How Liberals Lost the Fight For Abortion Rights

Unless we clearly understand the history of our defeats, and popularize those lessons to a mass audience, the ideological blinders of liberalism will drive our movements into more dead-ends.

By Ty Moore

The Supreme Court’s right-wing rampage, from overturning abortion rights to dismantling environmental protections, is sparking a fierce debate between liberals and the left over how we got here. Did the movement behind Bernie cost Clinton the 2016 election, and should it be blamed for the three Trump-appointed Justices on the Supreme Court? Or should we blame the Democratic Party’s embrace of neoliberalism and spineless vacillations in the face of Republican attacks for the growth of right-populism?

Socialists, of course, generally side with the latter line of argument. But if our aim is to win a majority of working people away from the mis-leadership of Democratic Party liberals and to our point of view, bitter online denunciations are totally inadequate.

Instead, DSA and the wider left must develop a systematic mass campaign of “patient explanation” on how we got here, and the kind of political movement and program needed to effectively fight back. With Biden’s popularity lower than any president in modern history and the Democratic Party heading into a tough election this November, there is both an urgency and a huge potential to broaden support for socialist ideas in the months ahead.

Liberalism’s Blinders

In the context of this debate, the New York Times, the “paper of record” for American liberalism, provided an impressively clean target for socialist critique. “How did Roe Fall?” was the title of their June 25 feature article, published just days after the Supreme Court decision.

Written by Kate Zernike, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “explanatory journalism,” the article opens with this argument: “The downfall of the constitutional right to abortion began 12 years ago, after Republicans swept state house elections and passed hundreds of restrictions.”

Early in the article, she lays out the scale of Republican victories in 2010:

[C]ontrol of state houses across the country flipped from Democrat to Republican, almost to the number: Democrats had controlled 27 state legislatures going in and ended up with 16; Republicans started with 14 and ended up controlling 25. Republicans swept not only the South but Democratic strongholds in the Midwest, picking up more seats nationwide than either party had in four decades. By the time the votes had been counted, they held their biggest margin since the Great Depression …

The three years following the 2010 elections would result in 205 anti-abortion laws across the country, more than in the entire previous decade …

The momentum that started in 2010 led to the Supreme Court overturning Roe on Friday, even though polls show that a vast majority of Americans supported it, and that most now believe abortion is morally acceptable. The court’s decision lamented that Roe had “sparked a national controversy that has embittered our popular culture for a half century.” In fact, that controversy started not so much with Roe but in state houses, and raged hottest over the last decade.

For socialists who paid any attention to politics since 2010, this emphasis on the Tea Party Republicans’ historic sweep of the 2010 midterm elections might give rise to a moment of hope: Was the New York Times about to feature a serious analysis weaving together the rise of right-populism with the Democratic Party’s disastrous bailout of Wall Street during the Great Recession and wider neo-liberal policies? Was the article about to offer a clear warning to Biden and the Democrats in 2022 to avoid the mistakes the party made following Obama’s 2008 victory – the last time they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House?

There needs to be an analysis of how and why the far-right populists were able to defeat both the traditional GOP big business establishment and the Wall Street-backed Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, despite the pretense of a deep dive into how populist right and “pro-life” movement triumphed, the 4,000 word article didn’t feature a single reference to the 2008 economic crisis, the bank bailouts, or the foreclosure crisis. There was no reference to the generalized failure of the Democrats to deliver on promises of “hope” and “change” during Obama’s 2008 campaign, and no attempt to draw parallels with Biden’s failure to deliver Build Back Better or any of his big campaign promises.

The Tea Party’s Populism

Zernike’s almost singular emphasis on the 2010 state house elections is also revealing of her ideological blinders: equally important, the Democrats also lost 64 seats in the House of Representatives in 2010, the most sweeping defeat for either party since 1948. And Democratic Party setbacks and loss of voters continued at all levels up through Trump’s victory in 2016. While Obama´s re-election in 2012 stood in contrast to this trend, he also lost 3 million votes compared to 2008, and his margin of victory against billionaire venture capitalist Mitt Romney shrunk to just 5 million votes compared to 10 million against John McCain in ‘08.

Emphasizing state-level Republican victories and omitting their national victories helps her avoid any wider analysis of how and why the far-right populists who now dominate the Republican Party were able to defeat both the traditional GOP big business establishment alongside the Wall Street-backed Democratic Party.

Zernike acknowledges that “Tea Party-backed candidates [in 2010] had campaigned on fiscal discipline and promised indifference to social issues,” but then quickly moves on, explaining how it became politically expedient for Tea Party populists to embrace the religious right. But this issue isn’t a secondary one. While open racism, anti-LGBTQ+ attacks, and banning abortion did not have majority support, most workers were enraged at the corporate corruption of both political parties and the impacts of the Great Recession.

