Presidential Election 2024: Consistent Life Perspectives
We offer three different takes on last Tuesday’s elections. As usual, we don’t necessarily endorse everything said in our blog, since we encourage individual writers to express a variety of views. This is especially so when analyzing elections.
Carol Crossed
Peter Sonski is who I early-voted for at the Susan B Anthony House. Sonski is with the American Solidarity Party. Some say I “threw my vote away” and I guess I did.
Susan B. Anthony voted too, illegally in 1872, before the 19th Amendment passed. Because of the Republicans’ opposition to slavery, she voted for “the party of Lincoln.” While to my knowledge the term was not in parlance, she could have been called a “single-issue voter.” She was accused of being too singular in her support for “enslaved persons,” and to that she responded that she was for “human rights” – making the case that slaves were humans, like women were. Some retorted that slave owners were humans too and therefore had rights. Therein was the 19th-century struggle to define rights which continues today.
Carol Crossed
Today again we are asked to evaluate people’s rights. Are all rights equal, and what makes them unequal? The difference is some are civil rights and some are human rights. Susan made it clear that one’s humanity or one’s sex or one’s race fit into the category of a human right. They were not chosen and could not be violated by someone’s choice, whether that choice was to own a slave, to own a woman or to own another human being to misuse for your own purposes. Hence as civilization progressed, slavery, rape, and abortion were considered crimes against humanity, and laws prohibiting them were established or strengthened all within the same 8-10 year period.
Paradoxically, the crime of abortion is morphing into a “right” to the point that the State is called upon to give it legal recognition and make it available through the free services of health-care personnel.
Human rights are therefore not explicitly denied, but rather expanded to cover violent actions against human beings: instead of protecting human persons against violence, here human rights have evolved to include protecting actions against a person’s dignity or against a person’s life.
Its not surprising that the Democratic Party has dropped from its platform opposition to the death penalty. Using violence as a right to solve a problem normalizes despair and elevates irresponsibility to a right.
I couldn’t vote for Trump because I believe he’s a narcissist, an illness that makes a person’s actions unpredictable and wholly dependent upon one’s own self-absorption. I see Trump as dangerous in the short term and Harris as dangerous in the long term. As I see it, there is no “better of two evils” in this election.
Lisa Stiller
As I watched the returns coming in, and as I kept staring at the New York Times website as their election meter stayed in the red zone for much of the evening, a feeling of dread set in. My fears were being realized. A return to the Trump era of enabling hate, emulating fascist and authoritarian leaders, and cutting programs and funding that help our most marginalized people was, for me, unthinkable.
Yes, neither candidate was a consistent life candidate. Both had a lot of flaws. But saving what’s left of our democracy and preserving some sort of decency in our national conversation was also important enough to be a large factor in deciding which of the lesser of two evils should become president.
And Kamala Harris blew it. Instead of her being the candidate that would save us from a descent into a repressive government that will again enable hate and violence, turn its back on the poor, and enact a horrendous immigration policy, she basically ran a campaign centered on abortion. A campaign focused on the right to take life, rather than a campaign focused on those things that give life and help people thrive.
She started her campaign with an abortion tour. “Protect Our Freedoms” was simply a euphemism for abortion echoed by Harris and her supporters throughout her campaign. Democrats saw their attack on the Dobbs decision succeeded in 2022, so they thought they would do it again.
Meanwhile, they neglected to listen to what people were saying: concerns about economy and democracy topped the list. But Harris and her surrogates kept saying how great the economy had become under Biden’s American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan Infrastructure Act. While she loudly sounded the alarm over another Trump presidency, Heather Cox Richardson led the rose-colored glasses parade. But too many people were being seriously negatively impacted by inflation, including soaring rents, health insurance costs, food prices, and utility costs. Harris turned her back on that until too late.
Harris was too busy “preserving our freedoms.” Abortion was front and center of her campaign. She didn’t link abortion to the other issues it’s so closely tied to: lack of resources, fear of not being able to afford a child, lack of emotional and financial support. Abortion for Harris and the Democrats is a freestanding issue: a right, a freedom, an entitlement. The Democrats have held abortion as the cornerstone of their campaign efforts for years, without a thought to the fact it isn’t a choice most women make lightly, without a thought addressing the economic factors that lead to having an abortion.
Lisa Stiller
Most polls had the economy and inflation as the number one concern of Americans. Biden didn’t put our economy on the track they celebrated. Ordinary Americans are struggling with soaring costs — .housing, food, utilities, basic necessities. The Democrats failed to address it head-on. Instead they embraced abortion.
What for me is so sad is that once upon a time, the Democrats did hold up economic well-being and addressing poverty as priority.
