Last night’s debate between the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari and National Review’s David French focused on the New York Post editor’s diatribe “Against David French-ism.” Ahmari had argued in First Things that the Right cannot maintain conservative values and principles while fighting today’s culture war.
But in last night’s debate, Ahmari inadvertently carved out a pretty solid argument that conservatives should not reelect President Trump.
Despite Ahmari’s continued call for conservatives to focus less on legal battles and more on cultural ones, his chief defense of Trump rested on the president’s ability to advance the pro-life cause. Seeing as how Democrats refuse to vote on even the most common-sense, common-ground bills respecting abortion, Trump’s efforts in this regard have primarily come through his (mostly stellar) judicial appointments.
So Trump is winning — in the courtroom.
But as French has previously laid out, the factors driving our lowest abortion rate since the Supreme Court made the procedure legal across all 50 states with Roe v. Wade are largely unrelated to law. He attributes it in large part to a vast cultural shift, and statistics also point to improvements in contraception access, use, and education as another contributing factor.
So on this front, Ahmari could be very well right that conservatives should focus on the cultural fight rather than the legal one. When asked about LGBT issues, Ahmari noted that “Often these things don’t take place in a courtroom” and “what the sexual revolutionary left wants is not censorship,” but “self-censorship” — to make people cower and think twice before speaking up. While he lauded French’s role in fighting legal battles for conservatives, he also noted that conservatives should get more aggressive in lawmaking, not just in court.
And if that’s the case for Ahmari and many conservative’s priority issue, and if Trump’s primary conservative contribution to the country are judicial appointments, then what’s the point of reelecting him? Sure, he helps the legal battle for the pro-life movement at the periphery. But surely, a thrice-married womanizer, accused repeatedly of sexual assault, who was pro-choice on abortion until he decided Barack Obama was born in Kenya, only sours the public’s perception of the pro-life cause.
Aside from Trump, most everything else has been conspiring to make the pro-life cause more powerful and attractive than ever before. Advances in science have lowered the first age of fetal viability. Improved neonatal imaging has made the humanity of the unborn unmistakable. Republicans have successfully undermined Democrats’ push in the early part of this decade to turn the issue into one about contraception by backing the deregulation of contraceptives, which has left Democrats (who oppose this for self-interested reasons) in quite an awkward position. Moreover, this push has undercut the Left’s persistent argument that pro-lifers simply want to control women’s bodies.
An atheist can still care about an unborn baby when he sees a crystal clear ultrasound with his very eyes. An ardent feminist can still advocate for planning parenthood with contraception without endorsing Planned Parenthood’s 300,000-plus annual abortions. The pro-life movement can and should be advertised with the languages of love and science, not anger and provocation.
And so even if Trump is making the judiciary friendlier to pro-life laws, why would pro-lifers want to be represented by him in the long run? Whatever you think of Trump, you can’t escape the problems with his character. The thrice-married billionaire brags about groping women, has boasted of his adultery, and showed once how out-of-touch he is with mainstream pro-life thinking when he got behind jailing women who obtain abortions. Trump and his sexism arguably represent the most powerful force in keeping the culture pro-choice.
So if Trump only helps the legal pro-life battle indirectly, and hurts the cultural one, why reelect him? He’s not shutting down what Ahmari has represented as the “global threat” of drag queen story hours in left-wing cities’ libraries. He’s apparently only helping in the battlefield that Ahmari views as less important. So why get further into the mud with a man who’s blowing up the deficit, allowing Obamacare to wreak havoc to the healthcare market, and failing to broker a single immigration policy (or pro-life policy, for that matter) that can’t be undone by a stroke of his successor’s pen?
Besides, as French points out, if you care about the ability to appoint conservative judges over a generation and not just an administration, continuing to tether the Republican Party to a president so toxic to millennials and an increasing majority of the electorate seems fairly unwise.
