The Center Cannot Hold

In defense of polarization

This summer, I spent a week in Europe mingling with an eclectic smattering of liberals and conservatives. At dinner one night, I happened to be the only American conservative writer present. After a few courses/glasses of wine, a journalist threw out a “question for the table”: Why is it that more disaffected liberals don’t go full conservative? We regularly hear “how the left left me” stories, but not so many “how I joined the right” stories, in so many words. What’s stopping people?

No one exactly answered the question, and the stream of conversation flowed rapidly on until I found a moment to circle back to it (after a couple more glasses—these were the sort of dinners where they keep refilling, so one loses count). I said that while of course the definitions of words like “liberal” and “conservative” can get fuzzy, particularly when trying to have transatlantic political discussions (the journalist was British), the question he’s asking can be most straightforwardly answered in the American context by pointing to social issues. Specifically, to abortion. It’s not that I’ve never seen people redefine the word “conservative” to exclude the issue. But by and large, I think the idea still remains that to really go full conservative, to “join the right” in the most complete sense, is to become pro-life.

This was not always so. For a full, fascinating treatment of the history here, I recommend Connie Marshner’s two-part account in Human Life Review (Part I, Part II) where she looks back at the forgotten legacy of Paul Weyrich. Before Weyrich coined the term “moral majority,” founded PACs and think tanks like The Heritage Foundation, and became the father of the American pro-life movement, it was not at all clear which way either party would jump. In fact, given the Democrats’ Catholic base and the Rockefeller Republicans’ coolly calculating focus on fiscal issues, Weyrich initially thought he had more hope of success with the former. In the end, younger up and coming Republicans proved more receptive to his lobbying than either their Democrat counterparts or their Republican predecessors, and the rest was political history. But it’s easy to forget that for a span of time in the 70s, for that little window between Roe vs. Wade and the rise of the Religious Right, the issue was truly up for political grabs.

Which brings us to the present day, and the Trump-led trajectory of the Republican party. In light of this history, one could say everything old is new again.

To begin with, there is the high-handed way Trump has gutted the platform of any distinctly social conservative language (not just on abortion but on things like the definition of marriage). Having thus thrown socons under the bus, he has proceeded to back up over them, repeatedly. Democrats will still insist he could be playing 4D pro-life chess this whole time, because that’s how they will get themselves elected. The rest of us are free to state the obvious. He’s willfully misread and praised a SCOTUS ruling as if it enshrined a right to chemical abortion, when the ruling did no such thing. He’s boasted that his administration will be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” He’s denigrated so-called “heartbeat bills” which set a cutoff at 6 weeks as “stupid” and “a terrible mistake.” He was still so focused on taking jabs at Ron DeSantis that he recently appeared ignorant of what Florida’s new Amendment 4 even contained (protecting abortion through the duration of the pregnancy), merely repeating vaguely that “6 weeks is too early.” Pro-lifers are now trying hard to find a silver lining in his newly informed announcement that he will vote no on the amendment, because it’s “too extreme.”

Trump, of course, never had any truly pro-life principles to speak of. It’s much sadder to watch the transformation of J. D. Vance, who at one time opposed the “exceptions” (abortion in cases of rape and incest) and employed rhetoric looking towards a hopeful goal of “ending” abortion. His website was selectively scrubbed of this sort of content before eventually redirecting to Trump’s website. He is now parroting Trump on talking points like the support of chemical abortions (which the federal government could still constitutionally regulate under interstate commerce laws, if they actually cared). Whatever distinctive pro-life identity he once had is now gone, completely subsumed. Will he ever get himself back? Who knows?

The question of the hour is whether this aggressive pivot will gain the GOP more voters than it loses. There’s a sizable percentage of pro-lifers who feel tragically bound to vote for the lesser of two evils almost no matter what. In a group chat, I saw one evangelical voice saying his personal red line would be Trump vowing to expand abortion rights beyond the status quo at the federal level. I would reply that we can’t be sure Trump wouldn’t attempt something that at least weakens strong red-state bans from the top down. And even if he stopped short of a direct legal override, he’s made it clear that in social terms, he intends to push state legislators to his right out of the Trump Club. It is now abundantly apparent that he is not simply content to say nothing and let the chips fall where they may. Indeed, for all that he likes to use the overturn of Roe as a bargaining chip, expecting endless abject gratitude in return, we know that he was always privately uneasy about the decision, thinking (as ever) about whether it would cost him votes. By contrast, he seems fairly unworried about losing pro-life votes. Perhaps someone has advised him he can take it as read that most of them will stick it out all the way to November. Perhaps someone is right.

