Part 2:
It is incoherent to blame the Democratic Party, given that it is Democratic governors, like
Jay Pritzker of Illinois,
Gavin Newsom of California and
Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who have vowed to protect women's reproductive rights in their states, and it is Republican
governors like Brian Kemp in Georgia and
Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma and the
Supreme Courtappointments of Republican presidents who are poised to eliminate women's autonomy.
Observable reality is irrelevant to this faction of the left. The only thing that matters is that President Barack Obama and the Democrats did not codify Roe v. Wade as federal law when they controlled Congress from 2009 to 2011. But this argument ignores that Obama and Democrat lawmakers spent those two years pushing through a massive stimulus package in the middle of financial collapse and then passing the most consequential expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s, the Affordable Care Act, which enabled more than 20 million Americans to receive health care for the first time.
Obama also appointed Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, both of whom are committed to protecting a woman's right to choose. He also nominated Merrick Garland, now the Attorney General, to the Supreme Court and was met with a dishonest blockade from GOP senators. Based on Garland's opposition to an anti-abortion law in Texas, it is likely he would have voted in favor of Roe.
Last month, the US Senate
attempted to codify Roe. All but one Democrat -- West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin -- voted in favor. Every Republican voted against.
Of course, the women's rights crisis wouldn't exist if Hillary Clinton won the presidential election of 2016 and appointed three Supreme Court justices instead of Trump.
But many prominent left wing leaders gleefully called for people not to vote for Clinton.
The fan fiction left is not without precedent. George Orwell, a
socialist, came to believe that the left of his era had no real desire in holding power and for them political thought was nothing more than a "
masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters."
Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the Communist Party of Germany from 1925 to 1933, believed that the center left presented a greater danger than Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Needless to say, that analysis didn't turn out so well.
The Democrats certainly have flaws. They are rhetorically passive, disorganized and seem to base their strategy on how not to lose rather than how to win, which usually guarantees failure. The party is also worthy of harsh criticism for taking a bashful approach to punishing Trump and his allies for insurrection. Despite sizable weaknesses, they do have the advantage of not being racists, sexists, homophobes or hostile to the foundation of democracy. Residents of the real world should vote accordingly.