As I understand it, a major concern in the slave-owning South in the years leading up to the Civil War was that newly admitted territories would enter the union as slave-free states, thus diminishing the percentage of the nation that supported, and that was supported by, slavery. The Republican party, which was formed at least in part to advocate for slave-free territories and new states, and the election of its first President precipitated a desperate move on the part of the South to separate itself from what promised to be a nation dominated by free states and increasingly critical of the remaining slave states.

I wonder if the current excesses of the pro-abortion left, the swing-for-the-fences mindset that seems to have gripped the Democratic Party and its most progressive members, is an expression of a similar desperation. The left routinely portrays America as a reactionary country on the verge of theocracy, this despite the left’s impressive record over the past half-century of achieving dramatic social transformation. While I think this portrayal is absurd, I also suspect it’s sincere, and that many on the left believe we are one Ginsburg away from rolling America back to the dark ages of, say, 1958.