What this all means is that in effect, American conservatives now face a choice between two Democrat parties: the Democrat party of today, and the Democrat party of the 90s, or even the early noughties (except more enthusiastic about gay marriage). Trump would like to revive the spirit of “safe, legal, and rare,” if not the exact slogan. This is his bid for America’s majority middle: Are you fundamentally ambivalent about abortion? Do you have a vague sense that 6 weeks is “too soon” and birth is “too extreme,” but you don’t have a fully worked-out philosophy of what happens in between or when exactly it becomes not “too soon”—15 weeks, maybe? And if you’re honest, you’d prefer to think about it as little as possible? Hey—him too!

I doubt that Donald Trump is Eric Weinstein’s candidate, but Eric recently did a long tweet that one might say captures Trump’s approach in language above Trump’s intellectual paygrade. After running a poll to gauge where his followers land on the abortion issue, with the result that most respondents fell somewhere in that murky middle, Eric proposed a little theory of “political Schelling point polarization.” “Schelling point” is a term used in game theory when players are unable to communicate with each other but intuitively home in on what seems like it will be a popular solution or focal point, in hopes that others will share it. (For example, let’s say you’d like to meet someone in a city on a certain day, but you aren’t allowed to coordinate time and place beforehand. You might try a famous landmark at noon.) In the abortion debate, Eric concedes that hard-core pro-life and hard-core pro-abortion both make much better, more clearly defined Schelling points than “in the middle…somewhere.” And yet, that’s where most people are, including Eric. And as a rule, Eric believes that vast grey in-between is where the actual truth of the matter will be found. He wants to “reinterpret” Yeats, not saying that the two passionately intense sides are “the worst,” exactly, just the most clear. But Eric, for his part, is “done with clarity.”

On balance, Eric’s instincts still code more blue than red, so he feels he is “forced to caucus” with “the ‘My body, my choice. Full stop’ crowd,” like most people in the middle who feel politically pressured to share the Schelling point that feels marginally closer to their actual views. Yet Eric says the “My body, my choice” crowd “do not represent my position in the slightest.” He feels the same way about any number of “scissor issues,” from immigration to foreign policy to free speech. There are obvious Schelling points on each side of each issue, and then there’s the ill-defined landscape between them, simultaneously No Man’s Land and Most Men’s Land. To those men of the clear red and blue Schelling points, full of passionate intensity, he says, “Get a room, kids.” They should have one conversation, while everyone else should have another.

I give Eric full marks for candor, and I’m encouraged that he is at least disturbed by the blue Schelling point crowd. But, with equal candor, I must disagree with him.

Someone did a horrified tweet about the truck providing abortions near the DNC, reporting that 25 babies had been killed so far. Someone else tried to leave a corrective community note (which now seems to be gone), explaining that the truck was only offering medical abortions, which are only used in the first 70 days of pregnancy, which means that “Claims about ‘babies’ are false.” Incidentally, 70 days = 10 weeks. Here’s how the Mayo Clinic describes the development of whatever-it-is at this point in time:

By the 10th week of pregnancy, or eight weeks after conception, your baby’s head has become more round.

Your baby can now bend his or her elbows. Toes and fingers lose their webbing and become longer. The eyelids and external ears continue to develop. The umbilical cord is clearly visible.

Here’s a visual aid:

Since there’s also lots of talk about 6 weeks, here’s how whattoexpect.com describes this stage of development, even aside from the fact that this is generally the “heartbeat” week:

This week, your baby is starting to look more like, well, a baby — your little one’s head is taking shape, while the cheeks, chin and jaws are also beginning to form…

And are those little indentations on both sides of the head the sweet dimples you always hoped your baby would inherit from your mom’s side of the family? No, they’re ear canals in the making. Small dots on the face will form the eyes and button nose in a few weeks.

