The climate change evangelist with God on her side

In 1992, the Supreme Court surprised the nation yet again with a ruling on abortion. Many observers expected that the justices would use Planned Parenthood v. Casey to strike down Roe v. Wade, or at least sharply curtail the 1973 decision’s holding that the Constitution guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion. Four of the justices had indicated three years earlier, in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, that they would vote to overturn the landmark ruling.

Indeed, notes from the court’s retired justices indicated that after oral arguments in Casey, there were five votes to strike down Roe. Then Justice Anthony Kennedy changed his mind. He crafted an unusual plurality decision with justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter that jettisoned Roe’s trimester framework for evaluating when states can restrict abortion. In its place, the troika erected a new legal standard: Courts must evaluate whether those restrictions are an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to obtain the procedure.

Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe’s wizened author, could not mask his surprise at the reversal of fortune. “All that remained between the promise of Roe and the darkness of the [Webster] plurality was a single, flickering flame,” he wrote in his concurring opinion. But Blackmun also knew the fight over reproductive rights was not over: “I fear for the darkness as four justices anxiously await the single vote necessary to extinguish the light.”

Twenty-six years later, the darkness has arrived. President Donald Trump’s nomination to the high court of Brett Kavanaugh, a reliably conservative judge who currently serves on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, will likely end the precarious balance that has protected abortion rights for the last quarter-century. Kennedy occasionally voted to uphold some restrictions in the years that followed Casey, but his presence effectively blocked any outright attempt to overturn Roe.

Kavanaugh has never explicitly said he would vote to overturn the 1973 decision. This isn’t surprising, since judges do not disclose how they would decide cases before they hear them. Nonetheless, he is the product of a concerted effort by the conservative legal movement to build a Supreme Court in its own image. His most prominent opinion on the subject came last year when he dissented from a D.C. Circuit ruling that allowed an undocumented immigrant teenager to obtain an abortion while in federal custody.

If Kavanaugh proves the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe, there are multiple ways in which the Supreme Court could do so. The Roberts Court has already shown itself willing to overturn major precedents on issues like voting rights and organized labor in recent years. Those rulings provide a map to how the court’s conservative majority rewrites the nation’s understanding of the Constitution—and how it could do so again to eliminate abortion rights.

In theory, any abortion case that reaches the high court after Kavanaugh joins it could provide the justices with a vehicle to attack Roe. Kathryn Kolbert, the lawyer who argued for Planned Parenthood when Casey came before the Supreme Court in 1992, told Mother Jones this week that she agreed with legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin’s prediction that abortion will be illegal in 20 states within 18 months.

It’s uncommon for the Supreme Court to overturn one of its own decisions. Precedent is a cosmic force akin to gravity in the American legal system, and the justices generally adhere to the legal principle of stare decisis, a Latin phrase that means “let the decision stand.” Last year, the Government Printing Office identified 235 cases in which the court explicitly reversed a previous decision it had made over the past two centuries. Some of the court’s reversals are more momentous than others, of course. The Casey troika, for example, likened the prospect of overturning Roe to the court’s decision a half-century earlier to demolish the legal architecture of racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

“Whether or not a new social consensus is developing on [abortion], its divisiveness is no less today than in 1973, and pressure to overrule the decision, like pressure to retain it, has grown only more intense,” Kennedy, O’Connor, and Souter wrote in their joint opinion. “A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the Nation’s commitment to the rule of law.”

That warning’s logic could dissuade today’s justices from striking down Roe at the first available opportunity. Conservatives on the Roberts Court have taken an incremental approach to reversing course on major constitutional questions—voting rights, for example.

For almost a half-century, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a potent bulwark against efforts to obstruct Americans’ lawful right to cast a ballot. It requires certain state and local jurisdictions to obtain “preclearance” from federal authorities before changing their election laws. Giving the federal government so much influence over some states’ election laws stretched the outer limits of American federalism, but the Supreme Court signed off on the law in a 1966 case, Katzenbach v. Morgan, ruling that Section 5 was a necessary remedy to segregationist efforts to restrict black Americans’ voting rights.

