I believe life begins at conception. If I lived in Florida, I would support the state’s heartbeat bill and vote against the referendum seeking to liberalize Florida’s abortion laws. I supported the Dobbs decision and I support well-drafted abortion restrictions at the state and federal levels. I was a pro-life lawyer who worked for pro-life legal organizations. While I want prospective parents to be able to use in vitro fertilization to build their families, I do not believe that unused embryos should simply be discarded — thrown away as no longer useful.
But I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism.
Here’s what I mean.
Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character in leadership and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as “traitors.”
What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?
Let’s take an assertion that should be uncontroversial, especially to a party that often envisions itself as a home for people of faith: Lying is wrong. I’m not naive; I know that politicians have had poor reputations for honesty since ancient Athens. But I have never seen a human being lie with the intensity and sheer volume of Donald Trump.
Even worse, Trump’s lies are contagious. The legal results speak for themselves. A cascade of successful defamation lawsuits demonstrate the severity and pervasiveness of Republican dishonesty. Fox paid an enormous settlement related to its hosts’ relentless falsehoods during Trump’s effort to steal the election. Rudy Giuliani owes two Georgia election workers $148 million for his gross lies about their conduct while counting votes. Salem Media Group apologized to a Georgia voter who was falsely accused of voter fraud and halted distribution of Dinesh D’Souza’s fantastical “documentary” of election fraud, “2,000 Mules.”
And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Several additional defamation cases are pending against MAGA networks and MAGA personalities.
Let’s take another assertion that should be relatively uncontroversial: Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. One of the saddest stories of our time is the way in which even local election officials and local school board members fear for their safety. The level of threat against public officials has escalated in the MAGA era, MAGA Republicans often wield threats as a weapon against Republican dissenters, and every American should remember Jan. 6, when a mob of insurrectionists ransacked the Capitol.
I know that threats and violence aren’t exclusive to the right. We all watched in horror as a man tried to assassinate Trump; another man threatened Brett Kavanaugh’s life; and no one should forget the horrific congressional shooting, when an angry liberal man attempted a mass murder of Republican members of Congress on a baseball field.
But only one party has nominated a man who was indicted for his role in the criminal scheme to steal an American election, a scheme that culminated in a violent political riot. Only one party nominated a man who began the first rally of his 2024 campaign with a song by violent insurrectionists. He played “Justice for All,” a bastardized version of the national anthem by a group called the J6 Prison Choir. The song features the “Star-Spangled Banner” interspersed with excerpts of Trump reading the Pledge of Allegiance.
It’s not just Trump’s lies that are contagious, but his cruelty as well, and that cruelty is embedding itself deeply within one of Trump’s most loyal constituencies, conservative evangelicals. It is difficult to overstate the viciousness and intolerance of MAGA Christians against their political foes. There are many churches and Christian leaders who are now more culturally Trumpian than culturally Christian. Trump is changing the church.
And to what end?
It is fascinating to me that there are voices online who still claim that a person can’t be Christian and vote for Democrats, when the Trump campaign watered down the Republican platform on abortion to such an extent that it’s functionally pro-choice. Earlier generations of the pro-life movement would not have tolerated such a retreat. They would have made it clear that there were some principles Republicans simply can’t abandon without becoming a fundamentally different party.
It becomes even stranger to claim that Christians can’t vote for Democrats when the prime-time lineup at the Republican convention featured an OnlyFans star, a man who publicly slapped his wife, a man who pleaded no contest to an assault charge, and another man who had sex with his friend’s wife while the friend watched — and that’s not even including any reference to Trump himself.
Even if you want to focus on abortion as the single issue that decides your vote, the picture for abortion opponents is grim. Trump should get credit for nominating justices who helped overturn Roe (though the real credit for the decision goes to the justices themselves, including George W. Bush appointee Samuel Alito, who actually wrote the majority opinion).
But when we’re dealing with a complex social phenomenon, political and legal issues are rarely simple. For the first time in decades, abortion rates and ratios increased under Trump. In addition, the best available evidence indicates that abortion rates are up since the Dobbs decision.
Barack Obama was an unabashedly pro-choice politician, yet there were 338,270 fewer abortions in 2016 than there were in 2008, George W. Bush’s last year in office. Though Trump nominated anti-abortion justices and enacted a number of anti-abortion policies, there were 56,080 more abortions the last year of his term than there were in the last year of Obama’s presidency.
Even worse, after Dobbs, the pro-life position is in a state of political collapse. It hasn’t won a single red-state referendum, and it might even lose again in Florida, a state that’s increasingly red yet also looks to have a possible pro-choice supermajority. According to a recent poll, 69% of Floridians support the pro-choice abortion referendum, a margin well above the 60% threshold required for passage.
If the ultimate goal of the pro-life movement is to reduce the number of abortions, not just to change legal precedent, then these numbers and these electoral outcomes are deeply alarming. If present trends continue, then abortion opponents will have won an important legal battle, but they’ll ultimately lose the more important cultural and political cause.
Reasonable people disagree with me. I have friends and family members who will vote for Trump only because he is more moderate than Harris on abortion. I hate the idea that we should condition friendship or respect based on the way in which a person votes. Time and again we make false assumptions about a person’s character based on his or her political positions. There are truly bad actors in American politics, but we cannot write off millions of our fellow citizens who vote their consciences based on their own knowledge and political understanding.
At the same time, we should make the argument — firmly but respectfully — that this is no ordinary race and that the old political categories no longer apply.
For example, how many Republicans would have predicted that voting for a Democrat would be the best way to confront violent Russian aggression and that the Republican would probably yield to a Russian advance? In many ways, the most concretely conservative action I can take in this election is to vote for the candidate who will stand against Vladimir Putin. By voting for pro-life politicians down ballot, I can help prevent federal liberalization of abortion law. But if a president decides to abandon Ukraine and cripple NATO, there is little anyone can do.
While there are voters who are experiencing a degree of Trump nostalgia, remembering American life pre-COVID as a time of full employment and low inflation, there is a different and darker story to tell about Trump’s first term. Our social fabric frayed. It’s not just that abortions increased: The murder rate skyrocketed; drug overdose deaths hit new highs; marriage rates fell; and birthrates continued their long decline. Americans ended his term more divided than when it began.
I’m often asked by Trump voters if I’m “still conservative,” and I respond that I can’t vote for Trump precisely because I am conservative. I loathe sex abuse, pornography and adultery. Trump has brought those vices into the mainstream of the Republican Party. I want to cultivate a culture that values human life from conception through natural death. Yet America became more brutal and violent during Trump’s term. I want to defend liberal democracy from authoritarian aggression, yet Trump would abandon our allies and risk our most precious alliances.
The only real hope for restoring a conservatism that values integrity, demonstrates real compassion and defends our foundational constitutional principles isn’t to try to make the best of Trump, a man who values only himself. If he wins again, it will validate his cruelty and his ideological transformation of the Republican Party. If Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin, and conservative Americans will have a chance to build something decent from the ruins of a party that was once a force for genuine good in American life.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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