Also taking shape this week: your baby’s kidneys, liver and lungs, along with his little heart. See your baby’s development each week on the What to Expect app .

Of course, as one winds the clock back progressively further, one reaches the stage where the embryo truly does present to the eye as “a clump of cells,” albeit, obviously, not just any clump of cells. It’s at this stage that Richard Dawkins will archly warn us all about “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind,” which “cannot grasp the idea of half a person, or three quarters of a person” (or three fifths, while we’re making up fractions). He enjoys teasing Catholic “absolutists” by “confronting them with a pair of identical twins (they split after fertilisation, of course) and asking which twin got the soul, which twin is the non-person: the zombie.” This is cringe even if one leaves theology out of it. There is no “they” doing the splitting. There is one (1) initially developing human, from which a cluster of totipotent cells might separate and undergo a regulation process, which if successful will reprogram the separated cells’ DNA back to the DNA of a new human, which comes into being at the end of said process. It’s science, Richard.

I will admit, though—and here I’m aware that I’m about to step right on a landmine in my own backyard, but so be it—speaking as a Protestant, the way some of my fellow Protestants talk about in vitro fertilization is not exactly leading onward and upward to a clear understanding of science or theology. Not that there aren’t plenty of nominal Catholics who also disregard all kinds of Catholic teaching, but the structure of the Church is such that there’s at least an “official” understanding to point to. In June, I participated in a seminar that closed with short group presentations, where I was thrown together with three young Catholic guys. Never one to pick safe topics, I suggested we spend fifteen minutes presenting the case against IVF. When we got up to deliver, one of them teased me that this was going to be a presentation by three Catholics and one future Catholic. (Alas, I regret to inform my Catholic friends that for me it’s once a weird Anglican, always a weird Anglican.)

Thankfully, other Protestants are doing good clear work in this area, so I’m not a lone voice in the Protestant wilderness, but there is that embarrassing little grain of truth to what Eric Weinstein is saying: Even professing pro-life Christians don’t all share the same Schelling point. I recently came across an article by a pastor, an evangelical apologetics guru no less, who implies he and his wife didn’t even undergo the so-called “ethical IVF” process where couples don’t discard their embryos. He writes with an apparently straight face that “an embryo is not synonymous with a child,” contrary to what a handful of sadly misguided “outliers” think, because embryos can die before implantation. It’s unclear by what magical process implantation is supposed to confer human childhood on the already developing human embryo, with its already unique human DNA. Perhaps evangelical apologetics classes should spend a little more time on embryology and a little less time on Five Quick Facts That PROVE the Resurrection. Some might say I’m being harsh here, but I think I’m being rather restrained given that the author has cheerfully retweeted a reaction calling a Christian to his right on the issue a “wacko” and a “pervert.” I have slightly higher standards for someone who headlines conferences on “biblical worldview” and literally presides over an international ministry with “Christian Thinkers” in the title, but others’ mileage may vary.

But I digress. The point is that truth doesn’t change just because some people in my social tribe are confused about it. Unborn human life, at any stage, must be confronted as it is, not as what would make us more comfortable. The hard-core pro-lifers and the hard-core pro-aborts do share an understanding to the extent that at some point, the honest hard-core pro-abort will fully admit exactly what we’re all talking about, exactly what they want. They just think it should be legal. In that sense, Eric is right that the clear Schelling point people are able to have one conversation, while everyone in the middle is having a different conversation. Where we differ is that I believe the middle conversation is kicking the can down the road. At the end of the day, the question to be answered is actually very straightforward: Are some pre-moral humans disposable, or not?

There will be those who answer that question with both eyes open. But there will also be those who are too misled, damaged, or weak to grasp it properly. There will be those who stumble through something they don’t really understand, yet, intuitively, without being able to articulate why, don’t really want.

It is the task of the articulate to speak for the inarticulate. It is the task of the strong to carry the weak. Ours to clarify what is muddled. Ours to illuminate what is dark.

If you find yourself in that uneasy middle space, in that shifting center, I don’t despise you. I want to extend a hand to you. I want to walk with you.

Will you walk with me?