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Last weekend marked the one-year anniversary of Dobbs, the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended abortion rights in the United States. The intervening 12 months have brought story after story of the horror this has had on women and families everywhere. the country, with polls showing that ordinary Americans generally support abortion access and dislike Dobbs. In this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick joins Anat Shenker Osorio to discuss how the political class has yet to find a way to communicate or act around the Supreme Court in response to these changes. Part of their conversation is excerpted below, lightly edited for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: Your poll shows that political leadership either doesn’t understand that this is an opportunity, or they simply don’t know how to send a message to the threat posed by this current conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. Interestingly, the public already implicitly understands the problem, but its leaders do not reflect this in the speech and do not offer solutions in the speech. So we have this kind of weird thing where the public seemed to get it, at least on a visceral level, more easily than the leaders they elect.
Anat Shenker Osorio: After the Dobbs decision broke, there was near silence from the Democratic leadership for about two weeks. As they got close and heated, Nancy Pelosi took the podium and… read a poem. Throughout the period in which we see state after state pass what amounted to a total abortion ban through 2018, in a thorough review of all the political ads that came out on the Democratic side, very, very few of them . they mentioned health care and even less mentioned abortion. Less than 1 percent of all ads that were used even mentioned the topic. This was still happening in 2020, even when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. By the end of this year, 2019, there will be 25 new abortion bans. Still, in 2020, it’s: “Don’t abort.” In that election, about 1.5 percent of Democratic ads mentioned abortion. More than twice as many Democratic ads mentioned China, just by comparison. We’re into the mid-terms in 2022 and still, you know, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, Emily’s List, other organizations like that are screaming like they’ve been all along: mention abortion, mention abortion, mention abortion.
And suddenly the decision comes down. And as you say, the public has already understood. We were in focus groups every week, so these examples are burned into my brain. Think: a bunch of guys out of Green Bay, Wisconsin, unrepentant, whining for 35 minutes about the Democrats, every complaint under the sun, can’t stand them spending money, the economy, you know, everything. And all of a sudden, on a dime: These guys would come in and say, “You know, at the end of the day, I can learn to live on a budget, but I’ll be damned if I let somebody from the government come into my bedroom and tell me and my wife what will happen to our family.
The GOP presidential candidates have no idea how to talk about abortion
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Something similar, with a group of women in Texas. One of them says something like: ‘Prices go up, prices go down. I can figure out how to deal with it. What I can’t understand is how to live without my freedom.” And that’s what we’re hearing over and over again.
People are understanding. Suddenly, 2022 becomes “Roe, Roe, Roe the Vote” and “Roevember” and Democrats have woken up to the fact that they can run on abortion, something they’ve been biting their tongues about for decades. But not just biting their tongues, they had been calling themselves the big party of the tent and saying: it’s okay if you have all kinds of views.
Fast forward to now, and the exact same thing happens again with the Supreme Court. To give a very specific example, the survey we did in May was a survey of 1400 people. On the question of: Is the Supreme Court taking away our freedoms, or is the Supreme Court doing its job by upholding the law in the Constitution, it comes in at 54% to 33. 54% of people say the Supreme Court is taking away our taking away freedoms. , 33 percent believe they are doing their job, and that leaves 14 percent of people unsure. What does it mean? That means this story about what’s going on with the MAGA judges at the Supreme Court is up for grabs. We are in a moment of making sense that doesn’t happen that often.
Usually, when people think about politics, they have a baked-in calculation of what they already believe, rooted in an identity they’ve formed. And if we don’t take this moment of making sense, then shame on us.
Listen to the entire Amicus episode here:
Everything you say completely resonates with my sense of how the public viewed both the last term on the court and the extracurricular activities of the judges. But when I talk to a lot of Democrats in leadership, they either say, I don’t understand the court well enough to talk about it, I didn’t go to law school. Or, even more discouraging, they say: Since there is nothing that can be done, I don’t talk about it.
And I wonder if part of this logjam that you’re describing where you have a leadership class that doesn’t want to touch this problem and an audience that’s screaming for solutions, is that they just don’t have solutions. It seems like this is this big unsolvable mess. And if you say the words “court packing,” everyone immediately lights up. And so there is sort of an agreed upon problem and no agreed upon solution. And what has seeped into our bones is just a kind of learned helplessness and the sound of hands. is it fair
In fact, I think this is a rather generous interpretation of the way democratic leadership behaves. I think about the Clarence Thomas scandals, you know, and the fact that it’s like palling around with a billionaire and basically setting the scene that not only can you pay to hang out with justice, but you can pay to have the rules manipulated in your favor. And the response to that from the Democratic leadership is to issue a letter in the passive voice that says, You know, something has to be done. It’s like, dude, it turns out you’re the one responsible. So maybe you should rephrase that and put yourself in the active position in this sentence.
There’s a ticking time bomb in the progressives’ big Supreme Court vote case Win the timing of Alito’s private jet scandal couldn’t be more damning John Roberts has regained control of the Supreme Court The candidates GOP presidential candidates have no idea how to talk about abortion
I don’t think we have an agreed definition of what the problem is. It even has a name in psychology, it’s called “system justification.” And it’s very, very real, it’s this kind of natural human proclivity. And there are evolutionarily beneficial reasons for it to exist, to think that things will turn out well. There is order in the universe, things will turn out as they should. And what’s interesting about the justification for the system is that it follows very, very closely the political ideology.
People who are more inclined to be justifiers of the system are more conservative. And that can mean both conservative in the traditional right-wing sense, but it can also mean more rule-bound. And this generally comes from people for whom these standards, norms and traditions, the way we’ve always done things, have been extraordinarily beneficial. So people at the top of the social hierarchy benefit from saying, Hey, you know what? The system is fine. So I think the reluctance to call a spade a spade is perhaps justified, but there is no real solution.
I think it comes from a false model where if we get along, like, you know, if we go high to paraphrase Michelle Obama, they’ll come here and hang out with us. But really, as I often tell people, you can keep turning the other cheek. I promise slaps will follow you
