personal liberties alone. Achieving this will require all of us to participate—at a minimum to uninstall and replace any politician who deviates from the above basic standard. It will require active and continual use of our freedoms to speak, to write, to assemble, and to petition government. We will all have to seek out direct information on topics that concern us from the candidates, rather than relying on the advertisements that donations pay for. Some of us will have to run for office, but all of us must vote—in primaries especially.
Or we can continue to ride the merry-go-round of donkeys and elephants who chase each other endlessly in their fixed positions on the circle, their respective calliopes shrieking out contrapuntal lines of the same tune.
Merry-go-rounds it is! LOL.
Unfortunately there's no incentive to change. Each party stays in power with these issues, so resolving them is to no one's benefit.
When we speak of building parties, do we mean new parties, or the existing ones? The only party that values both rights is the Libertarian Party, who've sadly succumbed to the same dysfunction that most all third parties do in the U.S.