Is the Overturning of Roe a Pyrrhic Victory?
The left's refusal to play by the rules may eventually lead to civil war
The Supreme court’s overturning of the infamous Roe vs. Wade decision has been celebrated by pro-life activists across the nation, but this celebration seems to be based on faulty premises. The most critical of these premises is the belief, rarely voiced but clearly implied, that this is decision overturning Roe is etched in stone and will remain in force for a very long time. There is no reason to believe, however, that this is true. Given the left’s absolute contempt for following constitutional rules whenever they get in their way, how long will it be before pro-choice activists manage to get Roe reinstated? Since these people have no scruples and since their opponents have no means of controlling them, isn’t it only a matter of time before they once more establish Roe as the law of the entire land?
Leftist politicians have spewed all kinds of nonsense about how January 6 constituted a grave assault on democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth. On January 6 a very small percentage of those Trump loyalists who had assembled in Washington to demand a more serious accounting of election fraud spilled over into the Capitol and engaged in a crude and stupid riot. Anyone who thinks this riot constituted an “insurrection” against the U.S. government either has no idea what a real insurrection would like look and/or they are lying. The real threat to democracy comes almost entirely from the left. But in order to understand this, one needs to know what democracy really is rather than what we pretend it is.
The belief that democracy is a form of government in which the people, through their elected representatives, rule the country is pure myth. In reality, democracy is no such thing. Civilized societies are always governed by elites—that is to say, by organized minorities. In a democracy these elites are forced to play a game called an election where they must compete for votes from the public at large. Supposedly this game forces elites to be somewhat accountable to the masses, but in practice it rarely works out that way. Democracy, as an instrument of majority rule, is largely a failure. Democracy’s raison d'être is not to facilitate the will of the majority. No, that is an impossibility, because no such will of the people exists. Human beings are intrinsically different, and so they can’t possibly all have the same will. As a consequence of the multiplicity of wills throughout society, it becomes very difficult for any nation to settle on a course of collective action. Throughout most of history, this issue was settled by force. Whichever faction had the upper hand controlled the state and ran the country. The problem is that this arrangement wasn’t always all that stable, and when it broke down, the nation inevitably plunged into civil war. To get around this problem, various solutions were trotted forward, such as hereditary monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. In more civilized societies, democracy was seen as the best of these systems because it was considered the least violent. You simply had your elites vying for control of the state by engaging in a competition for votes. This enabled an elite to assume power without anyone getting killed.
Now because democracy is game we play to avoid settling our differences through violence, it must be played like a game: that is to say, all the participants have to follow the rules. Games tend to break down if one or both contestants cheat. In the United States, the most important rule book for how the game of democracy is played is the Constitution. And so if the various factions vying for power on the national stage are going to participate in the democratic game, they all have to follow the Constitution with equal zeal. If one side cheats (i.e., they refuse to follow the constitution), then they are essentially engaged in a full on assault on democracy that is far more dangerous than anything that happened on January 6.
What the left has been doing for decades, if not for centuries, is actually far worse than merely cheating. What they have done is to engage in full-on assault against the rule book of democracy—that is, the Constitution. Imagine if you were playing a game of monopoly against an antagonist who kept insisting that, because the rules of monopoly were old and written by “dead white males,” they should be regarded as a “living” document that could be recast as one sees fit. If your antagonist then proceeded to interpret the rules monopoly in just such a way as to favor his game at the expense of yours, what would be the likely outcome? You would most likely throw up your hands and give up playing with him.
What your antagonist did to the rule book of monopoly, so has the left done to the Constitution. Unlike a game of monopoly, the game of democracy is not one that either side can simply abandon. The right can simply throw up their hands and declare to the left: “We’re not playing with you any more, because you keep cheating.” On society wide level, that wouldn’t work. Which of course places the right in a terrible position—because if the left insists on cheating, what is the right supposed to? Short of violence, their options are very limited.
The original Roe vs Wade decision was an example of the left playing fast and loose with the Constitution. In the game of democracy, they were cheating. The right at first could do nothing but and complain about legislating from the bench. However, despite the left’s continued refusal to honor the Constitution, the right nonetheless doggedly went to work to get Roe overturned. After five decades of thankless toil, they have at last succeeded. But for how long? The left will be more motivated to cheat than ever, and they have already begun to talk about packing the court.
In a democracy, when one side refuses to play by the rules, it leads to an increasingly unstable situation. Since the whole point of democracy is to settle collective disputes in a way that avoids violence, when any side cheats they are effectively creating the conditions for civil war. The main reason why no such internecine conflict has arisen as a consequence of leftist chicanery to date is because our society has been so very wealthy that the right has decided they have too much to lose and have therefore refrained from igniting a hazardous civil war. But if the left continues not merely to cheat, but to (through their incompetence and nihilism) impoverish society, all that could change very quickly. If the right has nothing to lose what is to stop them from resorting to violence?
It is the left, therefore, that constitutes the main threat to democracy, and if in their zeal to reestablish Roe they pack the court and criminalize their opponents, we may live to see the end of democracy in America.
A possible solution: State nullification of perverse decisions handed down from a packed Supreme Court. (No less than Jefferson noted that the Supreme Court, being a federal branch, would tend to decide cases in favor of expansions of federal power.) A number of States have strong conservative majorities, and State nullification would be a way of peacefully signaling significant opposition. Perhaps the Left then backs away from the abyss or chooses to dive into it. Either way, the Right can respond appropriately with a clear conscience.
Well done. What the Leftists (not liberal Democrats but leftists) are doing makes one feel very helpless. This ends in civil war I’m afraid because the leftists always overreach. It will start slowly, like the riots in the summer of 2020, but then engulf the nation from the cities and population centers outward.