Why Pro-Life Candidates Should Embrace The America First Agenda
You don't have to support America First to be pro-life. But embracing this agenda would be sound moral principle and good political strategy. Here's why.
The right to life movement is on the defensive in the political sphere. A decisive referendum defeat in Ohio last month joined losses in places that include Montana and Kansas in 2022. Democrats, having completely failed to deliver peace or prosperity, are counting on abortion as their only path back to the White House. Republicans are on their back heel, which is never the place you want to be in politics.
I think it’s important to keep some historical perspective. This type of backlash is normal after a seminal political moment, which the overturning of Roe vs. Wade certainly was. It’s normal for the side that lost to get angry and ultra-motivated, while the side that won gets a little complacent before a series of defeats jolts them back into a renewed focus. That doesn’t make living through the backlash fun, but it’s the way things work.
The question then, is how do pro-life candidates respond to get through the backlash and to the better future?
Understanding the Pro-Life Movement
Before offering my solution, I want to step back and make one distinction that is too often lost. Pro-life candidates must be seen as distinct from the pro-life movement.
The movement is the beating heart of the pro-life cause. It’s crisis pregnancy centers getting material help to pregnant mothers. It’s the person praying the rosary outside an abortion mill. It’s the mother who gives birth in a difficult situation, medical or personal. This is the pro-life movement.
Pro-life political candidates are different. They have different degrees of commitment to the cause. They have a responsibility—including to the pro-life movement—to carry out that commitment in a way that can build an electoral majority, while still moving the cause incrementally forward. It’s this aspect of pro-life activism that is my focus here.
I believe pro-life candidates would be well-served by embracing the America First agenda associated with President Trump. The embrace should be unabashed and be fleshed out in detail, not simply a patriotic slogan.
There is no better source of inspiration than the Holy Bible. One of my favorite passages is from the Epistle of James, and I believe it has application here:
“And if a brother or sister be naked and want daily food: And one of you say to them: Go in peace, be ye warm and filled; yet give them not those things that are necessary for the body, what shall it profit?”
James: 2: 15-16
Like all of Scripture, this has meaning that vastly transcends politics. But that doesn’t mean we can’t draw some political inspiration and apply it to the current moment.
An American Tragedy
The voters that the America First coalition needs for an electoral majority, both nationally and in the battleground states, are generally disaffected. They are disgusted with both parties. They are middle-to-working class. They transcend racial lines.
These voters live in communities that are suffering, because of a landscape that looks something like this:
*A globalist free trade agenda allowed multinational corporations to exploit low-wage labor overseas and ship products back into the United States tariff-free. This undercut domestic businesses and ruined job opportunities for people on the mid-to-lower end of the economic ladder. Communities were decimated.
*Going to college was one way out. Or, if you didn’t want to incur a massive amount of student loan debt, joining the military was an option. Thus, motivated by both sincere patriotism and economic desperation, kids from these communities signed up for the Armed Forces.
*In the aftermath of 9/11, the decision was made to send the military on a 20-year expedition in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan. Multiple tours of duty, each one lasting as long as 18 months, put an enormous strain on the family lives of our military troops.
*Troops came back home, to lives that were often strained or shattered. They also frequently came home carrying severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
*The medical community decided it would be a good idea to treat the pain by pumping them full of opioids and other addictive painkillers, creating a further downward spiral.
*Today, fentanyl is the drug of choice for decimating these communities, as it pours across the border of Arizona. That border is conveniently insecure, a byproduct of the 2020 election being stolen from President Trump and the 2022 Arizona governor’s race being stolen from Kari Lake.
*That same wide-open border also means a labor market where employers can get away with paying lower wages—even off the books entirely if someone is here illegally. The prospects of family-supporting work in the disaffected communities decreases even further. Depression, and it’s companions—alcoholism, addiction, and family breakdown—increases.
*Then you just rinse and repeat, and start over with another generation of youth, who in seeking the way out, end up fighting in foreign lands.
It is the portrait of an American tragedy. One that has developed in slow-motion, but a tragedy, nonetheless.
The Political Fallout
This is a humanitarian crisis with serious political repercussions. These communities produce voters that went for Barack Obama. They also went—and continue to go—for Donald Trump.
These voters clearly do not fit the conventional “conservative-liberal” paradigm. And, while being independents, they don’t fit the common media narrative of what independents are. The media seems to think every independent is a comfortable suburbanite that likes an eclectic mix of tax cuts and transgender bathrooms. That is one kind of independent, to be sure, But the disaffected voters in communities like I described are another—and they are often decisive in close elections.
