Say what you will about Americans, we are lazy. We are afraid of change. We fear what we don’t understand, and what we don’t understand could fill a library we’ll never visit. Our Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, designed a system that makes passing new laws extraordinarily challenging, and that system has over the years ossified to the point of total immobility. You’d be forgiven if you assumed that elections had no consequences and that there was little difference between one politician and another, because this system gives individual members of Congress very little power. Even if a party wins control over the House, the Senate, and the presidency, which you might assume would give them the authority to pass whatever reforms they see fit, they are constrained by arcane rules that make it nearly impossible to pass major legislation. Joe Biden has been unable to pass most of his agenda through an ostensibly friendly Congress, and Donald Trump, for all his bluster, was similarly stymied by courts and the Senate.
Progressives will sometimes ask us to imagine a better future—look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s posters of high speed rail traveling through a verdant park filled with happy cyclists. Optimistically, progressives believe their fellow Americans are capable of conceiving of a better world, then working to make that world a reality. Conservatives have a cruder, possibly more realistic view of what motivates Americans: they appeal to the side of our nature that wants plentiful meat, cheap gas, the freedom of a semiautomatic weapon strapped to your ankle. Conservatives bank on Americans not thinking about anything but what is within five feet of their noses, and sometimes failing to do even that. Trump became president assuming Americans are suckers, and he was right.
Political scientists have a term called “thermostatic public opinion.” What this means is that when Republicans are in power, the public tends to dislike Republican policies and votes for Democrats. When Democrats come to power, the public dislikes their policies and votes for Republicans. Instead of rewarding a political party for following through on its campaign promises, voters punish them. There are plausible explanations for this, one of which is that people who are unhappy about the state of the country are more likely to vote, but maybe the issue is that Americans just want things to mostly stay the same, even if that means they stay shitty. The truest thing ever written about America is this Onion headline: “Nation Reaffirms Commitment To Things They Recognize.”
In part, this just reflects the views of relatively wealthy people. The poor are less likely to vote than the rich1, renters are less likely to vote than property owners. If you have a house and a car and health insurance, the status quo looks pretty good to you, and there are a lot of people like that. Bernie Sanders’s championing of Medicare for All made him a hero to the left and, briefly, a viable presidential candidate. Yet Biden beat him by being the candidate of business as usual: even as most 2020 Democratic presidential candidates followed Sanders in endorsing some form of Medicare for All, Biden stood apart by noting, correctly, that many millions of Americans liked their private health insurance. You rarely win elections by painting a vision of expansive change; the safer path is to promise to protect what voters already have.
The simpler way to say all this is that you win in politics by being normal. “Normal” changes over time, of course: In 2008, Obama felt compelled to assure people (falsely) that he wasn’t in favor of gay marriage, but now that enough Americans approve of gay marriage (and LGBTQ+ people more broadly), rank homophobia is seen as a strange outlier. A major project of political activism is to shift what’s regarded as normal, to move the “Overton window” to the right or left so that mainstream candidates can embrace positions, like gay marriage, that were once regarded as strange.
The Supreme Court is a political institution but it isn’t answerable to the electorate in the way politicians are; it’s therefore free, for good or ill, to ignore what’s “normal.” On Friday, when the Court’s arch-conservative majority ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson that there was no longer a constitutional right to abortion, it broke significantly with the majority of the public who thinks that abortion should be legal in most cases2. This was widely anticipated after a draft of the decision leaked last month, but it was still a shocking and unjust decision that will compel many pregnant people to carry their fetuses to term, potentially risking their lives and health as well as their families' stability.
Right-wing anti-abortion extremists have been working toward this end for decades now, and they celebrated. It was a victory decades in the making. Because it was the Supreme Court that originally made abortion legal on a federal level, these anti-abortion extremists worked outside of the electoral arena. They mostly didn’t try to convince a majority of the country that abortion is murder, and Republicans in purple states, like Virginia’s new governor Glenn Youngkin, have sometimes dodged the issue while campaigning. Instead, the anti-abortion movement focused on elevating right-wing lawyers to federal judgeships, and then elevating those judges to the Supreme Court. Thanks to some timely retirements and deaths on the high court, Republicans got more justices appointed than Democrats, and now a 50-year precedent no longer stands.
The effects were terrifyingly immediate: All over the country, clinics abruptly canceled abortion appointments. Many Republican-run states have “trigger laws” already on the books that will now come into effect; in Texas, the law will ban all abortions from the moment of conception, with narrow exceptions for pregnancies that threaten the life of the mother. There were already many places in America where getting an abortion was difficult thanks to regulations designed to shut clinics down. A 2018 paper found that 27 U.S. cities (including 10 in Texas) were “abortion deserts” where people had to travel over 100 miles in order to get care. Many states mandate counseling before an abortion and a waiting period that adds hardships for people who already have to take time off work and travel in order to have an abortion.
