Thursday open thread: What's right with Kansas?

Well, I certainly was gobsmacked by the results of the abortion referendum in Kansas.

Republicans put the referendum on the ballot to outlaw abortion. By a margin of seventeen points, Kansas voters rejected it. 

It wasn't even close. And the turnout was more akin to a general election than a primary election. Also, of the voters who registered after the Dobbs decision, 70% were women.

This is what happens when ideologues go too far. The Supreme Court extremist majority either didn't think there would be such a backlash to the taking away of a right, or it dismissed it. They spoke, the peasants would have to follow.

But we're not tugging on our forelocks and kicking the dirt. Authoritarians make that mistake over and over about Americans. Yes, too many of us are apathetic, allowing something like Dobbs to come along. But once such an event happens, the fury is immediate and devastating. Imperial Japan learned this on December 8, 1941. The Taliban learned this after 9/11. And now it's the turn of our own religious fundamentalists to learn this eternal lesson.

In a ruby red state, voters rose up in hundreds of thousands to say "no" to the machinations of the fascist Republican Party. These are people who are now engaged, and single issue voters. Woe betide the Kansas GOP come November. And the result in Kansas can't just be taken as restricted to that state. Yesterday Monmouth released a poll showing the Democrats with a seven point lead in the generic ballot, 50%-43%. Rather than a red wave, we are seeing the first inklings of a blue tsunami. Our would-be overlords overplayed their hands, again. They had fallen for their own bullshit, counting on American apathy to push through legislation to turn the US into a real-life Gilead. They still think they can pull it off. Good. Their blind hubris will be their undoing.

Also, what happened in red Kansas is why those of us in blue states can neither dismiss states like it as deserving of their fate, or abandon them. Kansans came through. What happened there can happen in the rest of Red America. Our holier-than-thou attitude will not save this Republic.

The Whig Party fractured in the mid-19th century over slavery. Abortion is the social question of our time. And while it's too early to pronounce anything with certainty, abortion may do the GOP what slavery did to the Whigs. It would be a historical irony that the party which replaced the Whigs will likewise fall apart due to its inherent contradictions. An anti-slavery party which is now the home of Southern revanchists. A party founded on liberty which now wants to impose a Christian fundamentalist state. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

We have a lot of work to do. But the burden has been lightened.