The Roberts Court first opened the door to challenging Section 5 in the 2009 case Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that such strong medicine may no longer be justified and warned that Section 5 raised “serious constitutional questions.” But Roberts and his colleagues avoided those questions by resolving the case’s underlying dispute on statutory grounds instead.

Four years later, in Shelby County v. Holder, the court’s conservative majority returned to finish the job. Writing again for the majority, Roberts concluded that Section 5’s implementation was no longer tenable. He extensively cited the warnings he had put forth in Northwest Austin to reiterate that “things have changed in the South” and that the VRA violated the “equal sovereignty” of the states. In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg compared the court’s decision to “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Roberts and the other four conservative justices in the Shelby County majority did not explicitly overturn Katzenbach or strike down Section 5 along the way. What the court actually ruled unconstitutional was the formula crafted by Congress in Section 4(b), which determines which jurisdictions fall under Section 5. Congressional Republicans have subsequently refused to draft a new formula to replace it. Without one, Section 5 is effectively a dead letter, with dire consequences for the integrity of American democracy.

The post-Kennedy Supreme Court could take a similar path toward overturning Roe and Casey by casting doubt on them in its next rulings on abortion, then using those rulings to justify further attacks on the precedents down the road. With Shelby County, the Roberts Court took only one step to go from the status quo to a counter-revolution for voting rights. But that process could also unfold over a series of multiple cases, as it did with the conservative justices’ campaign against public-sector unions.

In the 2012 case Knox v. SEIU, the court began questioning the constitutionality of “fair-share” fees that were collected by public-sector unions from government employees who weren’t dues-paying members of their workplace’s union, but who still enjoyed benefits secured by the union’s collective-bargaining efforts. The Supreme Court first approved the practice, in the 1977 decision Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, as a way to avoid a free-rider problem and ensure “labor peace.”

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority in Knox, called Abood an “anomaly” in the court’s First Amendment jurisprudence. Conservatives have often argued that state laws allowing these unions fees are a form of unconstitutional compelled speech, because workers are forced to subsidize an organization they do not support. Two years later in Harris v. Quinn, Alito wrote another majority opinion that called Abood “questionable on several grounds,” before resolving the case by other means.

“Readers of today’s decision will know that Abood does not rank on the majority’s top-ten list of favorite precedents—and that the majority could not restrain itself from saying (and saying and saying) so,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent from Harris. In 2015, the court took up Friedrichs v. California Teachers’ Association, a case that put the question of overturning Abood directly before the justices. Justice Antonin Scalia’s death the following spring led to a 4-4 split that set no national precedents on whether Abood remained good law.

Then, last month, the guillotine finally dropped. In Janus v. AFSCME, Local 31, the Supreme Court’s five conservative justices ruled that fair-share fees violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against compelled speech and overturned the 1977 decision that had upheld them. “Today, the Court succeeds in its 6-year campaign to reverse Abood,” Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by the other three liberal justices. The decision will likely have significant consequences for the financial future of public unions, hitting American organized labor hard where it is strongest.

There’s a more insidious way that the post-Kennedy Supreme Court could attack abortion rights. The justices may decline to explicitly overturn Roe and Casey, acknowledging the weight of precedent after a half-century of decriminalized abortion in American life. At the same time, they could achieve similar ends by refusing to strike down onerous restrictions on abortion providers and clinics passed by state legislatures.

The court already came close to pursuing this path in 2016 in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court’s most significant abortion-related decision since Casey. That case centered on a series of regulations passed by Texas lawmakers that targeted clinics where women obtained the medical procedure. The state defended the regulations, which required the clinics to meet the building and safety requirements of hospital surgical centers and for the participating doctors to have admitting privileges at hospitals within a 30-mile radius, as necessary to protect the women’s health.