These policies disproportionately impact poor people and people of color, and so will the blanket bans on abortions in red states—imagine being forced to give birth when you lack health insurance or maternity leave, as is the case for millions of Americans. But relatively wealthy people will also suffer under these bans. Even if you can afford to take time off and travel out of state to get an abortion, even if your employer will cover your travel costs (many businesses have announced they will), it’s still an imposition to fly to an unfamiliar city for a medical procedure that can be emotionally and physically arduous. This is a far-reaching policy change that will change the lives of millions; it’s a testament to the Supreme Court’s power that conservatives enacted this even though Democrats nominally control the presidency and Congress.
If you’re in Nashville or Atlanta or Phoenix or Austin and need an abortion you will soon have to travel in order to get what is usually a routine medical procedure3. If you’re in fucking Michigan you might not be able to access abortions anymore thanks to a 1931 law that’s still technically on the books. People who live in what are otherwise perfectly livable cities with progressive policies are going to be compelled to move. If you’re a company headquartered in one of these cities, recruiting highly skilled workers just got more challenging. You want me to move to Atlanta? Knowing that if my partner or I need reproductive care I might have to fly to Maryland? How about I stay put in New York, which is still solidly in the developed world?
There will likely be a backlash to these bans from corporations, who have lately recoiled at the hard conservative edge of the Republican Party. In 2016, North Carolina passed a deeply transphobic “bathroom bill” at the behest of anti-LGBTQ+ crusaders. In the political turmoil that followed, businesses boycotted the state, concerts and the NCAA basketball tournament canceled plans to come to North Carolina, the state lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and Democrat Roy Cooper was able to eke out a victory in the 2016 gubernatorial race. The law was largely repealed a year later.
You might see a similar dynamic play out in the aftermath of Dobbs. Corporations with highly educated (and therefore progressive) workforces will be pressured to denounce abortion bans. Major events may shift venues to states without draconian theocratic laws. This isn’t because corporate America is “woke,” it’s because corporate America hates controversy and political upheaval. The conservative movement just lobbed a grenade into the country’s boardrooms.
Ordinary voters will hate these sweeping changes as well. The anti-abortion movement has until now had the luxury of operating in the shadows, playing its judicial branch games without having to worry too much about what people thought. Now every Republican will have to defend these bans. They'll have to explain to voters in suburban Georgia why they have to book a flight with their daughter when she gets “in trouble,” they’ll have to tell voters in Texas that if you get raped, you have to carry the rapist’s child to term. Maybe they’ll say that such a child is a blessing from god. Maybe they’ll say, “I do trust women enough to control when they allow a man to ejaculate inside of them and to control that intake of semen.”
Abortion bans aren’t just inhumane. Americans have an incredible tolerance for the inhumane, the cruel, and the pointlessly vicious. But we despise change, we abhor weirdness, and abortion bans are weird. They’re going to inconvenience well-off people who need abortions—rich people hate inconvenience—and it’s going to force people who would rather not think about abortion to think about it.
The day of the Dobbs decision, Dave Portnoy, the scummy right-leaning bro CEO of Barstool Sports, called it “insanity” in a video, complaining, “you’re taking away basic rights. What’s next, same-sex marriage?” He went on: “We have to vote for the morons like Biden, who’s borderline incompetent because it’s too dangerous to vote Republican.”
Portnoy is emblematic of a certain type of American: narcissistic, spiteful, endlessly privileged yet pissed off for no reason, proud of his own ignorance. There are too many of this type of guy for the left to write them off as lost causes. Like it or not, you need their votes. And to get them, you need the only message that reliably works in American politics: We might be bad, but have you *seen* the other guys?
Top photo by Flickr user Miki Jourdan.
Poor people, of course, often have difficulties getting time off work to vote or struggle to find transportation to polling stations.
Though a majority of the public also approves of some restrictions on abortion.
It’s not even quite right to call it a “procedure,” since in so many cases having an abortion means taking some pills.
Notably practical approach - helpful. Given that "reality" depends on what bubble you're in, though, why is the Republican vision of 5 ft circumference and no wider more realistic than AOC's vision, which isn't just bullet trains and non fossil fuel transportation, after all. )Bullet trains are an exaggeration of what can be built in time to cut ytranspo emissions, at that.)