History cannot predict the future. Yet it can offer insight into trends and patterns of the past that help us understand current issues.
My view has long been that western democratic societies, such as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and France, have been generally moving forward in adopting more liberal values and ideals. This certainly has been the case if you consider the transformation during the last 250 years of the role of women, the end to legalized discrimination against minorities (though not prejudice), the (mostly) equal treatment of all citizens under the law, and the liberalization of morality (good or bad depending on how you perceive it).
This dramatic change in modern life has not been straightforward or smooth — far from it. While the modernists embrace change and liberalism, traditionalists or conservatives are often resistant, even hostile, to this shift, citing religious precepts, more narrow interpretations of moral behaviour, and an almost desperate need to maintain the status quo. Sometimes, they want to push society backwards to an era when the world made more sense—at least from their perspective. Louisiana Republicans’ new state law requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom is a classic traditionalist measure (and more than likely unconstitutional).
Thus for every step forward along the path to modernization, there are frequently three or four steps backward, which can cause angst and acrimonious conflict before this process gradually resumes.
At the moment, there is an intense struggle in the U.S. between the traditionalists and the modernists, with more Republicans on the former side and more Democrats on the latter, though it is not a clear-cut division.
The main dispute is about abortion rights. While this has been a contentious issue in the U.S. since at least the mid-19th century, this current clash erupted in June 2022 after the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision that “ruled that the Constitution of the United States generally protected a right to have an abortion.” This judgment triggered severe restrictions of abortion rights in many states with Republican governments curtailing the rights of thousands of American women and literally threatening women’s lives in the process.
Predictably, abortion rights have emerged as a key issue in the 2024 presidential election. There has been an intense pushback on the Supreme Court’s ruling from the pro-choice side (that to my mind is the modernist position) which has a strong ally in U.S. President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
Their pro-life (ie., anti-abortion) opponents, meanwhile, have been bolstered by Project 2025, a coalition of conservative organizations which under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Washington D.C. think tank, has published a 900-plus page manifesto, essentially a “blueprint for a second Trump administration,” as the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently noted. Some of its many proposals hearken back to the moral values of the 1870s including calls for the Comstock Act to be “resurrected.”
The act was the cause célèbre of the popular New York City moral crusader Anthony Comstock (1844-1915). Starting in the late 1860s, he devoted his life to combating sin, lust, homosexuality, perversion, prostitution, contraceptives, abortion, and vulgarity. In 1873, he was the key organizer of the influential New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
That same year, he was made a special agent for the U.S. postal service and later boasted that from 1873 to 1882, he had “confiscated 14 tons of books and sheet stock and a million and a half obscene circulars, poems and pictures.” In the same period, he had nearly 100 people arrested for advertising or selling contraceptives (“indecent rubber articles”) and for providing advice on obtaining abortions.
He also convinced politicians in Washington, who shared his concern about obscenity, to pass what became known as the “Comstock Law.” The act banned “lewd” and “lascivious” and “indecent” books, pamphlets, and literature from being sold or mailed—including information “or any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of contraception or the procuring of abortion.” Twenty-two states (of a total of 37 in 1873) followed the federal government’s lead and instituted their own Comstock-like laws.
Comstock claimed that he was responsible for the convictions “of enough persons to fill a passenger train of 61 coaches, 60 of which contained 60 passengers each with the 61st half full.” He also engineered the arrest of many physicians who were legitimately assisting needy women with information about contraception. In 1914, he waged one of his last bitter battles against the pioneering birth control advocate Margaret Sanger.
Congress never repealed the Comstock Act, though 150 years later it has been overridden by various Supreme Court decisions on free speech, birth control and abortion, as Goldberg points out. Should the unthinkable happen and Trump becomes president again, there is a real possibility that he—and a Republican-controlled Congress—would follow much of what Project 2025 proposes and attempt to “reanimate Comstock, using it to ban medication abortion.”
If that and other traditionalist policies the group wants enacted comes to pass, the march of progress might be stalled for a while.
Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.