Reaching Out
How can pro-life candidates put them on our side? Let’s return to our Scripture passage. We want to tell these voters to “be ye warm and filled.” In a narrow political context, we can reasonably take this to mean that we want them (and everyone) to embrace a society where every child is seen as a gift of God, welcomed, and cherished in life, and given the full protection of the law.
I think a good starting point for pro-life candidates is to focus on the following:
*Stop the never-ending foreign wars
*Continue the good work President Trump has started and revamp our trade relationships to be more middle-and-working class oriented.
*Get control of the border
*Get people access to healthcare—real healthcare, not a trip to a Planned Parenthood mill. This includes help with rehab for anyone struggling with addiction and mental health.
*Get people access to housing. This is particularly relevant to the pro-life cause, where so many women seek abortions because they’re living in a domestic situation that’s either unsupportive or outright violent.
*In one of the great ideas in American politics today, Lake, running for the Senate in Arizona, has proposed “baby bonuses”—financial incentive for having children. Drawing on Hungary’s model, she further proposes that any family with four children or more be exempt from income taxes altogether.
*Stop the excessive government spending that fuels inflation and takes away people’s purchasing power.
*Stop the never-ending foreign wars—it’s important enough to say twice.
This is a concrete agenda that is truly America First populism.
Republican Rot: A Harsh Reality
Virtually all pro-life candidates are on the Republican side of the aisle. That doesn’t mean all of us in the pro-life movement have a fervent identity as GOP loyalists. Some do, others don’t. But the candidates that have claimed to speak in our name have been almost exclusively Republicans.
Can we have a big “come to Jesus” moment and acknowledge that our own side bears substantial responsibility for the cultural landscape I’ve outlined?
Yes, it was Bill Clinton who pushed the most dramatic advances of the free trade agenda in the 1990s. But he could not have done so without the enthusiastic help of Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. In fact, Clinton was opposed by congressional Democrats. He could never have passed the trade deals that Trump undid without strong Republican support in Congress.
Yes, people like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and others, have supported the military adventurism abroad and deserve the label “warmonger”. But it would take a massive rewriting of history to suggest that the disastrous Middle East Wars have anything other than a Republican copyright.
Yes, Democrats spend money like drunken sailors--although, as Ronald Reagan used to say, that might be offensive to drunken sailors. But when Republicans had Congress and the White House in the late ‘00s, they went on a spending binge themselves. And the most recent spending orgies under Biden have gotten enthusiastic rubber stamps from Republicans in both houses of Congress. When given power, our side has been no better at controlling spending, or protecting the value of people’s currency.
Those of us in the pro-life movement specifically and the America First populist movement more broadly didn’t do or advocate for these things--or if anyone did, it was only because they were lied to about things like WMD in Iraq. In fact, many of us have spent a political lifetime arguing against some, if not all of Republican sins in the post-Cold War era.
But the reality is the stench of these failures—the stench of Republicanism as it existed between Reagan and Trump—covers us all.
Voters in these key swing communities recoil from traditional GOP candidates. Not out of love for Democrats. But because they feel Republicans don’t care. That’s a tragically inaccurate stain on the entire pro-life movement and on many of its candidates. But it’s a reality. It must be repaired.
To me, the conclusion is clear—corporate Republicanism must be left for dead. If the voters who align with the traditional GOP Establishment--defined as anyone who still likes the Bushes, McCains, and Romneys of the world--want to work with us on areas of shared agreement, that’s great. But it can’t go farther than that. We can’t give them cheap labor through these insane immigration policies. We can’t give them their free trade agenda. And we certainly cannot give them their wars.
Instead of us half-heartedly defending them, they have to embrace what we’re doing. Or we file for political divorce. The time we spend kissing their rings is time we’re not using to reach out to the disaffected voters. And the stench that turns those voters off gets worse.
Furthermore, a very public fight with the GOP Establishment might be what pro-life candidates need to exorcise what’s blocking their potential appeal to the broader audience. Has anyone noticed that as the current Republican leadership’s attempt to undercut Trump become more obvious, he rises in the polls? That’s because his support among the disaffected keeps expanding.
It’s time for pro-life candidates across the country to pick their own fight with traditional Republicans. They’re holding us back. The America First agenda—no more foreign wars, control of the border and trade policies that benefit the working man and woman, are the building block. Improved access to health care, housing, baby bonuses and favorable tax treatment for families are another.
We can offer these things that are “necessary for the body”. And perhaps, more voters will be ready to be “warm and filled”, with a deeper conversation about the dignity and value of every human person—born and unborn.
There’s an adage that says “people don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” Too many of these voters think pro-lifers don’t care about them. That’s not true. The pro-life movement demonstrates it every day. Pro-life candidates can find valuable inspiration there, and from Holy Scripture itself.