Abolition or Prohibition?

Remember 1994, when Newt Gingrich became so intoxicated with victory that he went on CNN to give a long Castro-ratory harangue, promising to put the Internet in every home and all the unwashed urchins in orphanages? True, an orphanage is probably better than a meth lab, but the details of Newt’s plan got lost in the reporting, and there was enough of a backlash to cost Republicans the Senate. Americans get scared when people start promising to “expend political capital” and make dramatic changes. Dramatic change scares the neighbors.

Voters get especially peeved when pols let pundits forget why we elected them, and that goes double when the margin of victory was a mere 3%. Forget what the exit polls say; we already know how wrong they were. The cold reality is that the voters narrowly reelected President Bush because (as even Karl Rove recognizes) they trusted him more with the issue that concerns them most–winning the war for our civilization’s survival.

Again, I fear that the Repubs are in a struggle between those who would overplay their hand and those who counsel building a consensus before acting rashly. Take the proposed Maoist purge of “class enemies” like Arlen Spector, a man of whom I’m not at all fond, for the very reason that he’s pro-abortion. So why should conservatives stop trying to dethrone this guy from the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee? In a word, prohibition. You can’t use law to stop a practice until you’ve persuaded society that the practice is wrong. The center of this country could be convinced that abortion is wrong, and statistics bear out that this is gradually taking place. Only a power grab that provokes a backlash can stop that trend, which is exactly what conservatives are risking.

The cost of this would be terrible–handing over the swing vote to the Democrats before they move back to the center on fighting terrorism and proliferation. It might also cost the lives of many children who are aborted by unpersuaded mothers. Abortion matters. But preserving our freedom to debate the issue to a national consensus matters most.