AMERICAN.COM

One of the consequences of the deep recession of 2007–2009, and of the high unemployment rate which threatens to become semi-permanent, is the eclipse of abortion as a political issue. Over a period of three decades abortion was a staple of political discourse, often to the discomfort of politicians. The irony is that it need not have been a national political issue at all. When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade in January 1973, 16 states with 41 percent of the nation’s population had in the previous five years liberalized their abortion laws, including California (where the legislation was signed by Governor Ronald Reagan) and New York. Three-quarters of Americans lived within 100 miles of a state where abortion was generally available. At that moment in 1973, legislatures in almost every state were beginning their sessions; some of them in other states would surely have liberalized their abortion laws. We would have ended up with an abortion regime like that in Europe, where abortion is widely available but subject to certain restrictions of the sort that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared unconstitutional.

The abortion issue was nettlesome to many politicians in the 1970s because it split both party’s coalitions. In my home state of Michigan, the leading proponent of abortion rights was Governor William Milliken, a Republican of considerable personal wealth and a graduate of Yale. The leading opponent of abortion rights was state House Speaker William Ryan, a Catholic and supporter of labor unions whose home in Detroit was next door to a nunnery. In a state like Iowa, where Catholics were a major source of Democratic support, the abortion issue caused many of them to vote Republican, which led to the defeat of Democratic Senator Dick Clark in 1978 and his Democratic colleague John Culver in 1980.

In time the two parties adapted. By the late 1980s there were few abortion rights supporters among active Republican politicians and few abortion rights opponents among active Democratic politicians. Among voters, too, pro-life men and women moved toward Republicans and pro-choice men and women toward Democrats. By the beginning of this decade there was a very high correlation between stands on abortion and party identification.

This continued to be the case up through and including the 2008 election. The Alan Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights organization, collects statistics that are widely accepted by advocates on all sides of the abortion issue. The institute provide a fascinating look at American society and American politics. If I am correct in supposing that in a time of economic distress abortion is likely to become a less salient issue, their latest compilation provides a look back at the way Americans live and the way they vote.

Two findings stand out.

The first is that Americans have been, as it were, voting with their feet against abortion. The abortion rate—the number of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44—has slowly but significantly fallen during the three-plus decades since Roe v. Wade. That rate rose sharply from 16.3 in 1973 to 19.3 in 1974, 21.7 in 1975, 24.2 in 1976, and 27.7 in 1977. It remained between 25.0 and 29.3 from 1978 to 1993, then began falling sharply, to 19.7 in 2004 and 19.4 in 2005, the latest figures in the Guttmacher Institute’s report.

The New York-based Guttmacher Institute notes also that the number of abortion providers has dropped precipitously, from 2,380 in 1992 to 1,787 in 2005. It makes much of the fact that 87 percent of America’s 3.141 counties have no abortion provider. Some advocates of abortion rights see this as a dire trend, preventing women in need of an abortion from being able to obtain one. That may come naturally to Manhattanites accustomed to walking not more than a block to take their clothes to the cleaners. But the fact that there is only one abortion provider in North Dakota and only two in Wyoming is, in my view, less of a problem for those seeking abortions. People in North Dakota are used to driving 200 miles to go to a shopping mall and high school football teams are commonly driven 150 miles in Wyoming to play weekly games. Abortion remains available in all 50 states and the District of Columbia for those who really want one, and the median cost of $523 is within reach of just about all of them.

But, and here is the second finding that stands out from the Guttmacher Institute’s statistics, the abortion rate varies widely among the states, and there is a high correlation between the abortion rate and voting behavior. Only 11 states and Washington, D.C. have abortion rates above the national average of 19.4. They include Hawaii, California, and Nevada in the West, Florida in the South, and seven of the eight states through which the Acela trains run in the Northeast—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland plus D.C. All of these voted for Barack Obama in 2008; all but Nevada and Florida voted for John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000.

The correlation between abortion rates and voting behavior is shown in the following table in which the states are ranked by the percentage of the vote going to Obama, and in which higher-than-average Obama percentages and abortion rates are printed in boldface type.

