Notes on Chapter 11

In preparation for writing this chapter I did a bit of look up on the composition of the Supreme Court in 1973, when Roe was decided.  The results can be found in this Excel file or in the screen shot below. Comparing then to now, there were 6 Justices nominated by Republican Presidents in each case.  But in 1973, 5 of those Justices supported the Roe decision (and 1 of the 3 Justices nominated by a Democratic President did not).  This illustrates pretty starkly that over those almost 50 years, the Republican party has moved a great deal to the right. It made me wonder whether Republican voters all moved along with that or if instead it was the uber rich, evangelical Christians, and the MAGA types who moved way to the right, while others remained much more moderate. 

 

I did not include this reference explicitly in Chapter 11, but underlying the ideas there is that many Republican voters are still located near the middle on the left-right spectrum.  If that is actually true, then the coalition of voters which The Minute Women aim to form is not that unreasonable an idea.  In contrast, if the middle truly has been hollowed out, then the ideas in Chapter 11 are utterly implausible.   

The heart of Chapter 11 is the draft of Elena's speech, which begins at the bottom of page 84 (page numbers are in the PDF version) and runs through the rest of the chapter.  No doubt, it is a lecture.  In the Preface I said I wouldn't do that.  My apologies, but I couldn't help myself.  I felt that the reader needed to see the full picture of what was being proposed, to understand the argument.  And the reader also needed to see all the moving parts that would have to fit together to get this to work.  Is this really possible to do?  That is the underlying question. It is for the reader to determine an answer.  I would like to see something like this tried, just to see how it plays out.

I want to note one other thing.  I'm quite fed up with polling, which now seems to invade many transactions outside of politics - going to see the doctor, making a purchase at Amazon, and research about online learning (my field before I retired) just to give a few examples.  I would like to see our politics much more educational, so voters can work through where they stand on issues and why, and then let what polling is supposed to produce instead happen en passant from the educational activity. The idea that voters might opt in for such an education is totally outside current politics.  Maybe somebody should give it a try.