WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

For those in search of rainbows and kittens today, the shelves are empty; the supply train has failed me.

The reaction to the leak of the Supreme Court draft decision overthrowing Roe v Wade that showed up last week has reminded me of many events that have happened since Trump came riding down his golden escalator in June 2015. The left’s eruption of anger and bewilderment, the sense that no one saw it coming, just as no one saw Trump coming in 2015 despite the fact all the signs of such an event had been staring us in the face since the first video of Republicans attending Palin rallies in 2008 popped up in screen; it was all there, telling us what was going to happen. And then there he was, riding that escalator in Trump Tower and declaring himself a candidate for president.

Republicans have been telling us for over 40 years that taking power as they did in 2016, changing the court and ending Roe was their exact plan. The left has paid for the complacency, the belief that the law really was settled, as the liars Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett each assured us it was at their confirmation hearings; the belief that “it really can’t happen here,” the belief that there couldn’t be that many people who really wanted all that. All while the other side has been organized, relentless, and willing to play a very long game, to do literally anything if it advanced their cause.

A few years back, there was a political cartoon I thought was dead-on in its explanation of political reality. There were two figures, one an older white man, obviously Republican, wearing a baseball cap and white T-shirt, on his hands and knees amidst broken glass. The other was a millenial woman wearing Birkenstocks and carrying a notebook computer and her phone. In the far corner was a voting booth. A reporter asks them what they think about the coming mid-term election. The male character says he’ll happily crawl over the glass to get to the voting booth, while the female character asks “Can you do that on Facebook?” The left has been outmatched for 50 years.

Looking back on the last 50 years, how did we not see it coming?

I thought I did, and yet I have been in reactive mode ever since that day in June 2015. I have felt like Michael York’s character Brian Roberts in “Cabaret” when his good friend Maximilian von Heune, played by Helmut Griem, first shows up in his full SS uniform - shocked, stunned, amazed, that people I thought I knew well turned out to be committed believers in such a thing as Trumpism.

With the clarity of 20/10 vision in retrospect, it’s easy to see what so many pro-choice activists were screaming for years: They were all lying at those confirmation hearings. Clarence Thomas, who stated he had “no agenda” on Roe; Neil Gorsuch, who said “it’s the law of the land” that a fetus is not a person; Brett Kavanagugh, who called Roe “settled” as precedent, if not the law. At least Amy Coney Barrett had the moxie to show her beliefs: “I can’t pre-commit.”

All five are the embodiment of a brilliant, ruthless, decades-long political campaign to overturn Roe. All the believers who became the Republican base had faith this was coming. While the Democrats grew complacent over those decades, their opponents never wavered, even while they were dismissed by the press and ignored by the wider culture, their fervor nourished by Republican politicians everywhere.

This past Wednesday in Los Angeles, Gavin Newsom asked “Where the hell is my party?” and then declared, “This is a concerted, coordinated effort and yes, they’re winning. They are. They have been. Let’s acknowledge that. Where’s the counter-offensive?”

Good question. I don’t see an answer. Not right now, anyway.

And now it’s not just abortion. The other side has to keep their base animated, angry, pissed-off and committed. Already state legislatures are passing laws that declare IUDs and Plan B and “the abortion pill” to be “abortifracients” and make them illegal. They are passing laws to make it illegal for a woman to travel to another state to obtain an abortion. Senators want to pass a law making it illegal for companies to pay for their employees to travel out of state if necessary to obtain the procedure.

This isn’t “conservatism.” Conservatism is about keeping government small and keeping it out of people’s personal lives. This is State-Enforced Pregnancy, marshaling the power of the state to override the rights of the majority of Americans who disagree with this minority of extremists.

It took the right more than 40 to create the power now wielded by Alito. His opinion is a response to a restriction passed by a Republican legislature, then signed by a Republican governor, with full knowledge that it would be challenged and would ultimately land in the laps of five conservative Supreme Court justices who were where they are because they are warriors in the long fight against Roe.

Trump and McConnell stocked the courts with conservative justices—today, more than a quarter of active federal judges are Trump appointees—but none of those efforts would have been possible without the groundwork laid by a small group of conservative political operatives back in the 1970s. Democrats often mistake abortion opponents as Bible-banging mouth-breathers exploited by false prophet politicians like Mike Pence, a longtime advocate of defunding Planned Parenthood. The truth is that the anti-abortion movement began as a long-tail political campaign. The theology conveniently and cynically mutated around it when it had to.

In the face of the seeming success of a 40-year campaign that they dismissed at all points as it advanced, the left is reduced to performative demonstrations, picketing the homes of Supreme Justices in acts of futility that not only will change nothing, but give their opponents ammunition for responding with more repression - with the media and much of the public agreeing in the face of the unrelenting propaganda.

