PBS’s Amanpour and Company is so skewed to the left that on the Tuesday program, it was actually argued that true conservatism means opposing conservative policies and the recent Dobbs decision.
Hari Sreenivasan was interviewing Never Trumper Tom Nichols of The Atlantic, who he described as a "dyed-in-the-wool conservative" when he asked him to comment on a recent quote of his, “It says, ‘I will root for GOP defeats on policy even where I might otherwise agree with them. The institutional Republican Party must be weak enough so that it can't carry out the larger project of undermining our elections and curtailing our rights as citizens.” Put that in some context for us.’
The list of sins the GOP has committed is not just related to Trump, “I don't think they have any faith that they can make anybody else believe it either. And so, their answer is suppress the vote, put -- make it harder to vote… And I think their goal is minority rule, less democracy, authoritarian measures that are meant to constrain individual freedom.”
Later, Sreenivasan turned to abortion, Roe, and Dobbs, “Well, you mentioned the courts. And you’ve written a long time ago that you thought that the Roe decision was at the hands of an activist court. And we are speaking now not too long after the Dobbs decision. And you said that, essentially, now, we have another activist Court.”
Nichols is best known for being the professor who decries the lack of trust in experts. To help mitigate this lack of trust, he has acknowledged experts should stay in their lane, but on PBS the expert on Russia and nuclear weapons launched into an objectively false denunciation of the Dobbs decision.
It started out well enough, “even Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrestled with about the way Roe was decided, that a court in the '70s said -- the Supreme Court in the '70s said, this somehow should be legal and we are going to figure out why it ought to be legal. And again, when you have even liberal justices saying, yeah, that probably wasn't the best foundation for creating this right, you know, there is a problem.”
However, Nichols’ argument quickly derailed as he then claimed that Roe being wrong doesn’t matter and wanting to overturn a wrong decision apparently makes one an activist:
On the other hand, I think the Court in 2022 had, at least, three members on it in the majority who said, we just don't like abortion and we don't really care about how things were decided one way or another. We just don't think abortion should be -- we want to give it back to the states knowing, of course, what exactly a lot of the states were going to do with it, and I don't think that is any better of a reason, especially once you have instituted a right for 50 years that people have woven into kind of the set of rights in America, you know, to simply remove it because the majority now feels confident enough in their own beliefs to do that, I think is dangerous.
The justices knew some states would outlaw abortion. So, what? The point is they have the right to do so. Nichols should take his own advice and stay in his lane.
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Here is a transcript for the July 26 show:
PBS Amanpour and Company
7/26/2022
11:40 PM ET
HARI SREENIVASAN: You know; you've got a quote I want to read out. It says, “I will root for GOP defeats on policy even where I might otherwise agree with them. The institutional Republican Party must be weak enough so that it can't carry out the larger project of undermining our elections and curtailing our rights as citizens.” Put that in some context for us.
TOM NICHOLS: I think the Republican Party has lost its faith and its ability to convince anyone to buy anything it's selling. The current Republican Party doesn't stand for anything. Their 2020 platform amounted to whatever Donald Trump says. They didn't even -- I mean, a political party that didn't even bother to write a platform.
You know, it was really -- if you think about how strikingly authoritarian and cultish that is, because I don't think they really believe in what they’re selling and I don't think they have any faith that they can make anybody else believe it either. And so, their answer is suppress the vote, put -- make it harder to vote, put through measures like the one that is about to go to the Supreme Court where the legislature can simply decide who wins the electoral votes no matter what the will of the people might be in that particular state. And I think their goal is minority rule, less democracy, authoritarian measures that are meant to constrain individual freedom.
The Republicans back during the Cold War especially were about more freedom and smaller government rather than less freedom and bigger government. And I think they are doing that because they realize that if any kind of fair national test their ideas would fail to win a majority. And I think that they've just given up on that. They have given up on the idea of winning a majority. And now, they are going to use the courts and careful manipulation of voting rules to see how long they can prolong the unnatural condition of minority rule. And that is anti-constitutional, it's undemocratic, it's un-American.
SREENIVASAN: Well, you mentioned the courts. And you’ve written a long time ago that you thought that the Roe decision was at the hands of an activist court. And we are speaking now not too long after the Dobbs decision. And you said that, essentially, now, we have another activist Court. Tell us about how you wrestle with your own thinking on abortion.
NICHOLS: Well, there's two parts to that. One is the legal problem that even Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrestled with about the way Roe was decided, that a court in the '70s said -- the Supreme Court in the '70s said, this somehow should be legal and we are going to figure out why it ought to be legal.
And again, when you have even liberal justices saying, yeah, that probably wasn't the best foundation for creating this right, you know, there is a problem. On the other hand, I think the Court in 2022 had, at least, three members on it in the majority who said, we just don't like abortion and we don't really care about how things were decided one way or another.
We just don't think abortion should be -- we want to give it back to the states knowing, of course, what exactly a lot of the states were going to do with it, and I don't think that is any better of a reason, especially once you have instituted a right for 50 years that people have woven into kind of the set of rights in America, you know, to simply remove it because the majority now feels confident enough in their own beliefs to do that, I think is dangerous.
