Fair enough

A friend responds to this post:

I would say, the cocktail of contraception (1st step) *and *no-fault divorce (2nd step). “We stopped up our fertility so we could concentrate on fulfilling our egos together. Now I find my ego can’t stand his/her stupid ego any more. But hey, let’s just let both of us agree that it’s nobody’s fault. Our 1.5 kids will just have to understand — we’ll get them counselling.”

I don’t worship at the shrine of Reagan, though he was the greatest president of my lifetime (so far, though I’m not hopeful for his equal coming along anytime soon). One of the reasons I admire him is that he was a politician who could actually admit his mistakes… like this one.

Quite so. And I reckon him the greatest president of my lifetime too. Bringing down Eurocommies without a shot fired is an achievement for which any President should be celebrated in verse. And his repentance on both abortion and no fault divorce does deserve note.

My point was more along the lines that people who focus on “family values” tend to chalk the whole mess up to “liberals and gays” while failing to note that their Political Team bears a huge share of the responsibility for the present mess. Reagan, to his credit, figured out his blunders concerning both divorce and abortion and repented. Many on the Right seem to be under the impression that their team was on the right side the whole time, just as many on the Left seem to still think they live in the pre-1970s Democratic party of the Working Stiff.

In fact, Evangelicals didn’t become interested in abortion until the late 70s, perceiving it as a “Catholic thing” before then. Likewise, the GOP only noticed it when Reagan made a thing of it and has historically treated pro-lifers, not as actual partners in their agenda, but as easily exploitable votes with nowhere else to turn. My (admittedly easy to misunderstand crack about the “Shrine of Reagan” was not meant to diss Reagan but to point out that social conservatives who treat the GOP as though it actually *cares* about their concerns are being played, particularly when they get herded on to the reservation every four years by a party that has demonstrated, for 30 long years, that it will occasionally throw them a bone but whose overall goal is to keep things at sub-Carthaginian levels of respect for human life, since it has no intention at all of ever really doing something serious about abortion. When it was in power, it used its clout, not to do anything about abortion, but to stampede prolifers into support for an unjust war and into making excuses for torture and consequentialism in percentages larger than the general population–all while flying the flag of Reagan and assuring the people who were doing this that they were honoring his memory. It reminds me of nothing so much as Gilded Age Bosses flying the flag of Lincoln while fleecing their constituents. As John Zmirak points out, the result of our tribal affiliation with the GOP has been as catastrophic as our previous tribal affiliation with the Dems:

As Philip Lawler has revealed, at the same time the Kennedys were following Catholic teaching by opposing segregation, they were also gathering liberal theologians to prepare the way for Roe v. Wade. This didn’t set them apart from the rest of the Catholic elites; instead of serving as America’s moral conscience, discerning which causes of social “reform” were just and which were groundless, our leadership class in the universities was signing on with a leftist social agenda across the board. Hence, when the main goals of the Civil Rights movement had been achieved, our leaders with few exceptions signed onto the next “reform” movement, “Women’s Liberation,” which borrowed its central demand – legal abortion – from the population controllers and eugenicists.

The Catholics who said “Heck no!” – including the most fervent and faithful – were frozen out of the schools, thrown out of seminaries, and reduced to attending Wanderer conferences and homeschooling their kids a few blocks from the Catholic academies they’d helped build. This faithful, angry “remnant” would soon find itself in hock to Republicans disdainful of other Catholic principles – such as just war theory. When the hype machine that lied America into the Iraq war started churning, it was all too easy for most of us who’d found our aid and comfort from secular nationalists and fideistic Protestants to convince ourselves to support the war – if only out of political expedience. “What harm could it do? WMDs or no WMDs, even if ‘preventive war’ violates some non-infallible encyclical, we’ll give them their war in return for the next three Supreme Court justices,” I remember people saying – under their breath.

Now “the Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return.” The unpopular, hideously expensive Iraq war helped destroy the fortunes of pro-life candidates in every branch of government. It elected a president who will surely have the chance to stack the Supreme Court, rendering the life issue moot for a lifetime. The money poured down that Middle Eastern hole would surely come in handy right now – as we weather an economic collapse of bipartisan provenance. Meanwhile, gay marriage has spread from Massachusetts to the Midwest, and the taxes our children must pay for our current spending spree will make it ruinously expensive to procreate and educate. And the leaders of our “trademark” Catholic university are cringing before the power of the newly anointed prince of this part of the world. “We adore you, O mighty sultan, and beg for your protection.”

Reagan, as you point out, learned from his mistakes. I don’t see the present GOP learning anything, or even admitting any mistakes at present. Admittedly, they are in a pitched battle to try to stave off disaster as our Amateur President flounders around and that requires most of their mental resources. But nowhere do I see a party on the Right with any ideas besides “NO!” and “It’s not my fault!” when it is manifestly, obviously, blazingly their fault for the disastrous mismanagement of the past eight years. One hopes that somebody somewhere on the Right will take stock of how Our Team has contributed to the culture of death over the past several decades and not just seek to score points with rote denunciations of liberals as the cause of all our ills. But I’m not seeing it. That’s closer to what I was trying to say. And knowing you, I know that you appreciate as well the grave danger of good people who cannot admit their own capacity for evil. So I don’t thinks we are on different pages here.

Blessings, friend.