Harris actually had some good ideas when she did talk about the economy, too late in her campaign. And a determined purpose to bring about a ceasefire in the Middle East, and stand behind Ukraine and seek peace. And fairly and humanely deal with immigration.
But these weren’t her focus. She didn’t address them much until too late.
A lot of people had moved on from casting their votes as a response to the Dobbs decision. They wanted a better life.
Harris failed us. And we are doomed to 4 years that aren’t very pro-life in so many ways.
Just some ramblings late at night when I was way too upset to sleep.
Rachel MacNair
There are many ideas about why Harris lost this election. I’ll cover what I see through my consistent-life lens.
War
Under Biden-Harris, we now have serious carnage in Ukraine and Gaza. The carnage of war is also in other hotspots now and was during Trump’s first term, but those two major wars were on voters’ minds.
Trump’s rhetoric was more anti-war than Harris’s. This doesn’t mean it was suitable for us peace activists. It was more from the view of military professionals and their families who believe in “peace through strength.” They regard being prepared for war as a way of preventing it through deterrence. That’s not my take on it, but it’s still an antipathy to wars happening.
Early on, Trump’s supporters were disgusted with the war in Iraq. Many of them had fought in it, and felt (rightly) that their political leaders had let them down. It was a failure by elites.
Discussing this, Democrat Pete Buttigieg said this in The New York Times:
Certainly, I think the complicity of the Democratic Party in the run-up to the Iraq war continues to be something that really helped set America onto the political trajectory that we’re on right now . . . The Democrats everywhere who were skeptical of the idea of the Iraq War were still kind of pretending to be OK with it, because they thought they had to be.
The war in Gaza was also explicitly one that distressed many voters who refused to vote for either candidate.
When it comes to actual wars happening now, Harris’s rhetoric was more belligerent. That didn’t get noticed much by the press because these were conventional pro-war thoughts.
This is an interesting take in The Washington Post: The right way for Trump to play peacemaker.
Rachel MacNair
Abortion
At the very least, it’s clear that Harris emphasized abortion more than polls show people indicated an interest in. She could have been talking about topics they were more interested in.
But I think there’s more to it. Her extremism was great enough to attack pregnancy help centers. Her extremism asserted that conscientious objection to participating in abortions shouldn’t be allowed.
There are millions of people who voted for pro-abortion measures who also voted for Trump. That means their commitment to abortion wasn’t total. It’s easy to vote for something when you’re voting anyway, and many of them were taken in by the rhetoric that women suffering miscarriages weren’t getting medical care.
In other words, they were voting against what was presented to them as an extreme that’s more extreme than what’s actually happening. That didn’t mean they supported the other extreme – even though that’s what they voted for. I live in Missouri, so I kept seeing the pitch for our pro-abortion measure: “Missouri’s abortion ban goes too far.” They never delineated how far Amendment 3 went in the other direction.
I think there’s a discomfort with Harris’s rhetoric that so totally ignores and discounts killed babies. Many won’t articulate that to pollsters, and I don’t think they’re articulating that to themselves, either. Therefore, I can’t document this idea, and could rightly be accused of wishful thinking. But I’ll maintain it all the same: I think, poetically speaking, that the ghosts of all those children are haunting the public discourse now, behind the scenes.
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For more of our recent posts on election politics, see:
Summary of Results: Peace & Life Referendums 2024 (for far more detail, see our project website: Peace and Life Referendums)
Oh My, How the Election Conundrum Has Changed (2024) / Rachel MacNair
Abortion on the Ballot / Lisa Stiller
Slavery: Removing the Exception
What History Shows: The Consistent Life Ethic Works for Pro-life Referendums
How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting
I agree with almost everything that Carol, Lisa and Rachel have said here, except that I see Harris as mostly dangerous in the short term (and dangerous within relatively normal parameters) and Trump as dangerous in both the short and long term. I dread how long and how broad the reverberations will be of a narcissist being allowed so much power, and I don’t believe he will ever give up that power willingly.
That said, I did feel very lucky to be living in one of the two states using ranked choice voting, which allowed me both a conscience-preferred vote and an alternative, I’d-settle-for vote – or a few of them, as I ranked every presidential candidate on my ballot except for the narcissist. My options were still only as good as the available set of candidates, and it didn’t make much difference. But it could if more states adopted ranked choice voting. The more it’s used, the more it undercuts the “lesser evil” campaign rhetoric that both major parties rely on so heavily while they champion their preferred forms of violence and dehumanization.
In response to Carol’s points on human rights, I’d like to address the first part of the word which is “human.” If a right is to be human, then it protects the species it belongs to. An unborn baby is human at conception, and thus should be protected under the term “human right.” Same with the man on death row.
It is unfortunate that rights are no longer protective of the human, but protective of an agenda. Rights are now subjective to whatever technology can do to soften the blow of eliminating unwanted persons.