Monday, June 27, 2022

Abortion Centrism

This is remarkably silly because it's *2022*, and expert on everything Noah Smith just learned this basically false thing today, but it was silly every time "centrists" repeated versions of it and similar for the past few decades.

Decades of columns in our finest periodicals trying to claim that there is a Wise Center, imbued with the wisdom of the Solomonic Compromise, written by people thinking that it was actually the compromise that was wise.

This set of guys is just remarkable in their inability to listen to anyone who actually knows what they're talking about, to listen to the reality of women's health care here or everywhere, to fail to understand that "abortion is health care" is not just a slogan, to reject out of hand the wisdom of anyone "on the Left" because of the bedrock belief in American political discourse that The Left is always wrong.

Decades of centrists offering up an abortion Grand Bargain, often based around "neeener neener is France not good enough for you???," erroneously portraying "the Left" as the intransigent obstacle to such a deal (the reality of France would be a deal happily taken, the centrist imagining of it, less so), asserting hilariously that if only The Left would agree, then the Right would cease their efforts to bring us to where we are now.

The centrist demand of The Left was not simply that they would accept these nonexistent deals, but that they would acknowledge that they were, in fact, Good, that abortion was, in fact, very very Icky.*

The true Solomonic Wisdom was that anyone who would accept - or seriously propose - such a compromise is a monster unconcerned with the lives of other people.