Had the court sided with Texas, however, the regulations would have forced all but a handful of clinics that provide abortions in the state to close. The impact would have been most acutely felt in the state’s vast rural areas where local hospitals are sparse. The court instead ruled in a 5-3 decision in 2016 that the regulations ran afoul of Casey’s holding by placing an undue burden on women who seek abortions. Without comment, Kennedy joined Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion in favor of the clinics, which reiterated what Kennedy himself had outlined in Casey more than two decades earlier. If similar regulations reach the court again, the retiring justice’s successor may not be inclined to do the same.

Lastly, there’s a more improbable—but also more far-reaching—way that the Supreme Court could gut abortion rights in America. In Roe, Blackmun concluded that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” If it did, he noted, then “[Roe’s] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.” Since then, some anti-abortion groups, lawmakers, and jurists have sought to extend legal personhood to fetuses through other means, with varying degrees of success.

Most legal arguments for reversing Roe and Casey focus on the constitutional right to privacy, contending that the court should never have extended it to cover abortion in the first place. If those arguments prevail, it would once again be up to the states to decide whether to allow or forbid the procedure. On the other hand, if the court rules that a fetus counts as a person under the Fourteenth Amendment, then abortion would be legally indistinguishable from murder and effectively banned across the United States. Only a constitutional amendment or a future Supreme Court ruling could then undo such a decision, and that would likely take decades of effort from abortion-rights advocates—if it would happen at all.

In 1970, when abortion was still illegal in most states, New York passed the most liberal abortion law in the nation. The procedure became legal up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, whereas previously abortion was treated like homicide. “One of my sons just called me a whore for the vote I cast against this,” one Catholic assemblyman said at the time; his other son, he reported, urged him to change his vote. He did, and the bill passed. Three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its verdict in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion. Around 350,000 women travelled to New York for abortions between 1970 and 1973.

New York didn’t amend its law after Roe, and in time, its reforms didn’t feel very revolutionary. Abortion is still illegal after 24 weeks of pregnancy, unless a woman’s life is in danger; women who need late-term abortions for other reasons, like a fetus that’s no longer viable, must travel out of state for their procedures. It’s a precarious situation made even more uncertain by the sudden precariousness of Roe itself.

“I will be appointing pro-life judges,” Donald Trump promised in the final presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, adding that the legality of abortion “will go back to the individual states” if he puts “another two or perhaps three justices on” the Supreme Court. “And that will happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court.” As president, he has kept his promise, first with Justice Neil Gorsuch and now with nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation seems likely with Republicans in control of the Senate.

That has many worrying that Roe could be overturned in the coming years, and that abortion law will indeed go back to the states. “Women’s lives are on the line,” New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said. “If this judge is confirmed by the Senate, the Supreme Court could take away women’s reproductive rights.”

If Roe were to be overturned, the outcome in conservative states seems clear: The Center for Reproductive Rights estimates that 22 states would ban abortion. “The threat level is very high now,” Amy Myrick, a staff attorney at the organization, told NPR. But that threat applies to blue states, too. Most states do not have laws guaranteeing a right to abortion, and a number of Democratic-leaning states have either failed to adopt measures that enshrine a positive right to abortion, or, as in New York, they recognize a limited right to abortion that’s seemingly out of step with their states’ politics. Some, like New Mexico and Massachusetts, even have archaic bans on the procedure that could theoretically come into play again.

“There are nine states that have adopted abortion protections and many of them are modeled on the standards set in Roe,” explained Elizabeth Nash, a senior policy analyst for the Guttmacher Institute, a non-partisan think tank that supports abortion rights. These laws vary from state to state. Some protect abortion access up to the point of fetal viability. Oregon’s laws are among the broadest: The Reproductive Health Equity Act, passed in 2017, requires private insurance plans to cover abortion services.