States Ranked by Percent Voting for Obama and by Abortion Rate (abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44, 2005)

Eight of the top ten Obama states plus D.C. have above-average abortion rates; the only exceptions are tiny Vermont and Illinois, where the abortion rate is only slightly below the national average. The only other states with above-average abortion rates are New Jersey, Nevada, and Florida. The state with by far the lowest abortion rate, Wyoming, also had the lowest Obama percentage. The highest abortion rate states are clustered at the geographic edges, the northeast, southeast, and southwest of America; in the vast geographic heartland the abortion rates are relatively low.

Roe v. Wade imposed the same legal abortion regime on the entire nation and made abortion a national political issue. Yet Americans in different regions and states have in effect established very different behavioral abortion regimes. Abortion is very common in New York (abortion rate of 38.2) and New Jersey (34.3), only about half as common in Illinois (18.9) and Texas (17.3), and lower in South Carolina (7.9) and Utah (6.4). Cultural liberals have noted that divorce rates are relatively low in some politically liberal states like Massachusetts and relatively high in some politically conservative states like Oklahoma. But abortion rates seem highly correlated with cultural attitudes and with, at least during the time that abortion has been a major political issue, voting behavior.

For the second time in as many gubernatorial elections, Virginia has elected Roman Catholics to its top two posts.

Amid the media-generated hullabaloo over Virginia Governor-elect Bob McDonnell’s master’s thesis at Regent University, an evangelical Christian graduate school, is the overlooked fact that McDonnell is indeed a Roman Catholic influenced as much by his undergraduate alma mater, Notre Dame, as he has been by Regent and its founder, Pat Robertson. Virginia’s next attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, also a Catholic, rode McDonnell’s conservative coattails to an easy victory last week.

In 2005, voters chose Tim Kaine, a Catholic and a Democrat, to be governor and McDonnell, a Republican, to be attorney general. Prior to that, the only previous Catholic statewide official in Virginia was former Lt. Gov. Richard Davis, who served from 1982 to 1986.

According to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Virginia is 31 percent evangelical Protestant, 20 percent mainline Protestant and only 14 percent Catholic.

The denominational affiliations of the candidates was not much of an issue in the campaign (even though McDonnell’s Regent thesis was), so what, if anything, does this mean? Three things:

1. For voters in Virginia, it’s another positive sign that the anti-Catholic bigotry once so prevalent in many southern states is fading away. Forty years ago this would have been unthinkable.
2. For religiously conservative candidates, it is a recipe on how to run a campaign. McDonnell never backed down from his faith and the way it has informed his positions on social issues—but he focused more on broader issues, such as jobs and transportation, that impact all voters.
3. For the mainstream media, it is an opportunity to cover McDonnell’s Catholicism, and its impact on his political governorship, with the same fairness and respect it gave Gov. Kaine, now head of the Democratic National Committee.

Kaine has been positively portrayed as a faith-friendly Democrat who openly links his Catholicism to his opposition to the death penalty. It will be interesting to see if McDonnell gets similarly sympathetic coverage if he opposes abortion or gay marriage in a manner consistent with Catholic teaching.

Last week, the Pew Global Attitudes Project released a study of attitudes in Eastern Europe and Russia about the collapse of Communism. Large majorities in all nine countries endorsed the change to a multiparty system. More than 70 percent in all countries except Russia and Ukraine applauded the change to a market economy. Bare majorities (54 percent in Russia and 52 percent in Ukraine) endorsed that change. On both questions, young people were generally more enthusiastic about the changes than older ones.

Pew also reported the results of questions that were asked in the United States and Western Europe, and one in particular caught my attention. When asked to agree or disagree with the statement, “success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control,” 29 percent in the United States agreed. But majorities or pluralities in every country in Eastern Europe agreed, as did 71 percent in Italy, 52 percent in France, and 51 percent in Spain. Attitudes in Britain were closest to ours, but even there, 41 percent agreed. Americans believe that they can shape their own destinies and that is why we place more responsibility on the individual than people in many other nations. The new Pew data show that Americans are indeed exceptional.

Chris DeMuth’s appreciation of Irving Kristol is reprinted here along with selections from Kristol’s magnificent lecture on “The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution.”