The truth is, in the face of an opposition that organized itself and propgandized its supporters so they would stand firm in all the time and through all the defeats and setbacks they would experience, firm in its belief in ultimate victory, the left has never committed itself to anything approaching that level of commitment to achieve its goals. Living in the bubble of the only time in the history of the Supreme Court where popular rights were protected and expanded, the left came to depend on lawyers and a legal decision, rather than take the effort to organize commitment to the point they could sit down in the factory and stay there until the other side agreed to negotiate. The old left, working in a time when there were few allies and no easy ways to achieve change, knew that organizing around the issue was the only way to achieve their goals.

In part, the right was able to do this using their belief in their own victimhood. If the courts were closed to them, if the media and the educational system was - as they claimed - in the hands of their opponents and opposed to them, they could get their supporters to provide the funding to create alternative systems to present their case. With Richard Vigurie demonstrating the power of direct mail advertising and communication to raise money from grassroots supporters, and the support of the rich who saw the “administrative state” impinging on their ability to run their affairs the way they wanted, the “conservative movement” came into existence.

Vigurie, Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Morton Blackwell were committed to the process of creating a conservative movement outside the Republican Party through a network of think tanks, political action committees and training institutes. The used abortion and opposition to the ERA to make their initial gains. Once the ERA was defeated, they and their new allies like Jerry Falwell pushed abortion as the organizing tool to create what is now known as the Christian Right.

Weyrich saw abortion as a moral issue which could potentially unite evangelicals, old line Christians, and Catholics. While a large majority of Americans supported, many swing voters and conservative Democrats had “muddier” opinions about abortion. Issuing a clarion call, The Moral Majority roared to life, creating a lobbying wing, an education project, attracting and organizing youth activists; they created training programs and direct mail operations, TV and radio ads, voter registration efforts - all of which created a direct line to Republican members of the House and Senate. Their campaign was: Abortion was evil. The only way to stop it? Vote Republican.

Back in 1966, when I tried my hand for the first time at doing some overt political organizing, I managed to bring Phil Ochs to Colorado, to do a concert tour of four schools: Denver University, Colorado University in Boulder, Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and my school, Colorado State College in Greeley. My hope was that the concert would bring out people that those I knew in The Movement on those campuses hadn’t reached before, and encouraging them to become active. The tour ended up being successful at doing that, and in the week he was there I learned how to knock heads and motivate people to do the the work necessary to make it a success. As I was driving him out to the Denver airport after the last concert, we talked about what had happened. He looked over at me from the passenger seat and said, “I hate to say this, but the day after the Vietnam War is over, the American Left will be dead. Nobody has a long term perspective on what needs to be done, nobody’s willing to make that long-term commitment to see it happen. But watch out, because the other side’s not like that.”

I’ve never forgotten those words.

Sure enough, after the “disappointment” of the McGovern campaign and the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, the left did contract. The contraction had begun as soon as the draft lottery began, and accelerated as the “Vietnamization” process proceeded. In truth, the engine of growth for the antiwar movement had indeed been the draft and the threat of being sent to fight and die in an unpopular war. Those who had learned that Vietnam was only symbolic of far larger issues in the country, who had come to see the need for real change in the way things were done in the U.S., were even a smaller minority than many had believed they were.

The emergence in the years just before that of a “revolutionary” wing of the left, willing to engage in violence and largely live up to the propaganda about the left being spread by the FBI and the political opposition, didn’t help. The Weatherman movement turned off many more activists than it attracted.

Just as Phil had predicted, the end of the war took most of the air out of the left.

During the 1970s, the left fractured into smaller groups around various issues - environmentalism, feminism, gay rights were the big ones - and lost what small degree of larger organization it had when the overriding issue was the war. There was no single issue the left agreed on as crucial, the way the right came to see abortion. There was no creation of larger organizations with staying power, as the right created. The only time that a larger issue united the left to any degree was in the early 1980s, when the “Nuclear Freeze” movement arose as Reagan pushed confrontation in the Cold War. But that wave dissipated when Mikhail Gorbachev came along and signaled the Soviet Union was willing to engage on the reduction of nuclear armaments. Reagan’s wars in Central America - which didn’t involve Americans directly - didn’t engage opposition the way Vietnam did.

And the abortion wars continued. Left corollaries to the right’s main organizations arose: Emily’s List, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. They became campaign powerhouses, raising and spending millions to elect Democrats up and down the ballot, every two to four years. But abortion rights groups never burrowed deep into the left’s political and cultural life the way the Christian Right did on the other side. Whenever a case got to the Supreme Court, when groups like Operation Rescue became threats, these groups could organize public effort, but those moments never felt like part of a national emergency to the wider Democratic left and Democratic leaders didn’t treat them as if they were. Everyone could relax, secure in the knowledge Roe was always there to protect most abortion rights at the federal level, and of course every Supreme Court justice had affirmed their belief in the rule of law and the importance of precedent.