Zernike fails to explain that the Tea Party’s message of “fiscal discipline” was intimately linked with their opposition to Obama’s bailout of Wall Street – a vast corporate welfare program at taxpayers expense that the right-wing of the Republican Party opposed. After failing to pass on their first attempt, the Wall Street bailout took a bipartisan campaign uniting the traditional Republican establishment with Obama and most Democrats in Congress to overcome the opposition of the Republican-right.

Obama’s Wall Street Bailout

While most of the US left and labor movement were also critical of the bank bailouts, they remained muted in deference to Obama. No mass demonstrations were organized to demand the criminals on Wall Street be jailed, much less calls for public control of the taxpayer-funded banks. This historic failure demoralized the Democrat’s working-class voter base, leading to low turnout in 2010, and left the political field wide open to the Tea Party to position themselves as the anti-Wall Street opposition and, increasingly, as the populist party of “Mainstreet.”

No serious left political challenge to Obama and the Democrats was organized until the Occupy protests in 2011 and then with Bernie’s 2016 race, but again the Democratic Party leadership’s campaign of dirty tricks against Sanders’ paved the way for Trump.

When Obama bailed out General Motors and Chrysler in 2009, effectively taking them into public ownership, instead of using taxpayer money to maintain union wages and benefits, his administration helped force through 50% wage cuts for new hires, cut retiree health benefits, and replaced workers’ defined benefit pension with a 401K. The central goal of Obama’s auto-bailout was to restore the profitability of the auto bosses and Wall Street shareholders.

An historic opportunity to retool the US auto-industry into a massive green jobs program to tackle climate change was wasted. Tragically, the corrupt UAW leadership went along with this disastrous approach, ignoring calls from left trade unionists to organize for an alternative vision of a publicly-run auto industry to serve the needs of people and the environment, not shareholders and banks.

After three decades of Democratic Party leadership on free-trade deals and deregulation of finance capital, is it any wonder that workers in Michigan and other Midwest industrial heartland states turned against them in 2010 and since?

Trump’s Rise was Avoidable

Like the Tea Party before him, in 2016 Trump similarly avoided the abortion debate and many other pet issues of the religious right. Judged by his policy positions on most hot-button social issues in the 2016 race, Trump was widely viewed as a “moderate” Republican. Instead Trump focused on opposition to the Democrats free-trade deals, the bipartisan disaster in Iraq, and promises to “clear the swamp” of corruption in Washington. Trump styled himself as a champion of the white working class, playing on their anger and sense of betrayal by the Democratic Party, and cynically twisting this anger into a racist, sexist, right-wing narrative.

The “five-year campaign” of Sanders between 2015 and 2020 and the growth of DSA gave an even further indication of the potential to channel working class anger away from Trumpism.

The rise of the right was not inevitable. In this period, there were repeated indicators that bold working-class politics could have gained mass support and deeply undercut the cynical populist appeals of the Tea Party and Trump. The 2011 labor uprising in Wisconsin and then Occupy Wall Street both won mass popular sympathy. The “five-year campaign” of Bernie Sanders between 2015 and 2020 and the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America gave an even further indication of the potential to channel working class anger away from Trumpism and into a positive movement for change. But that potential was wrecked by the full-scale war waged by the Democratic establishment and corporate media against Bernie’s campaigns and other left challenges.

Zernike is right to highlight the Tea Party Republicans sweep of the 2010 elections as the key turning point in the fight to defend abortion rights. But alongside her co-thinkers in the leadership of the Democratic Party, she appears willfully blind to the deep class anger at neo-liberal politicians and the wider political dynamics driving the ascent of the right-populist Republicans. Without recognizing these dynamics, liberalism remains incapable of drawing the necessary political lessons to change course today.

Liberalism’s Self-Justifying Story

In place of a serious appraisal of how and why the Democratic Party saw so many decisive setbacks between 2010 and 2016 (and may be plunging toward another electoral defeat in November), the only explanation offered is that clever Republican strategists simply outmaneuvered Democrats at the state level. Zernike emphasizes that:

“Republican strategists, however, had an eye on the states in the 2010 midterms. In The Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush’s victories, wrote that a group called the Republican State Leadership Committee was aiming to flip 18 legislative chambers where Democrats were holding the majority by four or fewer seats… The group spent just $30 million — less than the cost of some Senate races. Republicans won 680 seats, more than the Democrats had won in the post-Watergate election of 1974.”