Over at The Church Report, I’ve got a short article defending religious leaders who apply their faith to politics, while also pointing out some of the pitfalls. Since there are Christians who defend practically every side of every issue, an outsider might be forgiven for thinking either that religious leaders are simply dressing up their politics with theology, or for thinking that Christianity is compatible with any policy. Not so. It’s just that the connection between faith and politics is, well, complicated.

As I’ve mentioned before, the key is to distinguish between theological principles and prudential judgments. And not all prudential judgments are created equal:

There are good and bad, informed and uninformed prudential arguments. For instance, some pastors understand economics and take economic realities into account. Others seem to think that they can just rely on their untutored moral intuitions. We should take the arguments of the first group more seriously than we take those of the second group—at least when it comes to economic policy.

The take home lesson is pretty simple: Christian leaders should be careful to think and argue clearly, and to keep separate issues, well, separate. There’s a difference between religious principles and prudential judgments. And there’s a difference between good and bad prudential judgments—and arguments.

You can read the whole thing here.

In last Sunday’s Washington Post, Steve Hayward gave us a terrific tour d’horizon of the state of intellectual conservatism and included some kind words about Glenn Beck, pointing out that he occasionally has guests who get into serious discussions of serious issues. Then yesterday Jonah Goldberg weighed in with a defense of Beck, in which Jonah chides me gently for my complaint about Beck (“Don’t tell me we have to put up with the Glenn Becks of the world to be successful,” I had grouched) when I wrote an appreciation of the three giants of the right that we have lost in the last three years (Milton Friedman, Bill Buckley, and Irving Kristol). In conclusion, Jonah wrote:

Most important, popularity is what the intellectuals [such as Friedman, Buckley, and Kristol] were fighting for: to create a conservative culture … By definition, making conservatism popular means making it less stuffy and intellectual and more accessible. Not only is Beck good at that, he actually gets people to read serious books in ways Buckley never could. Why defenestrate him from the house of conservatism merely to preserve the rarefied air?

To some extent, assessing these defenses of Beck depends on an empirical question. Net, does he attract people to conservative or libertarian thought or does he repel them? I haven’t any idea what the answer is. Probably if we disaggregate the audience, we will get different answers for different audience segments. But I know who I have in mind when I write, and I’m pretty sure I can guess how Beck’s affecting them.

My reader—the one I’m talking to with every sentence—is a bright, reasonable person who doesn’t agree with me but comes to my text ready to give me a shot. My task is to get this reader to stick with me as we work through difficult questions. If I take a cheap shot at his point of view, I’m going to lose him. If I duck an obvious objection to the argument I’m making, I’m going to lose him.

I realize that this is a saccharine, maybe even a wussy, way of thinking about what I’m doing. And it’s more than a little elitist. But we live in a world where a majority of the best and brightest young people who are going to shape the culture leave college with a standard liberal view of the world. The contribution that people like Steve Hayward and Jonah Goldberg (and me too) can make is to get these people to take a fresh look. Doing that requires restraint. In Sunday’s article, Steve set up a sort of koan for thinking about this question when he wrote about Jonah:

About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present, it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.

Steve’s right, of course—the title sold a lot of books. He’s right about the serious book that Liberal Fascism really is. But he’s also right about the off-putting nature of the title. And so the question that Steve brought to my mind: what if I had entitled Losing Ground something like Liberal Cruelty? It probably would have sold a lot more than the meager 27,000 copies it actually sold on release. Would the book have had as much impact? That’s the koan. I’m sure Jonah can give me examples of people who did pick up Liberal Fascism even though they hated the title, but I’ll still bet he lost a lot of people who would have been deeply affected by his argument if they had read the book.

We are indeed engaged in a battle for America’s soul, but the way that battle is conducted makes a big difference. The goal—at least my goal, but I think it is Steve’s and Jonah’s as well—is not to elect a Republican majority to Congress. That’s not our job, and it’s not as if Republican congresses were so wonderful anyway. Our job is to engage in a debate on great issues and make converts to our point of view. The key word is converts—referring to people who didn’t start out agreeing with us. We shouldn’t be civil and reasonable just because we want to be nice guys. It is the only option we’ve got if we want to succeed instead of just posture. The Glenn Becks of the world posture, and make our work harder.