Note: In 2024, I wrote a pair of long, in-depth essays that quickly became among the most popular pieces published here at Dailies & Sundays. The pieces were about voting as a pro-life Catholic and an engaged U.S. citizen who supports the institutions of American democracy.
With the midterms approaching, I wish to re-present the argument of the first piece to the larger readership I have today. (The argument from the second piece I presented last month with in “Every election now matters: MAGA and the future of democracy and rule of law.” The argument from the first piece is more evergreen, and can be represented in its original form.)
Highlighting older pieces is what I created the “Blast From the Past” feature for in my monthly digests. In this case, though, I want to deliver this piece to subscriber inboxes. Substack doesn’t offer a clean way to re-email existing posts. I could copy the entire piece as a second post, but I want to keep the comments and the reader stats unified. So I created this short preview post linking to the full post from 2024. (Comments are disabled for this post, but are of course open at the original post. Likes and restacks also are most appreciated at the original post.)
One of my earliest political memories is from the morning after Election Day in 1980. At the Catholic school I attended, I asked a teacher, a member of the Christian Brothers, who he had voted for. “The guy who didn’t win,” he replied, meaning Jimmy Carter. My father, a Reformed minister who had voted for Democrats from Kennedy in 1960 to (I believe) McGovern in 1972, voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. He would never vote for another Democrat again. He died in 2021 a few months after voting for Donald Trump in 2020.
The divergence in 1980 between my father and that Christian Brother was a case in point of so-called ideological sorting unfolding during the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the sorting, it was ideologically feasible for socially conscious Christians, Democratic leaders, and other left-leaning parties who had joined in supporting civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War to extend their defense of the vulnerable to opposing abortion and euthanasia along with the death penalty. Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and Al Gore espoused pro-life views, and such stoutly leftwing figures as the antiwar and antinuclear activist priest Daniel Berrigan, SJ and the self-described “Jewish atheist” writer Nat Hentoff would continue to do so throughout their lives. (A pro-life “Catholic atheist” of great significance in my life: Roger Ebert.) Among those more supportive of relaxing abortion restrictions, on the other hand, were the Southern Baptist Convention and a number of conservative Republicans.
In the end opposition to abortion came to be regarded as a rightwing stance aligned with the Republican Party, while abortion rights were enshrined as a key principle of the Democratic Party. Pro-choice Republicans and pro-life Democrats still exist, but the latter, at least, have become an increasingly endangered species with no voice in their party.
I didn’t, of course, know any of this in the 1980s. All I knew, the first time I voted in 1988, was that as a Christian (not yet a Catholic) I was pro-life, and the Democrats weren’t. I voted for George H. W. Bush—and I continued to vote for Republicans for most of my adult life.
Was I a one-issue voter? Yes and no.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.