Against murder-suicide politics. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

Matthew Yglesias

26 Oct 2023. Paid

12 - 15 minutes

Backlash to the Dobbs decision transformed the 2022 midterms, and protecting abortion rights continues to be one of Democrats’ strongest issues for 2024 — especially if they can link it to a broader message about health care. Democrats want women to have access to contraceptives before they get pregnant, they want them to have both abortion rights and prenatal coverage if they become pregnant, and they want their children to have health care after they’re born. Republicans want none of those things.

It’s a strong, compelling message, and if Democrats could make that the most salient issue in 2024, they’d win a lot of races.

Republicans, because they are pretty smart, are disinclined to cooperate with this.

You won’t see Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, or any of the dozens of people running for Speaker of the House talking about how they would like to enact a nationwide ban on abortion. You also don’t see back-bench Republicans talking about how since there will never be 60 votes for a national abortion ban, they need to get people to promise to overturn the filibuster in order to accomplish this.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean there are no abortion stakes in 2024. Republicans will go as far as they can to restrict abortion rights, which might turn out to be pretty far when you consider things like FDA authority over mifepristone or the fact that some rogue district court judge anywhere in the country could hold that a blastocyst is a person under the meaning of the 14th Amendment. But note that while these things are unpopular, nobody in the GOP field is talking about them. And that’s not just strategic discipline on the part of the candidates. When Donald Trump was refusing to concede the election, Fox News made an initial effort to weigh-in against him, but they immediately started losing market share to Newsmax and OANN. By contrast, Fox is not pushing Republicans to talk about banning abortion, and Fox’s competitors on the right aren’t either. There is a lot of nuttiness roiling Republican Party politics, but there is ecosystem-wide cooperation with the post-2022 strategy of trying to reduce the salience of abortion in national politics, even while working to ban it any time a legislative majority to do so exists.

And a fascinating thing about all of this is that anti-abortion groups — even though they are staffed and funded by people who believe with 100 percent sincerity that legal abortion is a plague of infanticide — are perfectly happy to go along with this pragmatic strategy of trying as hard as possible to win.

I’m really working hard to minimize the quantity of Israel/Palestine content on this blog, but it happens to be providing an interesting contrast right now. The Biden administration’s approach has been somewhat more hawkish and pro-Israel than my personal convictions, but that seems broadly in line with American public opinion, which is sympathetic to Israel and very unsympathetic to the Palestinians. And my whole schtick over the past three years has been to urge Democrats to be more open to acting like this on a broad suite of issues — when marriage equality was unpopular, Democrats were against it, but when advocates succeeded in making it popular, Democrats embraced the cause.

But a notable aspect of current discourse is pro-Palestinian activists and their allies “warning” (but really, I think, threatening) that voters who are to Biden’s left on this topic won’t turn out in 2024 and that will throw the election to Trump.

This is important because it’s a general feature of how progressive activists have thought about politics over the past eight years and it helps explain a lot of Democrats’ conduct during this period. I’ve written several times about the mobilization delusion, the myth that a secret stash of hyper-progressive nonvoters is ready to surge to the polls if only Democrats shift to the left. But a very non-mythical thing is that if left-wing thought-leaders tell highly engaged progressives not to vote for the lesser of two evils, they can probably succeed in tanking turnout and throwing the election to Republicans.

In practice, this is what I think a lot of progressive activism has amounted to: Donors fund groups that are completely ineffective at mobilizing non-voters or persuading swing voters but can credibly threaten to actively discourage people from voting, and then they use these murder-suicide threats to extract policy concessions.

The first time I saw this dynamic at work in a major way was during the debate over the Keystone XL pipeline. Every informed person involved in this dispute understood that the cost-benefit profile of blocking this pipeline in terms of emissions reduction was terrible, largely because the emissions impact was nearly zero. But a few months ago when I criticized Obama’s decision to cave on this, a very smart climate analyst wrote to say that even though he agreed with me on the merits about the pipeline, “the counterfactual where climate activists decide (idiotically but still) that Democrats are just as hopeless as Republicans seems potentially terrible.” So Obama did the right thing in his estimation. To me, though, the fact that you’d even be having that conversation reflects an irresponsible attitude on the part of the people who finance and lead progressive activist organizations.

George Soros obviously doesn’t have a switch in his basement that he can flip and have progressive activists all be more chill.

It’s challenging to say exactly how networks operate and how conventional wisdoms are formed. But I do think that if you look at behavior in the nexus of conservative media personalities, conservative donors, conservative advocacy professionals, and conservative politicians, you see a different approach at work even in the context of a set of institutions that behave very pathologically in other ways.

