Abortion is back: back in the news, back in the American political scene, back in the fights that rage through a party as it tries to understand itself. Last time we saw this, it was during Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination, when three months in a row—February, March, and April of 2016—he fumbled questions about abortion. He recovered in May, releasing a list of potential Supreme Court nominees that satisfied the pro-life portion of the Republican base.
Trump was right to sense that he needed to secure his position on abortion, even during an election in which abortion mattered less than in any election of the past 40 years. In the midst of all the anger of the populist voters, the fury at what they called the “Republican establishment,” one thing that would have derailed Trump’s campaign was a consensus that he was not pro-life. And after winning the presidency, he has more or less kept his promises, nominating Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch in January and signing a bill in April to allow states to defund Planned Parenthood. Still, just as abortion was not at the center of his campaign, so abortion has not been at the center of his politics since his election.
For that, you have to go to the Democrats, who are in the midst of an intra-party festival of self-immolation over the question of abortion. On one side stand the old establishment figures, who are willing to tolerate a little heterodoxy, if it increases the chances of a Democrat winning. On the other side stand the purists, who will not allow even a small deviation from the hard lines of their faith.
The flashpoint was an election for mayor of Omaha—perhaps a sign, in itself, of how far down the demand for orthodoxy has reached. Early in April, Nebraska Democratic party chair Jane Kleeb brought in Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison (deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee) and Sen. Bernie Sanders to rally support for a man named Heath Mello, the Democratic candidate for mayor in the May 9 election.
All well and good, yes? A unity tour of the party’s national figures, calling for support of a local politician. But then, on April 19, the Wall Street Journal noted that Mello is a practicing Catholic who has made small noises about maybe being pro-life. He even cosponsored a bill in the Nebraska legislature that required abortionists to offer to show their patients an ultrasound of their unborn children. (Both the Journal and the Washington Post exaggerated this into a requirement that an ultrasound actually be performed.) Within days, the influential website Daily Kos and nearly every other leftist organization had withdrawn their endorsements of Mello. When Democratic national chairman Tom Perez tried to defend the Nebraskan, NARAL denounced the party’s efforts to support a local candidate as an attempt to shame women.
So much for a “unity tour.” Nancy Pelosi tried to smooth things over on the Sunday talk shows, but by then, the rift was clear. In the name of establishing an inviolable tenet of the faith, the hard left will actively campaign against a Democrat who is not both a practicing and a confessional supporter of abortion.
All political parties are intersectional, in a certain sense of that buzzword beloved by academic supporters of leftist politics these days. Ronald Reagan’s big-tent Republicanism in the 1980s, for example, required a good dose of intersectionality. The antagonisms of current Republican politics—populists, paleocons, establishmentarians, and never-Trumpers all glaring at one another—may seem intense, as indeed they are. But we shouldn’t forget the strength of the disagreements among all those that Ronald Reagan gathered under his banner.
What’s fascinating about the Democrats, in their current round of agitation about abortion, is the way they have brushed aside their claims of intersectional unity. Originally coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality came to mean that disagreements on the left could be set aside, bracketed, as long as each leftist constituency understood that it was oppressed by the historical victors of Western civilization. Muslims and feminists ought to be enemies, but they can ignore their enmity if they join in the effort to overturn the structures of oppression.
If Reagan had a fault, it was that his big-tent Republicanism was more a practice than a theory. The problem with modern leftist intersectionality is the converse: It’s more a theory than a practice. And the theory has broken down over a mayoral election in Omaha, Nebraska. The claims of abortion are paramount. There can be no deviation, for the Democrats’ most fervent activists. And they are willing to stage an inquisition of one of their own, allowing a Republican to be elected—if the alternative is that a heretic rises within the party.
A smaller but purer congregation is what they demand. And abortion has become the first article in the new confession of faith.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
