Josh Marshall is angry about Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in the latest issue of the New Yorker on the state of the Democratic Party and so am I, but for very different reasons. Marshall thinks the article is cliche-ridden and out of touch with what’s really going on in the party. Maybe so, but the message it drove home for me is that much of the party’s base is still way out of step with mainstream cultural values.
Two passages stand out. First, Goldberg describes a New Mexico rally in honor of Howard Dean in which the secretary of state proudly refuses a veteran’s request to display an intact flag above her house:
Dean was late arriving from the airport, so a succession of local Democratic politicians took to the stage to deliver excoriations of the Republicans… Many nodded in sympathy when the New Mexico secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, told a story about the flag that flies over her house. A neighbor — a veteran, she noted — pointed out one day that her flag was “torn and tattered” and asked her if she wanted him to mend it or replace it. She said no, and explained, “I keep it here because it’s going to stay flying tattered and torn because that’s how this war is going. It’s going nowhere. And it will come down when this war is over.”
Later, Goldberg describes the refusal by activists at a Center for American progress meeting to concede that too many abortions take place in this country:
Abortion-rights groups are uneasy when Democratic centrists urge them to shift the discussion from “a woman’s right to choose” to the need to reduce the number of abortions. Recently, at a meeting held at the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning think tank founded by the former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, an abortion-rights activist named Rachel Laser, a former senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, was impatient with the refusal of others to view abortion as a moral issue as well as a personal one. “I said at the session that there are 1.3 million abortions in this country and that’s too many, and it’s too many for the majority of Americans,” Laser, who runs Third Way’s Culture Project, recalled. “Polls show that a majority of Americans think that abortion is morally wrong some or all of the time, and we have to address that.”
After Laser spoke, the moderator asked the audience “by a show of hands, how many people here think that 1.3 million abortions is too many abortions?” As Laser remembers a moment, “It was only me and maybe one other who raised our hands. I definitely touched a nerve. The fact is the majority of Americans are pro-choice, but the majority of Americans also see something sad in what this procedure does.”
Both of these anecdotes enrage me, and I’m a moderate Democrat. I can’t imagine how they play with centrists or conservatives.
Update 5/31 8:27 PM EST: Via Marshall, here’s a link to the Goldberg piece. Also, I edited the title of the post in response to a comment by Oliver.
Just to briefly elaborate on my reasoning, I’m not arguing in favor of my positions because they reflect mainstream values. I’m arguing in favor of them because I believe it’s disrespectful to fly a tattered American flag above your house, and because I believe there are far too many abortions in this country. The first point is simply a matter of personal preference, but the second is subject to empirical analysis. And the statistics we have suggest that abortion rates in the US are high relative to other industrialized countries. We can do better.