Dramatic pro-choice victory in Kansas demonstrates the power of the appeal to personal freedom
Central to the argument that swayed 60% of Kansas voters to preserve protections for abortion rights codified in their state constitution was the value of personal freedom. It was not the only piece of the argument, but it was key to bringing along a big share of a predominantly Republican electorate to vote resoundingly for choice. They voted for choice not Democrats, even though most of pro-choice energy and grassroots work came from Democrats. In fact, one of the tenets of American conservatism is that it’s the Left that poses the greatest danger to personal freedom and personal choice.
The high-profile alignment of “pro-life” Christian absolutism with the political Right creates the illusion among Democrats that Republicans are universally opposed to abortion. To the contrary, Kansas voters proved that views on the legality of abortion cross party lines. There are some Democrats—Catholics in particular—who are against abortion in most if not all cases, and there are obviously plenty of Republicans in Kansas who believe in a lawful right to an abortion. My father was a bedrock fiscal conservative who demonized Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he was also an agnostic, and he believed in abortion rights.
Lest we think many pro-choice Republicans will swing to Democrats over the abortion issue when voting in the general election, consider the case of Rusty Bowers, who as Republican Speaker of the Arizona House famously refused to bow to Trump in support of the Big Lie. Bowers subsequently testified to the Jan. 6 committee. Bowers evinced his righteous opposition to the attempt at bullying him into breaking election law. However, asked if he would vote again for Trump, Bowers said he said he probably would because of the danger Democrats posed to the country.
After everything that has come to light since the Jan. 6 Committee began its careful work eliciting information from people who were in the Trump administration, Bowers might possibly reconsider that stand. But Bowers has company among Republicans who disbelieve the Big Lie but are nonetheless ready to support Trump in 2024 when push comes to shove. Bill Barr, Donald Trump’s right-hand stooge as Attorney General, having declared Trump’s claim of winning the 2020 election “detached from reality,” asserted he would vote for Trump again because of the threat from socialists on the Left.
Such is the dread of socialism among conservatives (especially politicians beholden to big money), Democrats have a stiff challenge getting their votes even when the Republican candidate is a credible threat to democracy. Mull that over, ye who would like to expand Social Security and pass Medicare for all—in the view of conservatives, that would push us to the brink of tyranny of the collective.
The Democrats might have an edge in the midterms among Independents and moderate Republicans IF abortion rights became paramount, and IF the “pro-life” forces were to continue to sound like uncompromising zealots. But the general election vote will turn on a composite of issues in which the leading element is the economy, and the pro-lifers—having learned their lesson in Kansas—will soften their tone and their platform to win points.
Still, proponents of state control over women’s reproductive rights cannot win the personal freedom argument on abortion. And the desire for personal freedom occupies a huge space in the American psyche.
Different social arrangements and cultures give the desire for personal freedom varying degrees of scope. In China, familial obligations tightly constrain personal freedom—part of their culture for centuries—and now the state has added more constraints. One thing that makes America exceptional is the wide scope of personal freedom available in this country and the high value placed on it. Liberty, along with life and the pursuit of happiness, is the cardinal “inalienable right” of every person enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. (Set aside a history of oppression beginning in 17th Century America and extending into this very day, in which Thomas Jefferson took part—we are talking about an aspiration.) While not everyone knows or remembers the exact words of the Declaration, the ideas saturate American culture.
The issue of personal freedom is a bright line in nearly every political question in America today, from tax rates to environmental regulation to medical care to housing—you name it, personal freedom is part of it, and often a decisive factor.
If you frame a political argument largely in terms of personal freedom, you run a risk of ceding ideological ground to groups in this country who weaponize the principle of personal freedom in order to dominate the political landscape. In Kansas, the pro-choice campaign adopted the personal freedom issue as a practical necessity in such a conservative state, and the result was a decisive victory. But the long-run risk is to hand ammunition over to extremists who can turn the intense desire for personal freedom against you on other issues.
Prominent in the struggle for political dominance in America today is resistance to public health measures by the Right, most vividly illustrated by conflicts over gun rights and the COVID pandemic in the last two years.
You can anticipate the comeback of gun rights partisans to future efforts to limit access to guns: “You made a big deal out of personal choice when it came to your right to kill unborn babies, and you want to deprive us of tools to protect ourselves and our families? Take away our personal choice? And while we’re at it, guns save lives.”
It doesn’t matter if this is a false equivalence. It will be a rallying cry for gun rights across the land.
For those of us on the political Left, the public benefits of women’s access to reproductive health care—in which abortion plays a minor part—are obvious and would be a winning argument in the clash between pro-choice and pro-“life” forces among, well, public-spirited people. But it wouldn’t play well among conservatives for whom any public program—be it Medicare, rent subsidies, labor unions, government funding of higher education—smells of collectivism. The public health issue had to give way to the personal freedom issue when it came to persuading the Kansas electorate to vote for choice.
Guns as a public health issue: ignorance as policy
When it comes to dangerous stuff like driving cars or smoking or living near an oil refinery that is spewing toxins into the air and water, getting as much accurate information as we can about the hazards in order to combat them ought to be a top priority . However, in each of those cases the industries affected did their damnedest to keep evidence from us. Their first line of defense was to obfuscate, withhold information, and flat-out lie. And so it has been with the firearms industry. In the case of guns it is gun manufacturers acting principally through the NRA who have clamped down on the flow of information to the public (including gun owners).
