Here at The Hot Screen, we’re always on the lookout for analyses that help Americans understand the underlying dynamics and stakes of our political conflicts — to use one of my favorite metaphors when talking about this topic, we’re basically flying blind if we try to process the daily blasts of news and propaganda without a proper context for understanding it. Over at Flux, Matthew Sheffield has written a timely essay that fits this bill — not only does it provide a succinct overview of long-standing Republican strategies for advancing their unpopular political goals, but it also argues that the party’s apparent success in overturning Roe v. Wade is now threatening these heretofore successful strategies.
Sheffield discusses two basic strategies that the GOP has long relied on to advance its unpopular ideas and defeat the Democrats’ more popular ones — painting the Democrats as “extreme” while lying about the GOP’s own goals to hide the party’s radicalism. Meanwhile, “moderate” Republicans are trotted out to represent the GOP in the media, even as they are in fact far from the radicalized heart of the Republican Party. At the same time, the GOP pushes the few items for which it does plausibly have majority support — such as immigration — while otherwise relying on a conservative judiciary to implement policy goals it can’t pass through majority votes. This rule-by-judicial-fiat approach has grown into a staggering success as a Supreme Court with a conservative super-majority has embarked on rolling back long-standing precedents that could never have been reversed legislatively. The most notable of these, of course, is the recent Dobbs decision that eliminated a federal right to an abortion.
But this is where the plot thickens and cracks begin to appear in the GOP’s interlocking political strategies — because, as Sheffield reminds us, GOP-controlled state governments around the country have now imposed draconian bans on abortion that fully embody and advertise the GOP’s extremism in a way that can’t really be dissembled away. This state-level campaign against abortion is happening even as the congressional GOP has so far refrained from pressing for new anti-abortion legislation at the federal level. In this way, we can see the GOP’s attempts to obscure its anti-abortion extremism starting to come apart at the seams, with state Republican parties lacking any compunction about letting their anti-abortion freak flags fly. Indeed, this open extremism has already led to a real-world backlash, as multiple red states have passed ballot initiatives protecting abortion rights (there is also good evidence that concern over abortion rights helped the Democrats exceed expectations in the 2022 midterm elections).
And as Sheffield describes, recent events in Arizona acutely demonstrate how previously-successful GOP tactics meant to hide the party’s anti-abortion extremism continue to falter in the post-Dobbs world:
In anticipation of the Dobbs ruling, state Republicans passed a bill in March of 2022 which banned most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy which included language explicitly stating that it did not repeal a much older 1864 law, enshrined in Section 13-3603 of the state code, which banned the procedure in all circumstances except to save the life of a mother.
[. . .] Arizona Republicans were trying to follow the national model in getting unelected judges to impose their most radical viewpoints on the public without having to actually legislate them. On Tuesday, the Republican-dominated state supreme court gave them exactly what they wanted in a ruling that correctly noted that the 2022 law “does not independently authorize abortion,” meaning that the original 1864 provision would be enforceable.
Republican legislators in Arizona used long-standing GOP tactics of employing the courts to insulate themselves from their extremism — but as anyone who’s been following recent news can attest, the strategy has backfired this time, as it simply looks like the Arizona GOP consists of anti-abortion zealots whose extremism has led them to support a crackpot law passed so long ago that women couldn’t even vote yet.
Not insignificantly, the Arizona dust-up also tripped up Donald Trump, as he opined that in the post-Dobbs world, particular abortion restrictions are at the discretion of each individual state. In other words, as many observers have pointed out, abortion restrictions can now be as strict as Republican legislators choose to make them — a situation that Trump is trying to play up as a just and perfect scenario of states’ rights triumphing, but which most American will rightly see as a license for extremism that directly implicates the GOP. Strikingly, gone is the cover of “the courts made the decision and we are just following their wise strict constructionism”: we are now in a world where, in the words of the GOP’s own presidential candidate, state legislators can do whatever they want where abortion is concerned.
Sheffield notes that Trump is still engaging in the pre-existing GOP tactic of lying about Democratic extremism (Democrats want to abort babies even after they’re born) even as he tries to whitewash whatever extremist legislation GOP-controlled states pass as the essence of democratic justice. It’s worth remarking that this sort of GOP propaganda is likewise faltering in the face of the post-Dobbs reality, where Americans are able to see with their own eyes that it is Republican laws that are causing real-world mayhem, not fictional Democratic laws causing imaginary harm. In such a situation, Republican propaganda can even become self-defeating, as the distance between the party’s claims and obvious reality becomes grotesquely wide. Canny opponents of the Republican agenda should emphasize this gulf, which not only can help reveal actual GOP positions but also the party’s deep contempt for the average voter, who is conceived of more as a mark to be manipulated than a fellow citizen to be persuaded.
In a broader sense, this growing space between GOP lies and American reality is an object lesson in why it would behoove Democrats to describe Republicans’ strategies of dissimulation and slander far more frequently, in order to prime ordinary citizens to find for themselves examples of this GOP strategy in action. Once seen, I believe, its workings can’t be easily unseen. In the realm of abortion rights and women’s equality, for instance, GOP insistence that Democrats are murdering unborn children sounds increasingly absurd in light of the growing number of real-world examples of women whose health has been put at risk due to Republicans’ frenzy of new abortion restrictions. Absent a media apparatus sufficient to counter the massive bullhorn of the right wing, Democrats should at least invest more effort into helping the public understand the workings of GOP propaganda.
As Sheffield concludes, abortion isn’t the only issue where the GOP is wildly out of step with majority opinion, but it’s a crucial one, arguably one of the central political conflicts of our time. Abortion has long been a proxy for fights about gender equality, as well as the role of religion in public life, and so has ramifications far beyond the already vital question of whether a woman is able to exercise autonomy over her own body. Expose the GOP’s lies and propaganda around this issue, and the ensuring clarity may help illuminate many of the Republican Party’s other unpopular initiatives as well.