Outside those nine states, many American women would lack comprehensive access to abortion if Roe were overturned. That’s why pro-choice activists are pushing for updated abortion laws in places like New York.

“In New York, the abortion law is still regulated in the criminal code. There’s actually a first degree abortion and second degree abortion that applies to both providers and women,” Katharine Bodde, a senior legislative counsel for the New York Civil Liberties Union, told me. The 1970 law merely “carved out” an exception to the criminality of abortion, called “justifiable abortion.” The law’s limits are apparent today. According to an NYCLU report last year, “hospitals and health providers in New York are reluctant to provide abortion care to women past 24 weeks of pregnancy because of the threat that they could be criminally prosecuted under state law.”

“New York’s 24-week cutoff results in devastating denials of care,” the report added. “Women jeopardize their wellbeing to travel across the country to another state that provides the care they need–away from their friends, family and health care providers–often facing great financial cost, stress and added health risks. A low-income woman who lacks the means to travel must instead carry her pregnancy to term despite the risks, or wait to access care until her health deteriorates to the point that an abortion is necessary to save her life.”

The proposed Reproductive Health Act, which the NYCLU supports, would remove abortion from the state’s criminal code and regulate it instead as health care. It would expand exemptions from the 24-week cutoff to include fetal non-viability and risks to a woman’s health, not just her life. Current state law stipulates that abortion can only be performed by licensed physicians, but the RHA would clarify the right of physician assistants and nurse practitioners to perform abortions, either by prescribing medical abortion or providing abortion procedures.

New York legislators have introduced the RHA multiple times; it has repeatedly passed the state House, but failed to get a vote in the Senate. Governor Andrew Cuomo has long professed support for the RHA, and in a speech on Monday he blamed Senate Republicans for the bill’s failure to pass. But public pressure from gubernatorial nominee Cynthia Nixon, who is challenging him from the left, prompted Cuomo on Monday to urge the Senate, which is out of session for the summer, to reconvene to pass the law.

Cuomo isn’t the only Democratic governor racing to update their state’s outdated abortion laws. Governor Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island has also urged state legislators to convene a special session to pass the Reproductive Health Care Act, which would codify abortion rights in the state. The state’s abortion and contraception laws are uneven and some pre-date Roe. “One requires prior notice to a spouse. Another prohibits insurance coverage for an abortion. A third mandates the imprisonment for anyone who attempts to induce a ‘miscarriage’ in a pregnant woman. A fourth says: ‘human life commences at the instant of conception,’” The Providence Journal reported in February.

As she battles Democratic challengers in her race for reelection this year, Raimondo is being hounded by her own record on abortion rights. In 2015, she signed a state budget that required the state’s healthcare exchange to include plans that exclude abortion coverage. At the time, abortion rights advocates accused Raimondo of passing what amounted to restrictions on abortion access. (That year, 9,000 Rhode Islanders were automatically re-enrolled in plans that lacked abortion coverage.) Gloria Steinem and 50 other pro-choice activists cited this issue in endorsing one of her primary opponents, Matt Brown.

Massachusetts legislators are also working to update the state’s abortion laws. The state still has a nineteenth-century abortion ban on the books, in addition to laws requiring elective abortions to be performed in hospitals and banning the sale of contraception to unmarried women. Roe technically invalidated the abortion ban, and Eisenstadt v. Baird, decided a year before Roe, invalidated the contraception ban. But the Negating Archaic Statutes Targeting Young Women Act, or NASTY Women Act of 2018, would officially overturn the laws and end any chance they’d ever be enforced again. The state Senate passed the bill in January, and reportedly awaits a vote in the state House of Representatives.

In New Mexico, where Democrats control both chambers of the legislature, elected officials and abortion rights activists have renewed debate over the state’s pre-Roe abortion law. The law made it a felony for medical professionals to perform abortions unless a woman’s life was in danger, if there were fetal abnormalities, or if the pregnancy was the result of rape. New Mexico House Speaker Brian Egolf, a Democrat, told the Albuquerque Journal in June that legislators will prioritize repealing the law during their next session.

