Give this much to President Trump — he learns from experience.
One thing that he learned from the battle to seat Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court is that the only way to pick a conservative who can sit on that body is to nominate a woman. This is the only way he can be totally sure that he and she will not be sandbagged in the course of the process by someone the nominee has never encountered or perhaps even heard of, who will insist that the nominee had talked dirty to her (Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas in 1991) or had tried to rape her (not very determinedly) when they were fifteen and in prep school (Christine Blasey Ford vs. Brett Kavanaugh in 2018).
Apparently, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose seat on the court is the one now in question, never believed this story either, or she would never have described Kavanaugh and fellow newcomer and Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch to reporters as “intelligent” and “very nice people,” whom “I like very much.” Unfortunately, the famous tolerance and congeniality of the court’s different members did not descend from these justices to their more ardent supporters, as many exposed to their incivility, intolerance, and penchant toward violence have reason to know of today.
How did we get from the much more civil and much less explosive confirmations of earlier decades to the eye-gouging contests and tense confrontations from which we suffer so badly today? The answer is abortion, and the reason is the efforts of the small number of outliers on each side of the issue to control or dictate policy to hundreds of millions of their fellow citizens.
When the social issues took hold in the 1970s and thereafter, the world was in the grip of a great social loosening. Segregation and other forms of restriction weakened and then fell away. But so too did disapproval of divorce and cohabitation collapse. Feminists expected views on abortion to follow in turn, but something else happened — instead of withering away, as feminists had expected, resistance to abortion stabilized and even began to gain ground. At some point, the consensus view settled at widespread permission in the earliest phases of pregnancy, increasing resistance when it comes to “look like a baby,” and near-total resistance to abortion beyond the third or perhaps the fourth month.
This was not what the abortion-rights movement in this country had expected. It panicked and turned to politicians for help in keeping the courts as abortion-friendly as possible. This was when the Ted Kennedys of the world began their attacks on the Robert Borks of the world. It worked in Bork’s case, but not in most others.
Perhaps we were all a lot better off before the “great sort” that occurred sometime in the mid-1980s when the outliers in each of the two major parties took them over and made them their own. Is there some magic way to reverse that operation? War-weary minds want to know.
