Tammy Ljungblad/Kansas City Star
Kansan abortion rights supporters celebrate the failure of an attempt to strip abortion protections from the state constitution on August 2, 2022.
There have been several times in American history when a large number of people have had basic rights stripped from them, and the results are instructive.
The most notorious and catastrophic such event was the end of Reconstruction, when Blacks who’d enjoyed and exercised the right to vote for some of the time since the end of the Civil War saw that right violently stripped away by white vigilantes and the withdrawal of federal troops. As it ultimately took harsh federal coercion to end Jim Crow apartheid—the very system that denied Southern Blacks federal representation—the fight to restore civil rights took nearly 90 years.
For those who would deny Americans a previously enjoyed basic right, the story of Reconstruction’s end, it became clear last night, contains a fundamental lesson: If you’re denying a group of Americans some fundamental right—say, the right of a woman to decide whether she’ll bear a child once impregnated—it’s advised to also deny that group of Americans the right to vote.
As Kansas most gloriously illustrated last night, by voting against a ballot measure that would have stripped from their state constitution a woman’s right to choose—and by a whopping 18-point margin.
Kansas, let’s be clear, is a deeply, historically, fundamentally Republican state. In the last 21 presidential elections, going all the way back to 1940, Kansans have voted for the Democrat exactly once—in Lyndon Johnson’s landslide 1964 victory over Barry Goldwater, who carried only a handful of Deep South states and his native Arizona. To most Americans, Goldwater—who disparaged Social Security, had voted against the recently enacted Civil Rights bill, and had loudly embraced “extremism” in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention—appeared to be a radical eager to overturn landmark New Deal legislation, including the right to enjoy one’s retirement after a lifetime of work without plunging into poverty.
They’re jealous of these long-held rights, these Kansans, these Americans. And when right-wing ideologues on the Supreme Court strip them of those rights, and right-wing Republican legislators and governors jump at the prospect of criminalizing choice, they come across to these Kansans, these Americans, as latter-day Goldwaters, determined to impose a new social order regardless of the damage they’re inflicting on their fellow citizens. (In fairness to Goldwater, who was chiefly a libertarian, he was also resolutely pro-choice.)
For decades, the Republican Party has exploited a series of social changes—as various as same-sex marriage, transgender bathroom rights, and immigration from non-European nations—as threats to the traditional moral and cultural order, and as a way to win over voters who, if they voted on economic issues, wouldn’t give Republicans the time of day. For much of that time period, Democrats have abetted the Republicans’ strategy by shunning the kind of populist-progressive economic policies that historically had attracted those voters (see, e.g., the electoral consequences of the Democrats’ infatuation with “free trade”).
In any given election during that time, Republicans turned the discussion to the culture wars whenever they could, and it didn’t matter if the affronts they blamed on the Democrats actually didn’t exist (see, e.g., the wholly imaginary “War on Christmas”). What the Republicans failed to realize, what the Supreme Court’s partisan theocrats failed to grasp, was that their own cultural values increasingly were at odds with the basic tenets of modernity, democracy, classical liberalism, and the Enlightenment. Living in the surround-sound world of Fox News, talk radio, and far-right social media, they failed to gauge how repulsive the world they wish to create is to a majority of Americans, and to a supermajority of young Americans.
It was the good Republican middle-class suburbs of Kansas City that doomed their anti-choice amendment last night.
Even before Kansans spoke, Democratic strategists had placed measures on several states’ ballots this November that would secure a woman’s right to choose. In Arizona and Nevada, the precinct-walking to turn out the pro-choice vote began several months ago. If Democrats do better than expected in the midterms, if they have any chance to hold on to Congress, it won’t likely be due to economic issues—though the new Inflation Reduction Act, if it passes, will surely help them. Chiefly, it will be due to their being on the right side of the very culture war that Republicans have been leveraging for 40 years of victories.
At one level, the Republicans do realize that actually winning the culture war requires them to do what the white South did to post-Reconstruction Blacks: deny their critics the right to vote. That’s become the fundamental electoral strategy of a party that understands that they can’t hold power in an America based on majority rule. But it may be that their racism, sexism, homophobia, assault-weapon infatuation, and primitive religiosity targets so wide a spectrum of Americans that no campaign of voter suppression can encompass all the Americans they’ve threatened, or deter all the enemies they’ve made. It was the good Republican middle-class suburbs of Kansas City that doomed their anti-choice amendment last night. Does the GOP have to keep them away from the polls, too?
You take away Americans’ established rights at your own peril, as Kansans made very clear last night.
