When Did the GOP Radicalize?—Part 2

Thirty-eight years ago, the Republican Party staked out an extreme position on abortion. Overturning Roe was one of the results, but it's unlikely to be the last.

President Donald Trump attends the 2019 National Prayer Breakfast on February 7, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chris Kleponis - Pool/Getty Images)

In yesterday’s post, I looked at Republican Party platforms from 1976 down to the present, with special focus on the issue of abortion. Today I reflect on what this history tells us about the ideological trajectory of the GOP—and suggest how Democrats should respond to it.

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Anyone claiming that the Republican Party significantly radicalized under President Donald Trump needs to come to terms with the fact that the GOP staked out an extremely radical position on abortion way back in 1984—making promises to the pro-life movement that the conservative-dominated Supreme Court has so far come nowhere close to fulfilling.

It’s striking how little the platforms down through the years have spoken of reversing Roe v. Wade (1973) and allowing the issue to be decided by the states, a position compatible with New York, California, and other blue states keeping abortion freely available to women. That’s been the rallying cry of Federalist Society lawyers and judges for decades—and it’s where, thanks to the Dobbs decision, we have now arrived.

Instead, GOP platforms since midway through the Reagan administration have skipped past a mere reversal of Roe and called, instead, for a nationwide response that goes far beyond reverting to the pre-1973 status quo. The platforms have consistently advocated both a human-life constitutional amendment that would ban abortion around the country and a novel interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that would use the equal protection clause to defend fetal personhood in the womb.  

The Three Waves of Populist Rebellion

This would seem to imply that the party has been consistently extreme on this issue since the Reagan administration. And yet there have also been changes since the ’80s. In Part 1 of this post, I noted the number of times each platform refers to abortion, and the length of the passages in which the abortion plank is introduced and discussed, and the number of abortion-related policies proposed, praised, and denounced—all of them growing over time.

But that growth hasn’t been steady as the decades and presidential administrations have unfolded. It’s happened in spurts, driven by a series of populist upheavals that have rocked the GOP, with each bringing an intensifying focus on abortion.

Reagan himself led a populist insurgency against the blue-blood, centrist Republicanism that that prevailed before 1980. (As a gesture of conciliation toward the old guard, he also picked a running mate, George H. W. Bush, who came from that formerly dominant faction of the GOP.) The lurch of the Republican platform to the right on abortion in 1984 was a response to what many of Reagan’s new allies—including preacher and activist Jerry Falwell, North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, and other religiously inflected conservatives from the South and Midwest—expected and demanded in return for their support.

The next significant expansion of the abortion plank took place in the 1996 platform, just after Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich led the populist insurgency in 1994 that delivered majority control of the House of Representatives to the GOP for the first time in forty years. In its wake, the party coalesced around George W. Bush, who embraced “theocon” formulations about building a “culture of life,” with absolute opposition to abortion at its core.

The third populist rebellion began with the 2010 midterm elections, in which “Tea Party” Republicans took 63 seats in the House, the largest shift in 62 years, and it continued to roil the party through the 2012 “clown car” primaries, Mitt Romney’s failure to defeat President Barack Obama later that year, and the announcement of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the summer of 2015. Where the right-wing insurgents had failed to unify around a single alternative to Romney (an establishment favorite) in the previous presidential cycle, now they latched onto Trump and never let go.

The most religious Republicans were cool to Trump at first, but eventually they came around, willing to risk a transactional relationship with the unorthodox Republican presidential candidate. In return for winning the support of pro-life voters, the nominee vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe, with the work of providing a list of names outsourced to the Federalist Society, which had long been committed to reversing the 1973 decision. As a way of assuring these voters that they were making the right choice, the 2016 Republican platform devoted more space than ever before to lashing out at abortion and promising to outlaw it across the country.

(Trump was aided in consolidating the support of the religious right by the refusal of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to hold hearings or schedule a vote for Obama’s chosen successor to conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. The hardball tactics convinced angry GOP voters that great things might be achieved the next time Republicans were put in charge of appointing members of the judiciary.)  