By no means is Roe certain to be overturned. The more likely scenario, as political science professor Jeffrey Segal explained to FiveThirtyEight last year, is that the Supreme Court’s five conservative justices hobble the ruling over time. “They might not overturn a precedent right away,” he said, “but they start chipping away at it until they can say, ‘Look, this precedent just isn’t workable and it’s time for it to go.” That’s why advocates like Nash, of the Guttmacher Institute, say liberals states have to act now to shore up abortion rights. “One is that we need to protect access to the right writ large,” she said. “Protecting the right to abortion may mean stepping away from the standards set in Roe.”

Three months ago, Mark Zuckerberg was sitting before Congress, promising to change Facebook’s ways. “I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here,” he said. “It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.” Zuckerberg promised to take privacy concerns more seriously, ensured members of Congress that he was open to regulation (so long as it was the “right regulation”), and pledged to do more to stop bad actors from abusing his platform.

Zuckerberg insisted that this was the beginning of a new chapter in the company’s history. The company would return to its roots as a “village square,” where people shared personal updates and photographs of their loved ones. Shortly after he left Washington, D.C., Facebook began airing national television advertisements in which it apologized for having lost its way.

However successful Zuckerberg’s testimony was as a public relations exercise, it did little to change the real problem. Facebook’s core business model is built around advertising, which means that it will always share its users’ data with advertisers. And, despite the company’s strenuous apologies, it is continuing to push the boundaries of privacy to ensure that its market dominance remains unchallenged. The latest front in that fight is facial recognition.

As The New York Times reported earlier this week, “more than a dozen privacy and consumer groups, and at least a few officials, argue that the company’s use of facial recognition has violated people’s privacy by not obtaining appropriate user consent.” The facial recognition software used by Facebook scans photos uploaded to the social network against a database of “unique templates” of user faces to help recognize them. It does so without alerting the person whose face has been identified or obtaining their consent.

In Europe, which has much more stringent privacy regulations than the United States, Facebook sold its facial recognition software as a tool for privacy protection. “Face recognition technology allows us to help protect you from a stranger using your photo to impersonate you,” the company said. In the U.S., concerns about Facebook’s facial recognition software have been overwhelmed by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a Trump-affiliated firm was given access to the private information of tens of millions of Facebook users. But consumer groups asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the company’s use of the technology.

This technology is not new, and its implementation—particularly in law enforcement situations—has been enormously controversial. But it does represent a new technological frontier and every large internet player is gunning for supremacy. Amazon found itself in hot water in May when the ACLU criticized its Rekognition program for “automating mass surveillance” and collaborating with sheriffs’ departments. (Some Amazon employees recently wrote a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos decrying the use of Rekognition by law enforcement agencies.) Google was criticized for its seemingly banal “Face Match” app, which compares users’ faces with classic works of art; the company denied that it was building a database of faces or using the app to train facial recognition software. (That may be true, but Google could presumably still use the data to do either of those things at any time.)

Facebook insists that it does not share its facial recognition software with advertisers. A Facebook spokesperson told the Times that the company’s technology is only used for those who have “their facial recognition setting turned on” and that it deletes the facial data if it is unable to find a match.

But Facebook is presumably gleaning data from its software, which it can then use to help target advertising. This might ultimately mean that such data is safe from companies like Cambridge Analytica, but the software still constitutes a violation of privacy.

There are also questions about how aware users are that Facebook is scanning their face, or if it has done enough to obtain their consent. Facial recognition appears to have been automatically enabled—I am a very light Facebook user and just noticed that it was being used on my profile—earlier this year with minimal notification.

