Reacting to the leak of Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Jonathan Last of the Bulwark writes that “for the first time since the days of Jim Crow, it is going to matter a lot what state you live in.” After that thoughtful entry into the topic, Last goes on to explain himself:
Both political parties are interested in controlling peoples’ lives. In many places, the Democrats, for instance, want to prevent you from using plastic grocery bags. Democrats forced restaurants to put the number of calories in a dish on restaurant menus. You may recall that in New York City Democrats even wanted to control the maximum size of a soda you could buy. Quelle horreur.
And the Republicans want to exert control over Americans’ lives, too. They want to be able to control the presidency on an ongoing basis with a minority of the popular vote. They want to impose their own rules on how voting may happen, how votes are counted, and even whether or not governmental bodies may choose to reject the results of vote counts. They want to control what the CEOs of private businesses may or may not say in public. They want to criminalize abortion.
So, you know, both sides I guess?
Since neither party is terribly hospitable to libertarian sensibilities, we are entering a period in American life where the state you live in will matter quite a lot in terms of your day-to-day life. If you live in a Democratic state, you will have to deal with various bits of nanny-ism that may or may not annoy you. Your local government might mandate composting. Your House rep might announce her pronouns at a town hall. Some women in your state might get abortions.
If you live in a Republican state, what can be said in your child’s classroom may be dictated by the angriest MAGA Karen. You might have to wait in line to vote for several hours. Your state legislature might have the power to decertify the results of an election.
Now, this may or may not come as a surprise to those of us who remember Last as the columnist who once observed that “when we talk about abortion after Roe, we’re not talking about a few hard cases here and there, where the situation is morally complex. We’re talking about a wholesale industry,” supposed that “even good-hearted Kantians must shudder when they survey the enormous, deadening scope of the world Roe has wrought,” and called Roe itself “a gruesome event.”
Of course, Last had already professed to have opted out of the abortion wars — “what are you supposed to do when you think abortion is a tragedy and that Pro-Life Inc. doesn’t really care about life?” (note the kind of false equivalency that Last mocked in the excerpt above) — but this is another step entirely. The comparison he sets up is between relatively pro-life states and segregationist ones. Few Americans, I think, would fail to recoil at such a comparison.
But those who pressed on might have noticed another problem: Last is not comparing like to like. Instead of placing the Republican and Democratic positions on a topic beside each other, he’s compared the former’s supposed position on election structure, education, and abortion to the latter’s on . . . grocery bags, calories, and soda size?
If I were to play Last’s game and describe Democrats’ position as uncharitably as I could manage, I’d argue that Democrats also want to impose their own rules on how voting may happen, how votes are counted, and even whether governmental bodies may choose to reject the results of vote counts. They want to legalize late-term abortion across the country. They want teachers to preach the virtues of fringe theories about gender and race in the classroom.
Now I happen to think he’s quite talented, so it’s my assumption that Last knows that the arguments he’s making are poorly grounded and constructed but are nevertheless easy on his readership’s eyes. And if these are the sacrifices he believes he needs to make in order to keep them, I’d only remind him that there are ways to make a living that are much easier on the conscience.