She then approvingly quotes New York state senator Daniel Squadron’s analysis:

On the far right, they realized that the most lasting impact of 2010 would be in the states… On our side, state power was a footnote. The lesson we took was ‘Focus more on midterms’; the lesson they took was ‘Wield power in states.’ And today, both sides are reaping what we sowed.

The idea that the growth of far-right political forces in US society can be reduced to such tactical decisions by party leaders is ludicrous on its face. Across the globe, far-right parties have grown dramatically since the Great Recession. Can this global trend be simply chalked up to tactical errors by left-liberal capitalist parties everywhere?

Clearly a more serious analysis is needed, one that examines the rise of the right as a consequence of deepening inequality and the incapacity of global capitalism to take society forward – alongside the betrayals of formerly social democratic and left parties over the last 30 years.

Instead Zernike offers a self-justifying narrative for liberalism that obscures the deeper failure of corporate-backed Democrats. It obscure how Democratic-Party aligned leaders of the mainstream feminist organizations failed sustain the movement for reproductive rights, much less advance the wider fight for social and economic justice.

Zernike never mentions the mass feminist movement and broad social upheavals in US society in the 1960s and 70s that forced the US ruling class and Supreme Court to grant abortion rights in the first place. Instead, her survey of the failures of abortion rights organizations emphasizes their struggle to convince major donors to back state-level Democrats. Zernike only mentions, in passing, how “NARAL had cut its number of state affiliates nearly in half between 1991 and 2011.” She never asks (or answers) why NARAL, NOW, and the other liberal feminist groups – groups who initially rose to prominence in an era of mass feminist struggle – are so incapable today of building a grassroots movement to fight to Republican attacks.

Three Factors of Defeat

Instead of this false liberal focus on clever Republican strategists, the left should aim to popularize three major factors that explain the setbacks and defeats of the abortion rights movement – factors which should also inform our strategy in the years ahead:

First, Democrats played with defending reproductive rights during elections, but failed to actually fight. In his 2008 campaign, Obama famously promised to codify Roe into federal law, but then made no attempt to do so once elected. This repeated pattern has demoralized and sapped confidence from progressive voters while expanding the confidence and political space for right-wing activism.

Instead of promoting a bold abortion rights movement, Bill and Hillary Clinton introduced the slogan that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Over decades, even when they had majorities, the Democrats made no attempt to overturn the anti-abortion Hyde amendment.

Second, abandoning mass-movement politics in favor of a narrowly electoral and lobbying strategy has been a disaster. Polls today show unprecedented support for abortion rights, alongside wider demands for gender, racial, and economic justice. So why are we suffering setbacks when the movements of the 1960s and 70s – despite confronting a much larger portion of the population holding conservative views – achieved so much progress?

Part of the answer is that the US ruling class of that era felt forced into granting major concessions to cut across the various mass movements of the era. The political establishment feared these movements would further radicalize, join forces, and threaten capitalist rule (which was happening across the world at the time).

The 2017 and 2018 Women’s Marches against Trump drew record-breaking numbers into the streets. But these protests were limited to liberal politics and backing Democrats and were led initially by backers of Clinton’s disastrous 2016 campaign. While most participants undoubtedly supported a much broader program of gender, racial, and economic justice, many Women’s March leaders actively fought attempts to give expression to a more radical mass-movement politics.

Socialists should whole heartedly support and build the upcoming Women’s Marches’ “Weekend of Action” for abortion rights October 7th – 9th, but DSA should mobilize to them with our own demands and fighting strategy, aiming to pressure the mainstream feminist organizations to call bigger, bolder actions.

Third, without a fighting, working-class political alternative to corporate politics, Republicans will continue to win through populist appeals. The pattern of Democrats pretending at election time to stand on a pro-worker, pro-environment, social justice platform, then just caving-in to corporate pressure once in office, will continually re-open space for Republicans to win. The appeal of Tucker Carlson, Trump, the Tea Party, and others like them can only be effectively answered by a bold working-class, anti-establishment, left-wing political movement.

There is no path to victory if the fight for abortion rights continues as single-issue lobbying effort on corporate politicians. To be successful, today’s movement for reproductive rights must be part of the wider struggle for building a mass left political alternative, capable of competing for power against both corporate parties. Bernie Sanders’ two presidential runs and the election of DSA candidates across the country, despite using the Democratic Party ballot line (in most cases), have proven the potential to build mass support for socialist politics.

Anger is again growing at the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to defend abortion rights, alongside their failures to advance working-class demands more generally. This rising anger translates to rising possibilities to win over the Democrats’ still massive (if shrinking!) voting base among workers, women, and oppressed communities to the need for building a left political alternative. DSA’s messaging in the reproductive justice movement should find creative and consistent ways to popularize this vision.