Russia and Roe v. Wade
The two biggest news stories of 2022 have something in common
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.
Is it just a coincidence, then, that reproductive freedom in the U.S. and peace in Europe are both being ended within a several-month period? No, it isn’t, not entirely anyway. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the reversal of Roe v. Wade are connected, and in a way that reveals the vast implications of the growing political and social divisions in the United States.
Let’s start with the imminent overturning of Roe v. Wade, which when it happens will reverse a nearly 50-year-old precedent that has remained consistently popular among the public.
The outcome is shocking, if not entirely surprising to close observers of the Court. In its wake, many are asking why it’s happening, and why now. The 2019 book The Company They Keep: How Partisan Divisions Came to the Supreme Court argues that the justices vote with much greater partisan consistency now than at any previous point because of the way their professional and social networks have polarized. Because they’re human, the argument goes, they, like all humans, will naturally seek validation from peers and associates. As social-professional networks in the D.C. legal world polarized, so did the Court.
It’s a good argument. It’s rooted in real human motivations that are often overlooked in political science analysis of elite decision-makers, and professional legal networks in Washington D.C. have indeed polarized. However, in focusing on the justices motivations, the authors underplay a more significant factor.
Quick, relevant detour: a common misunderstanding of how money influences Congress is to think of corporate campaign contributions as bribes that elected representatives accept in exchange for votes. That’s not the most important dynamic. We know members’ votes tend to align with the positions of the companies, unions, and other powerful interest groups on their side, so if it’s not bribes why does it turn out that way? It’s because the people who get elected to Congress do so in large part because those interest groups backed them in the first place because they already held the right beliefs. A union doesn’t have to buy a senator’s vote if she already believes strongly in the importance of unions, and business groups don’t have to bribe a representative to cut the corporate tax rate if he already believes taxes on profits are too high. In other words, through various political means – influencing party elites to oppose them, supporting their opponents, spending money to defeat them – powerful interest groups create barriers that candidates who oppose them struggle to get past.
Similarly, the 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 voters1 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.2 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.
Division in America is also a significant factor in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s harder to know exactly how significant since the motivations are all mixed up in the dark mind of Vladimir Putin, but Putin has talked for years about division in America and the decline of American empire. It’s clearly something he thinks about and understands to be an obstacle to Russia assuming what he sees as its rightful place as a major global power.
After January 6th, the acceptance of the Big Lie by a supermajority of Republican voters, and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and backlash against the chaos it left behind, it’s easy to imagine Putin concluding America wouldn’t want to step-up to defend Ukraine, and wouldn’t have the political will and popular support to do it even if the White House wanted to.
About this, Putin was wrong. But by the time he realized he was wrong, it was too late, there was no way to withdraw without conceding Russian weakness, which Putin appears singularly unwilling to do.
In tort law there’s a whole literature about what it means to be the cause of something. Like if you put your collection of priceless antique china in your front yard to show it off and my basketball hits the edge of my driveway backboard, bounces into your yard, and breaks most of the china, who caused the China to break? There are various ways to think about it, which I won’t bore you with here. I always found the “but for” rule to be the most intuitive. Something, let’s call it event1, is a contributing cause of event2, if event2 wouldn’t have happened but for event1.
Though I concede it’s impossible to say with certainty, there’s a strong argument that but for the significant political divisions in the United States, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine.
American division and polarization, fueled in part by the dynamics of the internet media ecosystem, brought us arguably the two most significant events of 2022 – at least so far. The disruptions are interconnected.
Swing voters today are disproportionately low-information voters so the chances were slim that a procedural question, even an important one, would raise their ire.
Because each state’s electoral votes are equal to its number of representatives (proportional to population) plus its number of senators (2 for each state).