There’s a lot of demonstrations out there protesting the SCOTUS decision overturning Roe. That’s what the Left is really good at, taking to the streets. The Right is good at everything else—particularly political organization and ideological mobilization at the state, county, and local levels—which is why it can hold power even as it repudiates public opinion and majority rule.
Why is that?
It's a matter of faith, good and bad. The Left (until Bernie) has never been able to approach the American electorate in good faith, on the assumption that socialism is a winning program. Instead, the Left has assumed that it must disguise its intentions or dispense with electoral appeals altogether, because socialism is, after all, “foreign” to the American experience—it’s an invention of the “Old World,” where class conflict and political upheaval were the rule, where individualism and political stability were the exceptions.
The Right, by contrast, has always been able to approach the American electorate in bad faith, knowing that a celebration of capitalism—“greed is good” and all that—isn’t likely to win the hearts and minds of voters who, by and large, believe that MLK got it right on the promise of the Declaration (and/or that Bernie gets it right about M4A). Instead, an increasingly sophisticated Right has disguised its intentions (or, in the case of voter suppression, dispensed with electoral niceties) by appeal to individual rights (liberty) as these are protected by “free markets,” “free enterprise,” and “small business.”
Notice that both Left and Right agree that socialism is antithetical to the American Dream, the American experience, the manifest destiny of the American people. But they also agree that capitalism is not the name of the people’s desire: the neoliberal project is the object of revulsion and ridicule from both sides, as the corrupt, elitist, unfair, and unsustainable regime of Davos Man.
The effect of this agreement was and is to disarm the Left by convincing it that the American people are not to be trusted at the ballot box—they won’t vote for socialism, or for racial justice, or for income redistribution, but they will vote for candidates who deceive them by suggesting that Democratic candidates are, in fact, socialists who will abrogate Americans’ God-given rights and tax their incomes to subsidize the undeserving poor, whether immigrants or other people of color.
And so the courts—not state legislatures or county boards or school districts—have become the redoubt of the Left, from Brown to Casey. (“Conservative” law professors recognized this jurisprudential danger and founded the Federalist Society in 1982 to address it.)
The broader effect of the Left/Right agreement on the nature of the American electorate—it’s anti-socialist, but not pro-capitalist—was to galvanize the Right’s cadre of organic intellectuals (not the old-line crew at National Review and the Public Interest), which realized that a long march through the state and local legislatures as well as the courts was the key to victory over the Left in the long run. Unlike the Left, the Right wasn’t afraid to approach American voters because it knew—mistakenly, in my view—that they were safely anti-socialist, or at least could be convinced that Democrats were closet socialists bent on redistribution of income, eradication of religion, liberation of sexuality, and so forth.
And so the state legislatures became the redoubt of the Right, from Roe to Dobbs. Meanwhile, of course, it conquered the courts as well, using the Federalist Society as its cutting intellectual edge (all six of the Dobbs majority were or are members). By now the Left has little or no standing in these venues, except as “moderate” Democrats who continue to do the bidding of local business interests in accordance with neoliberal models of governance—they’re the state-level backbone of the Clinton/corporate wing of the party.
No wonder we flood the streets when the Right wins—we’ve got nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. So long as the Left agrees with the Right in assuming that the American electorate is fundamentally and irrevocably anti-socialist, that’s where we’ll be, protesting what we might have prevented.