This is in keeping with the defense that Zuckerberg made before Congress. There, he claimed that users had the tools to control their privacy—they just had to use them. He also suggested that, by and large, they also liked being surveilled, since the point of it is to improve their user experience. Some might find ad re-targeting—in which a product that you briefly looked at follows you around for days—creepy, but Zuckerberg told Congress it was popular. With its facial recognition software, the company is making a similar argument, claiming that criticism is overblown and that the technology is being used to improve user experience.

What this tells us is that, despite the advertisements that Facebook has run on television and in The New York Times, and despite its CEO’s doe-eyed apology before Congress, the company simply isn’t changing. Terrified of losing ground to competitors, it’s going to continue its ambitious rollout of invasive technology, which it will sugarcoat by claiming that it has its users’ best interests at heart.

Thirty miles northwest of Madrid lies one of Europe’s largest mass graves. Inside a massive underground basilica blasted into a mountain, the remains of over 34,000 people who “fell for God and Spain” rest in honor alongside the man largely responsible for putting them there: General Francisco Franco, Spain’s authoritarian ruler of 36 years. On a recent afternoon visit, both international tourists and a few Spaniards marveled at the immense size of the cavernous structure, which revealed signs of neglect through discolored walls and a leaky ceiling. Fresh flowers and roses adorned Franco’s tomb, a gray slab of concrete on the floor ringed by black marble: a tribute to one of the 20th century’s most notorious dictators.

Over four decades after his death, Spain’s infamous leader still generates heated debate and mixed feelings here, the product of a delicate democratic transition that saw post-Franco political leaders on the left and right forge “a pact of forgetting” to wipe the slate clean instead of holding trials to bring human-rights violators to justice. Yet in a country that has renamed streets and removed statues bearing Franco’s name and likeness, the Valley of the Fallen is publicly funded—to the tune of over 12 million euros since 2012—and largely untouched, standing as the most potent reminder of his rule. Now, Spain’s newest prime minister Pedro Sánchez, installed June 2, says Franco’s exhumation to a less controversial cemetery is imminent. “I believe that a mature, European, democracy like ours can’t have symbols that divide Spaniards,” Sánchez told the Spanish newspaper El País.

The Valley of the Fallen commemorates Spain’s bloody Civil War, which killed some 500,000 people between 1936 and 1939. General Franco led the Nationalists to victory over the Republicans, then taking his place as the head of government for the rest of his lifetime until his death in 1975. Designed, as Franco said, to evoke “grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and forgetfulness,” the Valley of the Fallen’s mountain basilica is topped by a stone cross almost 500 feet tall, an appropriate symbol of Franco’s “National Catholicism,” a key tenet of his conservative ideology. Many of the defeated, drawn from Franco’s forced labor and concentration camp system, built the site in the 1940s and ’50s. Estimates of how many laborers died during its construction range widely, from just fourteen to thousands of people.

In the months leading up to the site’s inauguration in April 1959, Nationalist and Republican dead were transported from across Spain in Franco’s bid to ostensibly create a space of “national atonement” that would commemorate the dead of both sides of the civil war. Hundreds of Republicans are believed to be buried there, and seven families are currently waging a campaign to bring their relatives home. It’s beginning to achieve results: The remains of four people were exhumed in April after years of legal obstacles.

Hundreds of thousands of people every year visit the state-owned site, which is administered as an abbey by Benedictine monks. Its supporters say that it should be left alone as a memorial to a violent conflict. Critics, however, compare it to the notion of a monument near Berlin glorifying Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.

The Sánchez administration waded back into the controversy surrounding the monument last month after years of indifference from the previous conservative government, which was forced out after being implicated in a corruption scandal this spring. The conservative administration had ignored the 2011 recommendations of a Valley of the Fallen commission set up by the last left-leaning prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which had called for the removal of Franco’s remains. They had also reversed a law of historical memory passed in 2007 aiming to exhume and re-bury in more appropriate locations 100,000 victims of civil war–era repression currently in mass graves throughout the Spanish countryside. Dissenting publicly from the government’s actions at the time—even passing a nonbinding proposal in parliament last year saying the Valley of the Fallen needed to be remade into a space “where the victims of the civil war and the dictatorship are recognized and treated with dignity”—the Socialists are now in a position to do something about it.  

