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{"id":99700,"date":"2017-03-27T08:59:38","date_gmt":"2017-03-27T15:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=99700"},"modified":"2017-03-27T09:07:35","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T16:07:35","slug":"to-win-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2017\/03\/to-win-again.html","title":{"rendered":"To Win Again…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Democrats must stop being the abortion party.<\/a><\/p>\n

This bit of common sense appeared, surprisingly, in the pages of the New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Remember the demographics. Out at the ends of the bell curve, one small minority of Americans want abortion on demand without apology or exception of any kind and another small minority want abortion totally outlawed.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in the huge mushy middle, the overwhelming majority of Americans have a deeply queasy conscience about abortion and know that it involves killing babies in gruesome ways that they sure as hell do not want to look at or think about but they also don\u2019t want to do anything to stop because they are not about to tell some terrified young woman who could be their daughter, \u201cI sentence you to a lifetime of poverty and myself to a lifetime of helping to care for a baby you did not want.\u201d That is the basic dynamic of American opinion, like it or not.<\/p>\n

Republicans play to the queasy conscience of the middle and to the small base who can be reliably counted on to believe the now threadbare lie that they care about abortion. So every four years they say \u201cVote GOP or the baby gets it\u201d and the idea-free monomaniacs in the base lie themselves into believing it (and into zealous supporting all the *real* anti-life agenda items of the GOP), even when their candidate is a transparent fraud, pornocrat, and sex predator who won\u2019t say whether he has personally paid for abortions himself and whose priorities transparently have nothing to do with ending abortion but with making war on virtually every value the gospel exalts. Only the people out at the \u201cabolishing abortion is all that matters\u201d end of the bell curve can lie themselves into buying that. The mushy middle knows it\u2019s bushwah, but (sort of) supports him for other reasons\u2013because they don\u2019t like thinking about abortion. But that middle is *very* mushy and knows he\u2019s full of crap on abortion, which is why he didn\u2019t even win the popular vote. On that score, there was no practical difference between him and Hillary, which is why his nominee (about whom he knew nothing and whose name was picked from a list drawn up for him) has declared Roe <\/em>settled law and said (as any Hillary nominee would have said\u2013as Hillary herself said) \u201cthe fetus is not a person\u201d.<\/p>\n

And yet, this transparent fraud still won. Why? Because Hillary, in a massively tone-deaf and inept campaign, dropped the triangulation of her husband and the \u201csafe, legal, and *rare*\u201d talk of his campaign and declared \u201cNO QUARTER!\u201d to the 80% of Americans who feel deeply queasy and morally conflicted about abortion. She made clear that she would do everything possible to ram her views on abortion down the throats of Americans and make. them. love. it. She played solely to the \u201cI Heart Abortion\u201d crowd out at the other end of the bell curve and demonstrated yet again that Dems need to rethink their self-evaluation as the Smartest Guys in the Room. Because the giant mushy middle are intensely queasy about abortion and don\u2019t want to think about it and don\u2019t like scolding harridans telling them they have to love it.<\/p>\n

If Dems could decouple from their rigid, blind, and unbending commitment to abortion as their sole core value and make room for the 80% of Americans who dislike and the 1\/3 of their own party who *deeply* question and reject the party\u2019s dogmatic commitment to abortion, they would never lose another election. The Dems are on the side of the angels on a huge number of issues and advocate all sorts of thing in harmony with\u2013or at least on the right track toward\u2013the Church\u2019s social teaching. But right in the middle of all that is this huge, suppurating tumorous blind spot on abortion that keeps millions of people of good will from giving them their vote. It is the mystery of evil that they cannot bring themselves to so much as rethink their approach and keep doubling down on it. And it\u2019s why Hillary lost this election.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"