Reactionaries

 It would be fun to watch Republican bewilderment over the backlash to Dobbs if it weren't so perilous for women's actual lives. Their struggles to understand why this issue is now salient for millions of Americans could be a classic class of epistemological closure.

I think it also speaks to something that speaks to the basic "conservatism" of most people (especially those older than 35). By conservative, what I really mean is a skepticism of rapid, untested change. As I've argued here for years, the American "Conservative" movement is, in fact, deeply reactionary. This is what Trump has so expertly grifted off of: turning the reactionary impulses of older Americans, especially fundamentalist Christians, into campaign funds and votes.

I think you'll find a fair amount of widespread aversion to weirder impulses amongst the Left like "Latinx" or "Defund the Police" for this reason. The recent increased visibility of trans people has left a lot of Americans perplexed. I don't think that leads to support for the sort of bullying and harassment that the GOP is currently fixated on, but there are a bunch of people saying "What now?" when informed of current thinking about gender. 

Do I think that transphobia is a vote getter? I'm skeptical. But trying to make out Democrats as trying to force your kids to be gender fluid will trigger some backlash. The falseness of the accusation will only mitigate things a bit, but again, I don't think there's a clamor for trans-bashing outside of the deeply reactionary base of the GOP - which again are fundamentalists.

When conservatives say, "Whoa, maybe we shouldn't jump straight to a single-payer health insurance system" they will enjoy support. When reactionaries try and unravel ACA, they will face a backlash.

This is why I really think the best hope for this country is an implosion of the Republican Party for about 12 years. Just a full on schism between normies and Trumpists that leaves Democrats largely in power to slowly make important changes like, say, a public health insurance option or maybe a baseline universal system supplemented by privately held insurance. Not banning gasoline powered cars, but creating infrastructure and incentives that makes it so much easier for EVs to replace ICE vehicles - similar to how solar power has largely buried coal.

After that, it's almost inevitable that Democrats will overreach and create a backlash that might allow a chastened GOP back into power. But only a chastened one, and only as a corrective to some overreach.

Because right now, the GOP's policies are pretty much toxic all the way down, precisely because they are just as much an attack on the status quo as the wildest dreams of the Kenyon undergrad fervently hoping that Bernie Sanders runs for president again. 

Matt Yglesias drives me crazy, but his impulse to name his blog Slow Boring is a nod to Max Weber's dictum that "politics is the slow boring of hard boards". Only one party is committed to that work, the other wants to ride the anger of old people and Christianists who pine for a mythic past. No one else wants to go back there, though, so subverting elections is all they have left.