In a sense, the outrage of progressives at the prospect of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade does not seem to fit the current master narrative that this group is defending democracy against the threat of authoritarianism and fighting for the principle of majority rule against a Republican Party that benefits from countermajority power.
After all, toppling Roe would return the issue of abortion rights to the democratic process, after two generations during which policy on the issue was defined by a juristocracy, an elite-only vote defined by 7-2 votes or 5-4.
But narratives are adaptable. “In draft abortion ruling, Democrats see a Supreme Court at odds with democracy,” read a recent Washington Post headline. The headline headed a story that summarized some of the arguments — opinion polls showing public support for Roe, the fact that three of the Supreme Court justices were appointed by a president-elect with a popular vote minority — floated to prove that letting states or Congress legislating on abortion is actually authoritarian, not democratic.
I do not want to argue with these interpretations so much as take note of them and at the same time propose a different view of the place occupied by abortion among the grievances of the American republic.
I share some of the anxieties that underpin today’s progressive master narrative — about a country too polarized to function properly, a populist right mired in paranoia, a decay of the norms that make republican government work. But if I set out to write a story about exactly how we got to where we are, I would place Roe’s initial decision near the center of the narrative; an inflection point at which the choices of elite progressivism actively pushed the Republic in the direction of our current divisions.
When, in 1973, seven Supreme Court justices struck down the country’s abortion laws, they were intervening in a debate whose political underpinnings were shaky and complex. Both the sentiments for and against this guarantee were present in both parties and in both ideologies: there were anti-abortion progressives, many of them Catholic Democrats, and Republican and right-wing advocates of the right to abortion, who saw it as a possible support for social stability.
It is likely that the discussion at the end would gain national contours and become polarized, no matter what. But the Supreme Court nationalized that policy very specifically, taking most regulation out of the realm of legislative debate and tying it to the court itself and the presidency.
From that moment on, instead of being debated and disputed in institutions designed to channel mass opinion and activist mobilization into stable agreements — whether state legislatures or Congress — abortion would be tied to “all or nothing” outcomes. the presidential elections and the fights over appointments of Supreme Court justices.
The already predictable result was an increasingly Manichean policy: either you were for the original decision or you were against it—no compromises could be negotiated, local political experiments could not be conducted. And every few years the issue was distilled into a referendum on presidential candidates and Supreme Court nominees, the distinction between friend and foe in its purest form.
Over time, the apocalyptic style it encouraged in the two big American parties would broaden to encompass other issues, so much so that the role of abortion was partially obscured. But whether it was feminists taking a stand for a sexually predatory president in the 1990s or religious conservatives abandoning all ideas about character, decency and piety to support Donald Trump in 2016, when polarization corrupted principle, the discussion of Roe has generally was at the root of the problem.
But the nature of the polarization also mattered. A nationwide debate has fractured the US along two especially dangerous lines: class and religion. While progressives often insist that they defend abortion rights on behalf of the marginalized, the reality is that the poorest and least educated are more likely to be against liberation, while the rich and highly educated tend to be more supportive of the guarantee.
Likewise, while anti-abortion advocates emphasize secular arguments, the reality is that Christian beliefs are one of the best indicators of this sentiment.
Thus, the separation that defines our politics today — a working-class, rural and religious right and a progressive city, secular and managerial class — has been accelerated by the divisions around Roe.
And the way in which the decision was made exacerbated this polarization. From a geographical and class perspective, a group of hoodlums in Washington demanding that the country simply accept their view on one of the gravest moral issues imaginable is the perfect trigger for a populist uprising.
Something that happened in similar ways with other issues—most notably immigration—happened with abortion first: the elite-set deal did not resolve the issue, and the backlash against it hit not just the issue itself, but the very legitimacy of the issue. elite.
Meanwhile, from the perspective of religion, in constitutionalizing the issue, Roe did not just impose a normal political defeat on the anti-abortion camp—the decision appeared to totally exclude these fundamental convictions from the American constitutional order, something that planted the seeds of a religious alienation that continues to bear bitter fruit to this day.
And the timing was especially unfortunate: when Roe vs. Wade was announced, Catholics and Evangelicals had just passed through periods of reform and modernization that promised a reconciliation between the Christian faith and liberal modernity. And so liberal modernity changed its demands and made them “all or nothing,” thus making the moral price of acknowledging the decision higher than many Christians would be able to pay.
Finally, and crucially to the misrepresentation of progressivism itself, the price demanded was not only moral but also intellectual—because Roe was not a persuasive constitutional decision, but the clearest possible case study of what it looks like when Supreme Court justices legislate.
Nothing in the story I’ve just told means that taking down Roe now will necessarily improve progressivism or conservatism, reinvigorate democracy, or reduce polarization. We started from where we are, and the place where we ended up does not inspire confidence in what may be to come.
But if Roe does fall, it makes sense that a decision that has done so much to divide our parties and delegitimize our institutions will eventually be undone by the very forces it unleashed. Its end was contained in its beginning.