The majority of Democrats, the majority of Americans as a whole, can’t remember a time when abortion wasn’t safe and legal.

The Republicans never forgot.

The Anti-Abortion movement has been defined throughout the decades of the battle by a state of permanent activism, in which politics became symbiotic with religious, cultural, and racial identity. The Republicans made fighting abortion part of their story and essential character. When the Moral Majority withered, other groups came to the fore: Focus on the Family, The Christian Coalition, The Family Research Council, the Faith and Freedom Coalition. They ran conferences, organized state groups, spent millions on direct mail and brochures for churchgoing voters. And it all happened outside the view of those who didn’t believe such groups were worth worrying about.

“Movement conservatism” wasn’t afraid to pick sides in Republican primaries, or attack those Republican politicians who didn’t share their goals - the term “Republican In Name Only” became a common slur on the right. Faced with the electoral power of this movement, Republican politicians promised Fundamentalist Christian voters they would defend “family values,” save traditional marriage, and appoint conservative judges. “Abortion was always issue number one, having become so powerful that even a publicly-amoral deviant like Trump could win over the Evangelical Right in 2016 by promising to appoint judges who would overturn Roe.

After 40 years, supporting Trump was a devil’s bargain, but it was logical because the final stage of a hard-won political project to end Roe was finally at hand. Republicans fell in line.

Can we find a way, for the next 40 years, to do the same? Because that’s what the situation is going to require. Can we get the organization and commitment to fight what is coming, now that the enemy has to up their demands in order to maintain the agitation of their base to continue their effort to overthrow democracy?

Face it: Biden will not pack the courts. The filibuster isn't going anywhere. Roe will not be codified into law by a divided Senate ruled by Joe Manchin, as was just demonstrated today. And if the Democrats don’t lose by a big margin in November, that will be a “victory.” Things may change in the next six months, but if there was ever a time to follow Willie Brown’s rule about political campaigning - “Run like you’re ten points down till they declare you the winner on election night” - these next months are it.

But once we do that - if we can - there is so much more that has to be done. And a disorganized mob has never defeated an organized army.

As the Republicans demonstrated over the past 40 years, the left needs to understand that the path back to power is through winning in the states, where they can rebuild and hold power. Even if Democrats are in control, the federal government is not coming to save us. We can’t be distracted by fad Democratic candidates like Amy McGrath in Kentucky, a guaranteed loss that siphoned small donor money away from winnable races.

In 2008, Democrats took the White House, a 60-seat majority in the Senate and a strong majority in the House in 2008 - and Rahm Emmanuel fired Howard Dean at the DNC, whose 50-state Project had been responsible for the victory, in favor of only supporting “obvious winners.” (The one thing I really like in the current cable series “The First Lady,” is that Emmanuel is played as the villain he was and is)

While everyone was cheering for “post-racial America” with Obama in the White House, Republicans invested $32 million in local legislative races, with the goal of taking over state-level policymaking and seizing control over the redistricting process to protect Republican seats for the next decade. They created the “Tea Party” to drive voter engagement and participation.

It worked. On election night in 2010, Republicans flipped 22 state legislatures. By the time Obama left office, his party had infamously lost over 1,000 seats at the state legislative level. Since that victory, Republicans in state capitals have incubated far right-wing policies previously thought inconceivable, developed a roster of young political talent, and with Trump’s victory and McConnell’s organization, seeded the judicial system with a new generation of conservative judges.

As a result, when Roe is overturned this summer, 28 states will move to limit or outright ban abortions, and more than a few will take aim at making contraception illegal. With governors, attorneys general and state legislators in charge of abortion policy, there will be pressure from the base they created these past 40 years to move quickly and pass even more restrictive policies in an endless game of right-wing one-upmanship. We have already seen in the primary votes this month that any Republicans who balk will face primary challenges that they will lose.

Unless Democrats suddenly devise a cohesive, bottom-up, always-on strategy to fight back against the ascendant right in a post-Roe political universe for decades to come, everything - everything! - gained in the past 100 years will be on the chopping block.

As the Pennsylvania union member said in an interview, “If they can kill Roe, they can kill the Wagner Act.”

Having watched the left never miss nearly every opportunity to miss an opportunity over the past 50 years, being able to count the number of people I know personally who are still politically engaged 50 years after we first met without using all my fingers, I worry that our side is up to the challenge that now stares us in the face.

I’d like to be proven wrong. But so far, Phil was right.

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