Destabilized Saturday Edition #23

Cascading instability overturns Roe v. Wade, America is growing apart (for good?), women tearing up on the train, don't learn helplessness

Jun 25, 2022

On May 5th, in Russia and Roe v. Wade, I wrote this:

One of the core beliefs here at Destabilized is that the big discontinuities we’re living through – climate change, the internet, and democratic division and political instability – are interconnected in important ways. They can’t be properly understood without seeing how they interact and influence one another, and their total impact is far greater than even the immense sum of the parts.

And further down,

[T]he biggest reason Supreme Court justices now vote more consistently with their aligned political party is the organizations that screen judicial nominees will only support candidates with the “right” set of carefully vetted beliefs. Thus, the five votes to repeal Roe v. Wade are less a result of a desire for social approval from their Federalist Society comrades, and more a consequence of Republicans selecting Supreme Court nominees based on whether they have the right opinion on Roe v. Wade and the other issues important to the powers that be on the right. If you pick the right justices, it doesn’t matter who they hang out with.
This tight vetting screen, and the entire decades-long right-wing project of remaking the Court, was helped by the fact that it mirrored a similar process of polarization and ideological purification in national politics, including among the electorate. For example, the polarized and ideologically sorted electorate allowed Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell to pay no political price for refusing to hold hearings on President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016 following the death of Justice Scalia. They estimated, correctly, that what they gained from increasing turnout among base voters base would outweigh what they lost by angering swing voters and institutionalists.
Moreover, the polarization of American politics generally, and McConnell’s refusal to acknowledge a Democratic president’s constitutional authority specifically, were both fueled by the internet media ecosystem. Under the old centrist-establishment newspaper and TV ecosystem, media outlets would likely have disapproved of the system-destabilizing move and would’ve had the monopolistic power to keep attention focused on it. In contrast, under the internet media ecosystem of 2016, after a brief flurry of outrage from Democrats, people were distracted by other things (the attention war never sleeps).
Further, Republicans were able to run their 2016 gambit because they had a Senate majority, which was helped by the fact that as the party coalitions polarized over the previous 40+ years, Republicans became the party of rural white voters. Because each state gets two senators regardless of population, the Senate is biased toward small states, and a disproportionate share of small states are predominantly rural and white. As rural white voters became ever more Republican, therefore, the Senate grew increasingly biased against Democrats. This had consequences:
“The five justices that Politico reported make up the court’s anti-Roe majority — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — are the only justices in American history whose nominations were supported by senators representing fewer voters than the senators who opposed them.”
This highlights yet another way polarization enabled the reversal of Roe, because polarization and the Senate small-state bias is the source of the Electoral College’s more modest small-state bias. Two of the three presidential elections Republicans have won since 1988 were popular vote losses (2000 and 2016). Indeed, four of the five votes to overturn Roe, all but Clarence Thomas, are justices appointed by presidents in office because the Electoral College put them there even though they received fewer votes than their opponent.
Bottom line, a key factor in Roe v. Wade being overturned is American social division and political polarization.

Shortly thereafter I wrote:

Cascading instability occurs when the emergence of one locus of instability, like extreme social division and political polarization in the U.S., creates the conditions for others to emerge, like a radical right-wing Supreme Court and an emboldened Russian dictator. Those conditions of instability, in turn, create more instability, including the Ukraine invasion and the reversal of longstanding legal precedents.

I will have more to say in the future about the reversal of Roe v. Wade, including its relationship to cascading instability.

For now I’ll just add that we should try not to get so caught up in the political, cultural, and constitutional drama of it all that we forget the thousands upon millions of human tragedies this will lead to. Rape victims’ trauma, widespread fear, women's lives derailed, abused foster kids, and worse.

My Work

Climate change will dramatically worsen inequality

Place will not be the only driver of unequal climate harms. The more time I spend reading and thinking about climate change the clearer it is that money, along with location, will be the critical dividing line. Most people and communities with enough money will be able to protect themselves from the worse climate impacts, while impoverished people and communities around the globe will be more exposed and have a more difficult time finding shelter from literal and figurative storms.

Interesting Reads

America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good

What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support.