Say not the struggle nought availeth
By Alan Fimister | 13 November 2024
As you may have heard, Donald J Trump has recently been re-elected President of the United States of America, taking 312 votes in the electoral college which formally appoints the US President. He also won the popular vote by several million, which is of no constitutional significance, but which undoubtedly strengthens him politically.
One cannot but suspect that Mr Biden foresaw that he would come under pressure, on account of his age, to relinquish the presidency and so selected a running mate who not only ticked the intersectional boxes, so dear to younger Democrats, but also had as little else to recommend her as possible. Either way, so it proved.
In addition to regaining the White House, the Republican Party has also taken possession of both cameras of the American legislature: the Senate and the House of Representatives. In virtue of the judicial appointments of Trump’s first term, there is already a socially conservative majority in the US Supreme Court, a majority which, on 24 June 2022, overthrew the iniquitous Roe v Wade judgment which had legalised abortion in 1973.
The Republican Party is therefore in possession of the Presidency, both houses of the Legislature, and the Judiciary. During the campaign, Mr Trump’s opponent, Ms Kamala Harris, strongly emphasised the grave danger posed by the Republican candidate to “women’s rights over their own bodies” — i.e. the “freedom” of women in America lawfully to murder their own unborn children. The Republican Party has for decades been committed to the sanctity of human life and to the defence of true marriage between one man and one woman. A new dawn then rises over the American republic: a chance significantly to realign the world’s hegemonic power with the natural law … or perhaps not.
Donald Trump, it is fair to say, is not the embodiment of the cardinal virtues as a brief perusal of even the uncontested facts of his biography and of his two books The Art of the Deal and Think Big and Kick Ass will confirm. There is little to no evidence of “conservatism” on Trump’s part prior to his pursuit of the American Presidency.
As Edward Feser recently laid out, Trump has a clearly defined personal philosophy which might be generously described as “sub-Nietzschean”. The idea that he has put this weaponised narcissism behind him is belied by the fact that it perfectly predicts his actions as a national politician over the last decade.
Admirers and defenders of Mr Trump will point out that he appointed the supreme court justices who overthrew Roe v Wade in 2022 and that he was the first president ever to attend in person the March for Life in Washington DC. The problem is that, since that time, Trump has dramatically shifted his position on abortion, insisting that the important point is simply that it should be a matter for the individual states, not that it be abolished as such, and that, in addition to various exceptions for rape and incest, total bans and even relatively restrictive non-total bans in various states, in his opinion, go too far. Trump even went as far as to imply he would vote in favour of a ballot proposition (a referendum) in Florida that would have destroyed such (comparatively strong) protections as exist in his state of residence. At the Republican national Convention where Trump was nominated for the Presidency earlier this year, the sections of the Republican Party Platform defending life and marriage were eviscerated.
None of this ought to come as a great surprise. For decades the Republican Party has been able to play a double game. The vitriolic support for abortion exhibited by the Democrats and the resilience of the two-party system meant that the defenders of human life had nowhere else to go. The only hope for restoring the protection of the law to unborn children seemed to be the election of Republican presidents who would (it was assumed) appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court, who would in turn eventually overthrow the 1973 decision. The problem was that justices appointed by Republican presidents very often did no such thing or even turned out to be quite liberal. Anthony M Kennedy, David H Souter and John Roberts have, in varying degrees, at crucial moments, adopted liberal positions on the court despite being appointed by Ronald Reagan, George Bush Senior and George Bush Junior respectively. A cynical analysis of this strange situation would conclude that futile opposition to legal abortion was crucial to the Republican electoral coalition. So long as abortion remained under constitutional protection and the appointment of pro-abortion justices seemed merely inadvertent on the part of Republican presidents, the Republican Party could bank the votes of social conservatives and win the votes of fiscally conservative social liberals.
How then was Roe v Wade ever overthrown? In the 2020 presidential election, Trump was aware that the contest would be extremely close. Biden won the nomination despite his advanced age and failure to embody any of the privileged racial or gender categories of the “woke” left because it was thought that an elderly, nominally Catholic, white male would reassure traditional Democrat voters. Correspondingly, Trump desperately needed to energise his base and so a spectacularly obviously pro-life Supreme Court appointment in the form of Amy Coney Barrett was called for.
The overthrow of Roe v Wade by Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022 has radically changed the electoral calculus. Instead of needing to reassure social conservatives of their pro-life credentials (while failing to deliver on them) in order to secure their nomination, Republican politicians are now concerned to reassure fiscally conservative social liberals that they will not in fact do anything to restrict abortion after all. For the Democrats, the overthrow of Roe v Wade is extremely helpful. They are incentivised to express the most extreme outrage at this attack upon “women’s bodily autonomy” and try to drag as much of the national conversation in this direction in order to peel off small state social liberals from the Republicans. This, in turn is quite helpful for the Republicans because it accentuates the miserable position of pro-lifers. Their favourite Republican politicians may have suddenly turned into moderate pro-abortion candidates, but the alternative is even more extreme than before.
