Republican 'true believers' don't seem to realize they're Wile E. Coyote

True believers know two things. One, they are right, and two, it’s only a matter of time until everyone comes to understand that they are right. Of the two, it’s the second that does them in.

The world needs true believers willing to put themselves on the line in the face of skepticism. It’s why we have air travel. But true believers also ascribed to witchcraft, faith healing and a flat earth. In a normal world, a true believer floats a balloon and it succeeds or fails in the face of evidence and the court of public acceptance.

In classic “be careful what you wish for” positioning, anti-abortion true believers snatched the brass ring by force-fitting Christian conservatives onto the bench of a secular institution, which facilitated the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

Americans have thanked them with a primordial scream of electoral outrage that makes you wonder how the Republican Party can compete in a tossup state ever again. From Wisconsin to Kansas(!) voters have voiced their support of abortion rights in no uncertain terms, even as state legislatures are still stampeding in the opposite direction of public opinion.

Even after the abortion issue cost the GOP its red wave in November, and even after every election with even a whiff of an abortion element clearly demonstrated its toxicity to conservatives, the Republican Central Committee was still taking the whip to state legislatures, urging them to pass measures even stricter than the ones already on the books.

In Florida, governor and presumed presidential candidate Ron DeSantis — already viewed as so cold and unfeeling that he would “unplug your life support system to charge his cell phone” (and those are his supporters talking) —  is expected to sign legislation banning abortion at six weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant. Some lawmakers in South Carolina want to go so far as to make abortion punishable by death.

You don’t need to be a political scientist to know that the day a young woman is slaughtered for having an abortion, the Republican Party will die along with her. And DeSantis, you would think, is bright enough to understand that in 2024 a radical stand on abortion will be suicide.

Of all the skills politicians have, the most enduring is a reptilian instinct for survival. They can sniff a winning or losing issue a mile away and pre-position themselves to take advantage — or at least control the damage. But that’s not happening here. After each electoral OD they go right back to the fentanyl.

Why? The easy answer is that they have no choice. The 25% of Americans who still identify as Republican is dominated by the far-right, which is pretty much okie dokie with killing women who have the temerity to make decisions about their own health. You don’t win a primary without them, so there’s no off ramp on the road to fanaticism.

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So you win the primary and worry about tomorrow when it comes. Something may come along — a recession, a foreign policy crisis — that can at least make an absolutist approach to abortion a wash.

Maybe you think the furor over Roe is an adrenaline rush that will have died down 18 months from now. This is a singularly male — “I’ll come back when you calm down” — approach that, even if true, is moot because Republican extremists, as mentioned, keep throwing gas on the fire. Abortion isn’t receding as an issue because the GOP itself won’t let it.

Lawmakers might also be frustrated because the overturn of Roe hasn’t been particularly effective at preventing abortions. The post-Roe proliferation of abortion drugs and distribution networks have made the procedure easier, cheaper and more available than it was prior. That led a Texas judge to more or less appoint himself to the Food and Drug Administration to try to end it — the primary effect of which will be to feed even more anti-Republican outrage.

Democrat or Republican, a sure sign of a party losing its grip is the contention, usually uttered after a crushing defeat, that “most Americans agree with us, we just didn’t get our message out.”

No, the problem was that you did get your message out. And voters threw that message back in your face.

Bill Clinton’s notion 30 years ago that abortions should be safe, legal and rare was derided by true believers on both sides for trying to have it both ways. It also was suggestive of compromise, an increasingly endangered species.

History suggests that a fanatic’s punishment is always self-inflicted. Wile E. Coyote never figured out that his was a lost cause, so he never stopped trying. Today’s true believers are headed for the same cliff.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Voters have made their feelings known on abortion; GOP won't listen