Promises Made, Promises (Partly) Fulfilled

Put it all together, and we’re left with a view of a party pulled ever-further to the right on abortion by pro-life voters, who have pushed relentlessly for gains that the party establishment may have preferred (or been content) never to happen.

And that points to at least one respect in which the GOP has indisputably become more radical in recent years.¹ If a political extremist vows to overthrow a government, doesn’t follow through on the threat for nearly forty years, but then finally does, the final step from potential to actual violence represents an extremely significant change, even if it amounts to making good on an aspiration announced long before.

In much the same way, the GOP vowed in 1984 to ban abortion, but it accomplished only piecemeal moves in that direction down through the intervening decades. That included the appointment of several Supreme Court justices (Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy) who ended up bitterly disappointing pro-lifers. But as of June 24, 2022, this disappointment has been replaced by immense satisfaction that the GOP has finally taken a significant step toward fulfilling what it first promised to do during the Reagan administration—thanks to Trump and McConnell.

Will it be enough? Given that overturning Roe and returning the issue to the states falls far short of fulfilling the full extent of those decades-old promises, I doubt it very much. The pro-life movement will continue to make nonnegotiable demands of the Republican Party, insisting that its leadership work toward the far more radical goal of banning abortion from sea to shining sea.

Next Steps for the Dems

How should rest of us—and the Democratic Party in particular—respond?

I have no revolutionary ideas. Leaving aside the former president’s outright refusal to accept the legitimacy of his own electoral defeat, the GOP has become incredibly adept at prevailing in elections, despite (or is it because of?) its radicalism on issues like abortion. It does this, first, by taking full advantage of our electoral system’s many counter-majoritarian institutions (including the Senate and the Electoral College, both of which give disproportionate power to the low-population-density states where Republicans dominate politically). To this, the GOP adds the additional strategy of pushing negative partisanship to the absolute limit, thereby putting millions of voters in the position of making the following calculation in the voting booth: I don’t really support what the Republicans want to do, but they’ve convinced me the Democrats are clearly worse. So I guess I have no choice but to vote for the GOP.

As long as this two-step proves effective, the Republican Party will avoid paying a painful political price for its extremism on abortion and other issues.  

Because of the right’s success with this dynamic, the best Democratic response isn’t necessarily to devote time and attention to pointing to the extremism of the GOP. Let that speak for itself. Instead, Democrats should work to demonstrate they aren’t the extremists the right claims they are.

If this sounds like yet another variation on the “popularism” argument so many center-left commentators are fond of advancing, that’s because it is. Repeating its nostrums might be boring, but that doesn’t make the advice any less reasonable.

If Republicans are staking out maximalist positions, trying to ban abortion in states across the country and experimenting with ways to prosecute those who seek (or help others to get) abortions in more liberal states, Democrats should respond with something other than pro-abortion maximalism. Rather, they should support laws that codify abortion rights through, say, the first 12-15 weeks of pregnancy, when the vast majority of abortions take place, with precisely defined exceptions for the life of the mother beyond that, and otherwise allow restrictions on the procedure. (For a more detailed version of something like this combination of ideas, see this excellent post from Michael Wear.)

That’s the sweet spot in public opinion—which is where the Democrats should want to be. Actually, it’s where any democratically minded political party should want to be. That the Republican Party has become more indifferent to winning majorities than one would expect is no reason for the Democrats to follow their example. In fact, doing so could easily spell electoral doom for the Donkey Party.

As author David Frum recently put it in a wise tweet: “The core fact of American politics is that the Republican base is stronger than the Democratic base; but the Democratic potential coalition is bigger than the Republican potential coalition.” Put in slightly different terms: The GOP is able to thrive politically while placating its most extreme and devoted voters; the Democrats can’t do the same, but they have the potential to win far more votes if they resist the temptation of following the Republican example of rewarding ideological purity and extremism.

This is true across a range of issues. But on none more so than abortion.

1. This two-part post treats as an open question whether over the past few years the GOP has become significantly more extreme on issues, especially social issues, and above all on abortion. When it comes to a willingness to defy the rule of law and disregard the outcome of democratic elections, there is far less uncertainty: Republicans have unquestionably grown more radical since the mid-2010s, thanks to Donald Trump’s distinctively demonic influence.