In today’s newsletter, what pro-life means now. And then:
Post-Dobbs, social conservatives are shifting their rhetoric away from abortion.Illustration by Keith Negley
The New Pro-Life Playbook
Under Trump, a new vision of conservative family policy is ascendant.
“Republicans have just spent an election cycle promising that they won’t ban abortion at the federal level,” Emma Green writes in this week’s issue. “Now that they’ve won, they will be tested on whether they meant it.” Even if the Party does uphold the post-Roe status quo, in which reproductive rights are enumerated with varying limits or protections at the state level, the pro-life movement will have significant influence in the new Administration. But, as Green reports, the primary policy goals may have shifted, away from a focus on abortion and toward socioeconomic strategies that emphasize the central role of families in American life, by connecting the progressive policy goal of greater spending on child care with conservative social initiatives such as reducing the role of public education and furthering a religious agenda. “What remains an open question,” Green notes, “is how their new family-policy agenda would account for the many families in the United States who don’t fit that mold.” Read or listen to the story »
The Lede
Photograph by Jae C. Hong / AP
The Election Was About the Issues After All
The fifteen-dollar minimum wage, a core progressive issue, won ballot measures in red states. Why have Democrats stopped pushing for it? Benjamin Wallace-Wells reports on how the Republicans have seized economic populism and why “voters no longer know what economic changes the Democrats are fighting for.” Read the story »
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P.S. “You know he’s great even when you’re not in a mood for him,” the art critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who was born on this day in 1840. “If you give Rodin the chance,” he adds, “he will show you possibilities of transcendence that aren’t only close at hand but identical with it.” ⚒️
