The fringe right adds to Martin Niemöller’s list
Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow reacted to how the Dobbs decision eliminating the right to an abortion will impact women. She testified Wednesday before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, telling the members that while still legal in Michigan, abortion access is under legal threat there after Dobbs. A Republican challenge to a court injunction threatens to reactivate a 1931 Michigan law banning abortion with no exceptions.
Women don’t matter
“We are telling them what the impact of Dobbs is. They won’t listen because [women] don’t matter… if you are in half of the population that can give birth, you don’t matter to these people,” McMorrow told MSNBC’s Joy Reid.
If the raped Ohio 10-year-old who had to cross state lines to obtain an abortion in Indiana offers proof, House Republicans’ questioning was further proof. The health, safety, and freedom of women to exercise power, personal or political, or autonomy in health decisions, is not conservatives’ concern. And that attitude, as Justice Alito might say, is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”
When the New York Times published its 1619 Project essays online, the headline on Jamelle Bouie’s contribution read:
America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.
Bouie’s essay proposes that the Republican Party’s radicalization in the wake of the election of the first Black president follows in the American tradition of closely circumscribing who wields political power here and who does not. The 1619 Project focuses on how enslaving Black people shaped this country’s culture, policies and politics, then and now. Recall, however, that at the founding non-whites in general and all women were excluded from power.
Bouie writes:
There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery. And while the racial content of that ideology has attenuated over time, the basic framework remains: fear of rival political majorities; of demographic “replacement”; of a government that threatens privilege and hierarchy.
Then they came for the women
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority and Republican-controlled state legislatures are, as the white Redemption movement did following Reconstruction, working to roll back the hard-won rights of the “undeserving.” This is the new nullification in the 21st century. It includes not only nonwhites, but now all women as well.
Scholars Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson noted that Tea Party members worry that “Tea Party resistance to giving more to categories of people deemed undeserving is more than just an argument about taxes and spending.” It is “a heartfelt cry about where they fear ‘their country’ may be headed.” That is, more political power for Others means less power for them and less control.
Republicans since the Obama administration in state after state and from coast to coast have worked tirelessly to restrict political power for anyone not aligned with Republicans. Now with Dobbs, that effort includes women. President Trump, Bouie adds, “has repeatedly and falsely denounced Clinton’s popular-vote victory as illegitimate, the product of fraud and illegal voting.” Any elections Republicans do not win are by their definition illegitimate, as are Americans who reject the conservative world view. The only ones who count are “real Americans.”
Bouie writes:
The larger implication is clear enough: A majority made up of liberals and people of color isn’t a real majority. And the solution is clear, too: to write those people out of the polity, to use every available tool to weaken their influence on American politics. The recent attempt to place a citizenship question on the census was an important part of this effort. By asking for this information, the administration would suppress the number of immigrant respondents, worsening their representation in the House and the Electoral College, reweighting power to the white, rural areas that back the president and the Republican Party.
When Bouie wrote that, the class of undesirables targeted for disenfranchisement by Republicans was primarily liberals and people of color. With the Dobbs decision, women have joined the list. William Greider once wrote that movement conservatives’ goal was “to roll back the twentieth century.” Now, with a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, theocratic reactionaries have expanded the targeted time frame to include the nineteenth. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said last night straight into the camera, “They want a world in which that child would be forced to carry her rapist’s baby.” A world in which white men again rule supreme.
Were he alive today, Martin Niemöller might include, “Then they came for the women.”
You don’t matter to these people.
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