Inserted into the 1996 omnibus spending bill of the U.S. government was the Dickey Amendment, mandating that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” In the same spending bill, Congress earmarked $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget, the exact amount that had been allocated to the agency for firearms research up to the previous year, for traumatic brain-injury related research. (This is not to minimize the important of traumatic brain injury, it is to question why both research on guns and on traumatic brain injury could not have been included in a $6 billion dollar bill—the two together amounting to .00086 or less than a tenth of one percent of the omnibus spending, which itself was a small fraction of the total federal budget, which was $1,789 billion in 2000.)
In other words, when it came to research about a phenomenon that was routinely killing tens of thousands of Americans a year, ignorance became policy.
Although the Dickey Amendment did not explicitly ban research on gun violence, for about two decades the CDC avoided all research on the topic for fear it would be financially penalized. Congress “clarified” the law in 2018 to allow for such research, and the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill earmarked the first funding for it since 1996.
Yay for the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill! The amount allocated for research on firearm injury prevention soared to all of $25 million split between the CDC and NIH.
However, as stated in the New York Times, “backers of the research say the money is a pittance compared with the breadth of the problem.”
The policy shifted from total ignorance to “meh–let’s take a look.” As for “the breadth of the problem,” a 2019 Congressional report estimated that gun violence costs the U.S. $229 billion a year. (About 9,000 times the amount of federal money budgeted for research.) If we consider the life of each of the 40,000 people who died from gun violence as priceless, the cost rockets to infinity.
At the tail end of this post I put two videos on the subject of approaching guns as a public health issue. Both of them stress the need for more data and analysis of the data in order to make wise recommendations working in the middle ground between ban-all-guns and all-guns-all-the-time. Also, check out this article in Science News where two authorities discuss gun violence and prevention.
There has been legislative movement toward greater gun control in 2022 at federal, state, and municipal levels, surveyed by Emma Tucker on CNN, July 30. Most of these laws are promulgated as “common sense gun legislation,” and vary from state to state and municipality to municipality.
Unfortunately, this “common sense” legislative patchwork makes the task of gathering meaningful data and analyzing it so complex that it calls for massive technical and human resources. That’s why the aforementioned $25 million split between the CDC and the NIH is called “a pittance” by backers of the research. “Common sense” can lead you astray. For example, since mass shootings of strangers comprise less than 2% of gun deaths, more emphasis should be placed on the day-to-day use of handguns for suicide (more than one half of deaths) and one-on-one crimes often between persons known to each other, than on banning assault rifles.
The personal freedom and private ownership stumbling blocks will always impede progress on gun control. But the kind of granular evidence that could come out of comprehensive research that is now missing might make some inroads where currently we have the sweeping demonization of guns on one side and “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” on the other. Knowledge is power. In these days of fierce partisanship where truth is often the first casualty, knowledge has been devalued, but it’s not nothing.
In the next post I will take up the bizarre battle against public health in the tragic response to COVID-19 in America.
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See below for two videos on guns and public health
The first video—”Do Gun Laws Work?”— is the fourth part of a four-part series entitled “Guns and Public Health.” It was made in 2017 and could be a little dated—the incidence of mass shootings has risen since then, but they are still a small part of gun violence. Also it was made before the restrictions on research stemming from the Dickey Amendment were loosened. It’s packed with information on what has worked and not worked in the U.S. and other countries.
The following video is of a TED talk made in 2019 by Megan Ranney, “How the public health approach can solve gun violence.” Ranney’s starting point: gun violence is an epidemic—not as a figure of speech, but a literal epidemic. Looking at it through the public health lens rather than a political lens offers a better path to solutions. She describes a four-part approach “that we have used throughout history to solve public health epidemics.” She discusses partnering with Dr. Christopher Barsotti, gun owner, gun safety instructor, and emergency physician, who founded the nonprofit “Affirm Research,” dedicated to “creating solutions [to gun violence] based on facts.”
Ranney: “When we demonize guns and gun owners, we will not make progress.”
BTW Ranney speaks with such clarity and enunciation you can probably ramp the playback speed up by 50% and comprehend it satisfactorily.
Enjoy!
Excellent examination of the divergent repercussions of Freedom as a predominant position.
I remember for decades during most of the Roe era, when Democratic politicians running in conservative districts would take a position of “I am personally against abortion but strongly support a woman’s right to make the choice herself as has been affirmed as a Constitutional right.” Democrats won Senate and House seats with that position.
Taking that position now that Roe has been overturned is not a tenable alternative. Getting pro-life Catholics to again vote Democratic will require demonstrating the fascist racists the Republicans have become. Stopping the MAGA cult is a winning position when it is clearly demonized with the truth.
Fortunately the positive legislation passed in the last few weeks adds to the Democrat’s appeal. The ability of President Biden to strengthen and expand the NATO alliance, to help defend Ukraine and avoid a nuclear WW III holocaust is an enormous accomplishment.
Thanks, Elliott. Good point about the new tack that pro-choice Democrats must take.
Glad to see someone defending Joe Biden. He’s been getting little credit where enormous credit is due, and the fixation of liberal pundits on who Democrats want to run for President in 2024 undermines political progress with Biden NOW at the helm. Also on Biden: yes, his low energy is frustrating, and the contrast with the bombast of Kevin McCarthy and others of his attackers makes him LOOK weak. But speaking as a 76-year-old whose energy is also not what it was at age 40, I would argue that what he’s lost in energy he’s made up for in wisdom–an asset underappreciated in a culture where snappy Twitter posts pass for deep insights. Quiet yes, slow on the uptake yes, but hardly weak when you consider all that he’s up against–to include Nancy Pelosi creating an international crisis at a time when the President could use some slack.