Nobody of any consequence on the right is warning or threatening that Evangelicals won’t turn out for Trump unless he commits publicly to doing everything in his power to ban all abortions in the United States. No major right-wing talk radio hosts are saying this, none of their television anchors are saying it, none of their major podcast or Twitter personalities are saying it, none of their backbench House members are saying it, no Evangelical group leaders are saying it — nobody is saying it. Now, one reason they’re not saying it is that it isn’t true. But the main reason it isn’t true is that this sort of thing is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If lots of influential right-wingers were “predicting” this and making joining in on their “prediction” the litmus test of commitment to the pro-life cause, then it could become true.

And it’s not just abortion, you see this on a range of issues:

    Republicans aren’t talking about repealing the ACA.

    Republicans aren’t talking about cutting legal immigration.

    Republicans aren’t talking about undoing marriage equality. 

Lots of conservatives are sincerely committed to those positions. Actual Republican Party elected officials seem to have a range of views and a range of levels of commitment. But what conservatives broadly get is that exactly how far a GOP administration can go in rolling back any of these things is basically just a function of how well they do in upcoming elections. Candidates focus their messages on Biden’s weak points (inflation, border chaos, culture war issues), not on conservatives’ passion points. And conservative activist groups don’t try to gain leverage by threatening to tank Republicans’ electoral fortunes.

This leverage idea comes up all the time whenever I discuss the perils of murder-suicide politics with progressives, and that’s why I started by talking about conservatives.

Because I don’t know anyone in progressive politics who thinks that the conservative movement lacks traction in Republican Party politics, even though they don’t pull these antics. That’s because the traction comes from the fact that Republican Party elected officials and the people they hire are just sincerely pretty conservative. That doesn’t mean they are 100 percent rightwing dogmatists all the time, because they also care about things like being popular and winning. But it means that if they are empowered to govern the country, you can count on conservative policy outcomes. And my claim here is that the same is true on the Democratic side.

The party system is just very polarized.

By that I mean not only that there’s a big gap between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but Biden and Trump are both relatively moderate on policy compared to other leading figures in their respective parties. But then looking at elected officials who are even more moderate, I can’t think of a single issue where Susan Collins is to the left of Sherrod Brown, even though she represents a state where 53 percent of people voted for Biden and he represents one where 53 percent of people voted for Trump. I’m not surprised that she’s to Brown’s right in general (though as recently as 20 years ago the parties weren’t perfectly sorted), but it’s remarkable the extent to which she is uniformly to his right without even a single pet issue where she scrambles things. And it’s remarkable on Brown’s part as well.

From the broad standpoint of American society, I think this is undesirable. But it underscores that you really don’t need to go questing for “leverage” or worry that both parties are poised to go full Median Voter Theorem and become identical. The sincere policy views of elected officials and their staffs are more polarized than the views of primary voters which, in turn, are more polarized than the views of the public.

A view I encounter pretty frequently among mainstream Democrats is that all this activism is just an emergent property of human psychology and there’s no sense in critiquing it from a standpoint of tactics and strategy.

That doesn’t make sense to me on a number of levels, starting with the fact that if people choose to spend time engaged in political activism and political advocacy, they presumably do, on some level, want to advance policy goals. Whether your issue is climate change or Palestine or abortion rights, if you care enough to spend time talking about it, you should try to do things that are constructive. That means either trying to actually persuade more people to agree with you, or else trying to help candidates from the better party win elections. The murder-suicide threat is counterproductive if it works (because it makes it more likely that the worse party will win), and it’s even more counterproductive if the bluff gets called and you need to follow through on it.

    People should not engage in murder-suicide activist tactics.

    People should not fund groups or individuals who use these tactics.

    People with public platforms (MSNBC hosts, progressives with large Twitter followings, columnists) should not treat people who use these tactics kindly.

My guess is that if people were not constantly facing a cycle of attention and positive reenforcement for engaging in bad behavior, they wouldn’t do it. It’s noteworthy that we are mostly seeing “warnings” of depressed turnout rather than explicit threats, precisely because everyone knows that these tactics are bad.

But the solution isn’t to act ashamed of yourself while doing it, it’s to not do it and to discourage others from doing it. If you genuinely are a single-issue voter and you also feel that there is genuinely no difference between the parties on that issue, then by all means, don’t vote. But very few people actually are single-issue voters and the parties are actually identical on few if any issues.

Now of course throughout human history progress has been made by determined people advocating for causes that were, at the time the advocacy began, unpopular. But the key mode of action is that you need to change people’s minds. If banning abortion were popular, then Republicans would all be loud and proud abortion-banners. But it’s not popular. Nevertheless, there are lots of ways Republicans can and will restrict access to abortion if they win elections, so anti-abortion activists are trying to help them, not trying to force Republicans to flatter the sensibilities of anti-abortion activists with promises and rhetoric that would guarantee victory for Democrats.

Conservatives do a lot of crazy shit — note, again, their inability to pick a House Speaker — but progressives should take note of the fact that even an extremely crazy and dysfunctional political movement does not threaten to sit out elections unless politicians endorse the most unpopular versions of its preferred ideas. There is probably a lesson in that.