The question is whether it’s even possible to turn the Francoist symbol into something other than what it is—to transform a fascist symbol into a site for national reckoning and rapprochement. 

Francisco Ferrándiz, a social anthropologist with the Spanish National Research Council who served on the commission, believes that dismantling its fascist symbolism is impossible. “It’s Francoism’s principal emblem and its most powerful expression,” he said. Instead, it should be “an attraction” that explains the perils of “totalitarianism.”

Others have gone further. One prominent Spanish historian said the Valley of the Fallen “will only be a beautiful place when it’s in ruins.” But few Spaniards advocate that, and they are divided on Franco’s exhumation. Around 46 percent support it, while almost 35 percent are opposed, according to a recent poll.

“[Franco’s exhumation] is a minimum reparation, but nowhere near justice,” says Silvia Navarro, the president of the Association of Pro-Exhumation Republican Families, a group that has advocated for the transfer of Republican remains back to their families.

Navarro’s great-uncle, José Antonio Marco Viedma, was 33 years old when he was executed with fifteen others by Franco’s army in the small village of Calatayud in September 1936. Then his body was dumped in a mass grave at the local cemetery—or so his family thought. Navarro and her family learned a decade ago that José Antonio had been dug up and transferred to the Valley of the Fallen a week after it was unveiled. She has campaigned to bring his remains back to Calatayud ever since.

The memorial, she believes, is too deeply connected with Franco’s legacy to serve as a place where Spaniards can come to terms with their country’s past. “How can you make amends with someone who has never offered an apology?” Navarro said. While she says “it wouldn’t be fair” to families of the dead to leave the monument to crumble, Navarro is unsure the Spanish government is capable of transforming the monument’s original meaning.

Eduardo Sánchez, a retiring anthropology professor at the University of León who witnessed Franco’s grand burial out of “a burning curiosity” in 1975, believes it can be done. “It has a very easy solution,” he says. “You remove Franco and turn it into a civil monument that honors the dead on both sides.” He also supports the impending transfer of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera—the leader of the far-right Falange party that backed Franco and is also buried in a place of honor there after being executed by Republicans—to a common grave within the site to further strip its symbolism.

In a maturing democracy that now outlasts Franco’s rule, Spain’s ability to reckon with the past has largely been influenced by who controls the levers of power in Madrid—and what political advantages they can wring from it. The Spanish political left, however, has been more willing to confront the legacy of the country’s fascist past, depending on the politics of the moment. “The commission was used to bolster their electoral support,” said Ferrándiz, referring to Zapatero’s government.

“Historical memory has been turned into a political tool,” says Dr. Queralt Solé, a professor of modern history at the University of Barcelona who has studied the Franco-era monument. The Socialists, she says, are seizing the advantage to isolate political rivals like the right-wing Popular Party and its newer anti-establishment competitors like Ciudadanos. As a young and untested leader, Sanchez needs to bolster his leadership credentials ahead of the next general election in two years—a difficult task given the Socialists control only one-quarter of Parliament.

What remains certain is that Spain’s narrative over its civil war will be contested for many years to come. The lack of a Spanish far-right like the kind that swept into power in Italy and Hungary, and made inroads in Germany, has perhaps eased the pressure to heal wounds of the devastating war. Yet the issue of how to suitably memorialize a conflict that caused so much pain and suffering echoes in the United States as well. The United States has long struggled with the ghosts of its own civil war, and it has seen white nationalists defend memorials and statues honoring the vanquished Confederacy—to dangerous consequences. Historian Eric Foner wrote that historical monuments are “an expression of power, an indication of who has the power to choose how history is remembered in public places.” Whether that power is shared among Spaniards will be key in determining the success of their own democratic experiment, and the extent to which Spain can begin to reckon with its bloody past.