This catastrophic loss of ground reflects three factors: first of all, the peculiar electoral calculus created by Roe v Wade greatly exaggerated the electoral strength of the pro-life position in the first place; secondly, the United States of America is secularising fast and, for some conservative Christians (for whom Christianity was anyway a feature of their conservatism rather than the other way around), Trump has become a substitute for religion; thirdly American society like other western societies has been completely transformed by oral contraceptives and abortion over sixty years, and the lifestyles and entire mentality of a vast proportion of the population are completely incompatible with authentic sexual morality. It is not possible to reverse this last catastrophe by legislative fiat. It requires grace and conversion and that requires a restoration of faith and discipline within the Catholic Church. Oral contraceptives created a culture of ubiquitous recreational sexual activity and this culture needs the option of murdering the products of contraceptive failure if it is not to be goaded back by nature into marriage and virtue.
The abortion-based culture of western modernity is totally unsustainable. None of these countries have above-replacement-level birth rates and the birth rates are still declining. The result is the inversion of the population pyramid and a labour shortage made worse by the fact that the deindustrialised, illegitimately born underclass is disinclined to undertake many of the forms of employment in which the shortage appears. The inevitable result of this is massive economic migration from poorer to richer parts of the world. This migration is itself transforming the politics of western countries but the new political forces offering to deal with it are promising to treat the symptoms exclusively and never the cause. The USA is fortunate in that it possesses to its south a vast reservoir of comparatively impoverished peoples arising from broadly the same culture as the Anglo-Saxon founders of the Thirteen Colonies and of the American Republic, who can ultimately be assimilated to the culture of the USA. Europe, on the other hand, is bordered by Islam, its historic foe, which possesses a vigorous alternative culture ready, willing and able to replace moribund post-occidental hedonism altogether.
The Trump phenomenon is therefore a product of a terminal cultural and demographic decline. The USA, however, has resources capable of slowing this decline long enough for the forces of recovery to organise themselves. The fact that a larger proportion of its immigrants are fellow westerners and the fact that its institutions and self-image are designed to assimilate populations from any region of the world, means that it can absorb the shock much better than Europe. Amidst the diabolical anarchy of, neo-pogroms, sodomarriage, the self-slaughter of the elderly and the sick, and people mutilating themselves to conform to their delusions about being trapped in the wrong body, it may seem as if there is no hope for the tranquillity of order on this earth. Undoubtedly the hour is late. Nevertheless, St John Henry Newman said, “Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God.” If only the carapace of godless prelates holding down the faithful and stifling the motions of the Spirit could be for a moment fractured by grace and providence, and Catholics return to their proper duties, the Lord might once again gather His “children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” and start anew.
On the practical level, what are pro-life Republicans and (genuinely) pro-life Republican politicians to do in response to the new reality in which efforts to establish full protection for unborn children will be used by the Democrats to win control of state legislatures for themselves and advance precisely the opposite agenda? This is not a matter of right and wrong but of strategy. I would suggest that the most important task is to win over the hearts and minds of the American people to the abolition of abortion as something that must be done as it has been done by education, witness and charitable provision for those driven by isolation and despair to the abortuaries. The second most important task is to advance legislation which will reduce the number of unborn infant deaths and not be immediately reversed by a socially liberal reaction at the ballot box. In this regard, education is also vital. Ultrasounds should be required as well as information on help and alternatives, and if they are not provided, the “facilities” in question should be fined, prosecuted and closed. None of this, however, can be a substitute for the demands of justice that the sanctity and inviolability of innocent human life be defended in full, from conception to natural death and those seeking its destruction prosecuted with the full force of the law. Fortunately, the US political system provides a way in which this aim can be pursued separately: the ballot proposition or state referendum, by which a law can be enacted directly by the people of a given state. Doubtless, these measures will fail again and again, but they need to be promoted ceaselessly so that the prospect of exemplary justice grows yearly in the minds of the killers.
Eugenics, materialism and nihilistic hedonism were everywhere in the 1920s and 30s, and it seemed briefly, after 1945, as if they were, if not defeated, at least hopelessly weakened. It was not so. They were merely repackaging themselves in new “liberal” forms. As Christopher Dawson wrote in 1940:
“[W]e have the hard task of carrying on simultaneously a war on two fronts. We have to oppose, by arms, the aggression of the external enemy, and at the same time to resist the enemy within — the growth in our society of the evil power we are fighting against. And this second war is the more dangerous of the two, since it may be lost by victory as well as by defeat, and the very fact that we are driven to identify the evil with that manifestation of it that threatens our national existence, tends to blind us to the more insidious tendencies in the same direction that are to be found in our own social order.”
At Nuremberg, the criminals apprehended by the allies were not given the excuse that their actions were legal at the time and they were only obeying orders. They were held to the standard of natural law, prosecuted and punished. If western society is to survive, the technicians of the culture of death must one day meet the same fate.
In the meantime, we can only hope that Harris’s hyperbole about the social agenda of the Trump administration turns out, most unexpectedly, to be truer than she ever believed it to be. Nor is it solely by punitive measures and legal obstruction that the natural law is vindicated. The retribution for vice is the misery which is its natural fruit, but such happiness as is obtainable in this life is nothing more nor less than the activity itself of the soul in accordance with virtue. Every measure which strengthens the ability of individuals to pursue the natural good strengthens the pro-life cause and diminishes the glamour of sin and the perceived importance of so-called “reproductive rights”. According to exit polls, single women went for Harris by 59% to 38% but married women voted Republican by 51% to 48%. Many who had fought their whole lives for or against the terrible judgment of 1973 were genuinely astounded when it was overthrown. This brief victory may not after all have been the beginning of the end but only the end of the beginning, and yet it was itself the result of tens of thousands of small acts of charity and witness over half a century which created the electoral imperative to appoint enough judges to bring that initial struggle to completion.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.