Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Yet if anyone crosses this silent majority, by passing laws to restrict personal freedoms, they will be silent no more. When the trustees at James Madison University in rural Virginia voted to ban the morning-after pill from the student health center in 2003, the largely conservative student body rose up within 36 hours and demanded change. Consider that a microcosm of what would happen nationwide.
And why do social conservatives loom so large in our politics today? The best historical parallel for them may be the Luddites who terrorized Britain two centuries ago, the workers who traveled around the country smashing machines for fear that the Industrial Revolution would destroy their jobs and way of life. They were loud, and their tenacity gave the impression that they represented more Britons than they actually did, when in fact they were merely acting out their despair and outrage at a world that was passing them by. Today's social conservatives are our cultural Luddites.
In the aftermath of the 2004 election, religious and social conservatives have begun to demand their spoils and due. Evangelical leader Bob Jones III, head of the eponymous Bob Jones University in South Carolina that until 2000 banned interracial dating, has called upon President Bush to appoint conservative judges and pass legislation "defined by biblical norm." Pro-choice Republicans like Sen. Arlen Specter have been threatened with loss of power if they refuse to rubber-stamp anti-Roe judges. The president himself has said he's ready to spend his "political capital" to enact his moral values.
It was a gleeful Karl Rove who let the evangelical genie out of the bottle to win this election, but what worked this year may come back to haunt the GOP in the decades to come. For as much as Rove needed these religious voters to get his guy over the top, let us not forget that the primary reason President Bush won is that he quite successfully turned the election into a referendum on leadership qualities for the war on terror, and in the process subsumed all other issues.
Perhaps Rove should have sat in on my undergraduate course on this year's presidential campaign, which I've been teaching this fall at American University in Washington. About two weeks before the election, I asked the students, "Would you be more or less likely to support George W. Bush if you knew he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would erode the right to an abortion, the right to sexual privacy, gay rights, church-state separation, federal environmental regulation, family leave laws, and both affirmative action and diversity programs?" And before I let them answer, I added that these were not mere abstractions, that Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas had both voted or vowed to erode these rights and protections, and that these were the two justices Bush has cited as his model nominees.
Predictably, the Kerry partisans shuddered at the idea of a Supreme Court stacked with Bush appointees. But more interesting was the reaction from the Bush supporters. With clear discomfort, most wanted to wish the question away, saying they don't vote on hypotheticals, and anyway, they couldn't imagine the Court reversing such settled law. But when I pressed them and asked them to take the president and his favorite justices at their word, one finally conceded that his perspective was based on "wishful thinking."
The "wishful thinking" student intrigued me most because he was a hard-nosed thinker, a strong Bush supporter from the heartland, and he spent much of the semester critiquing the Kerry supporters for "wishful thinking" about terrorism, saying that we needed to stand tough against Islamic fascists regardless of what the rest of the world says. So after the election I asked him about his "wishful thinking" on the Supreme Court, and after a few moments of cognitive dissonance, he admitted that a rightward Court that overruled Roe vs. Wade and other rights might eventually force him to rethink his political loyalties.
So be careful what you wish for, Mr. Rove. The moment the courts start reversing our personal freedoms -- or the religious right overreaches and tries to impose its will -- millions of Americans who voted for President Bush might regret their decision to let wishful thinking guide their choice back in 2004.
The new silent majority will rise again.
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