The Republican Party just revealed its new platform. The document is calculated to appeal to the needs of ordinary voters sick of cultural and economic Marxism. However, purported Evangelical Christians are suddenly frantically hostile to the RNC and to Trump. There’s something deeply weird about this position, given that it hands a win to “no limits on abortion” Democrats.
You can read the 16-page, small-font 2024 Republican platform here. However, if you don’t want to, Wayne Allyn Root summarizes the core principles in the platform under the heading “Trump chose the issues a huge majority of American voters agree on”:
Root is right: These are issues that appeal to most Americans, including their dislike for the Hamasniks and the alphabet-soup people taking over American education. It’s a pro-American platform that cuts across racial, geographic, and economic divides. It’s a broad-based MAGA winner, and anyone who wants to see the Democrat party harried (politically) from pillar to post should be happy with it.
And yet...
And yet what I see on X is screaming agony from pro-lifers who claim that, by leaving abortion off the platform, Trump is the second coming of Roe v. Wade:
This anger against Trump is weird, given that Trump is the most pro-life president in most of our lifetimes. He promised to end Roe v. Wade and, by nominating Supreme Court justices who take the Constitution seriously, he was able to get the correct ruling from the Court: Abortion is not a federal matter and, therefore, must be a state matter. (Check out the 10th Amendment.) That’s a huge win, and, thanks to Trump, half of the American states have moderate to tough pro-Life laws. This is a far cry from the pre-Trump era when abortion was unlimited.
Additionally, the new Republican platform isn’t pro-abortion. It simply goes back to core federal responsibilities and, properly, leaves abortion to the state parties.
So why the outrage?
I think this speaks to a deep political naivete that characterizes conservatives on so many issues. They have goals but lack both strategy (the big plan to achieve the goal) and tactics (the specific steps in the plan). In this, they differ greatly from Democrats who, up until they painted themselves in a corner by backing a puppet with dementia, have proven to be exemplary strategists and tacticians.
If your goal is to end abortion in America, the first step to achieve that goal is to get Democrats out of power. After all, Democrats are the pro-abortion party. If they have their way, abortion would be legal even after the baby is born—and, indeed, Princeton ethicist Peter Singer (who retired only last December) thinks abortion should be legal up to a month after the baby’s birth.
If ousting Democrats is the necessary first step to reining in abortion, a bad tactic is to hysterically castigate the pro-life party’s platform because it says the things it needs to say to appeal to the greatest number of voters, while leaving out your pet issue. Instead, you should applaud that platform for advancing you’re the first step in your plan.
At the same time, you can and should bemoan in non-hysterical terms the fact that we live in a country where a pro-life stance can’t be part of the platform. That is a tactic that advances your next strategic goal, which is to encourage more states to embrace pro-life laws. And of course, you should be ensuring that Democrats don’t get to do an end-run around the Dobbs ruling by trying to federalize abortion via legislation.
There’s something deeply weird about fierce pro-life advocates screaming so hysterically about the evil Republicans that they risk making other pro-life advocates unwilling to vote Republican. That, of course, increases the risk that Democrats retain the White House and Congress.
Even if it doesn’t succeed in keeping Evangelicals and other pro-lifers home on election day, that same hysteria will galvanize Democrats who are depressed at the thought of voting for Biden, Kamala, or whomever in the fall. In the face of all the screaming, the people who aren’t the base (who are fanatic and will always vote) but are base adjacent (they share the values but will stay away from the polls if not sufficiently roused) will be roused. These lumpen leftists will have confirmed the base’s claims that the only way to keep abortion alive in America is to support the Democrat party, no matter what corpse or moron sits atop it.
I strongly suggest that the pro-life crowd moderate both strategy and tactics. What they’re doing will empower the Democrats when they should be empowering the Republicans while working to keep a pro-life ethos within the party and, even more importantly, to change America’s culture regarding abortion.
