The Tribal Flexibility of "My Body, My Choice"...and What It Says About Our Politics

 

The more that our politics has realigned along ethnonationalist fault lines, the more incoherent it's become ideologically.  That seems counterintuitive as we're constantly told that ideological rigidity has left our governing institutions stuck in cement.  But the left's response to last month's Roe vs. Wade ruling really shed a light on the cherry-picked libertarianism that has been creeping into political messaging over the years and hit a crescendo in the Trump era.  Everybody is a libertarian....and nobody is a libertarian.  Everybody wants the individual to have dominion over their own body....and nobody wants the individual to have dominion over their own body.  It depends entirely on the constituencies connected to each issue, and it's stomach-churning to watch political leaders shouting "my body, my choice" on one issue while taking the diametric opposite position on the next.

The last week of June was a perfect encapsulation of where we are.  On the last day of the week, the Supreme Court's pending announcement of the overturning of Roe was made official, and people freaked out for a long list of legitimate reasons.  But in the two preceding days, the FDA made back-to-back announcements that it was going to, respectively, order the nicotine levels in legal cigarettes cut to "nonaddictive levels" and outlaw Juul, the most popular vape product on the market.  Only weeks earlier, the FDA doubled-down on its decision to ban menthol cigarettes and effectively turn more than 10 million mostly black Americans into criminals. Many of the same political leaders who angrily pivoted to "my body, my choice" talking points on Friday, June 24, were loudly cheering on the FDA's rulings on Wednesday, June 22, and Thursday, June 23.  Is it even possible to entertain more dissonant thinking than for relegating tens of millions of American tobacco users to criminality for exercising personal autonomy over their bodies and then aligning with "my body, my choice" absolutism on abortion in the same damn week?

Those guilty of this degree of cognitive dissonance regarding bodily autonomy would be quick to accuse me of false equivalence for comparing the freedom to smoke to the legal protection to abort a pregnancy, but such a dodge is merely an excuse to camouflage their incoherence and intellectual dishonesty.  If anything, the "my body, my choice" doctrine can be applied much more purely to tobacco or vape use than it can to abortion given that a third or more of the country fundamentally rejects the premise that a fetus is exclusive domain of the woman's body rather than its own distinct life.  I'm not one of them, but like most Americans, my views on the issue are nuanced.

As much as Europe is thought of by Americans as the ultimate "blue state" across the Atlantic Ocean, the abortion laws in European countries are, or rather were, much more restrictive than the post-Roe United States.  Most nations only allow legal abortion within a window of 18 weeks or less of becoming pregnant.  Such a limitation throws a substantial monkey wrench in the doctrine of "my body, my choice" because it effectively concedes the pro-life position that a fetus becomes its own life after 18 weeks.  So by the 19th week of pregnancy, very few countries in the world abide by a "my body, my choice" doctrine consistent with the chants at abortion rights rallies and routinely mouthed by American political leaders in the last three weeks exclusively as it relates to abortion.

Most conservative and libertarian critics have pounced that COVID vaccine mandates are simultaneously contrary to chants of "my body, my choice" and contrary to the position advocated by most of the political leaders chanting "my body, my choice".  It's not an apples to oranges comparison since pandemic-era vaccinations are about public health while abortion (and tobacco use) are about individual health but, nonetheless, the critics have a point.  I've never been entirely comfortable with a federal or state government mandate for telling people they have to take a certain kind of medicine, and I think with some more creative thinking and more cooperation by the insurance companies, vaccination compliance could have been more successfully achieved without resorting to mandates.  The fact that the vaccines haven't even come close to working as advertised has not helped the argument that individual liberties need to be suspended to impose them, despite my early optimism that the COVID vaccines would work the way other vaccines do and actually prevent infection and transmission for those who are immunized.

Even this week, we got another reminder of how the definition of "freedom" is defined entirely by tribal priorities.  California Governor Gavin Newsom is running advertisements in Florida inviting Sunshine State residents to move to Florida if they want "to get their freedom back".  Conservatives did a collective spit-take that the state with the highest income tax and highest gas tax in the country--and where the most populous county is days away from imposing another mask mandate due to rising COVID infections--would compel anyone to move from Florida in pursuit of "freedom".  But it was nonetheless a savvy ploy by Newsom who's clearly throwing out a trial balloon for a 2024 Presidential run.....because to a large faction of Americans obsessed with matters of cultural identity, being able to teach the most fashionably progressive viewpoints on race and gender ideology is what "freedom" is all about.  To these voters, Newsom's California seems less oppressive on personal freedom than does De Santis' "don't say gay" which became law in Florida earlier this year.  I don't think there are nearly as many of these kinds of voters as Newsom and fellow cultural progressives believe there are, but it's the sort of thing that could set him up well for soliciting campaign donations for his pending Presidential run.

It all adds up to a depressing reminder of the degree to which we're two different countries talking past each other.  As divided as I thought the country was at this point in 2016, it's exponentially worse after Trump so effectively radicalized the voting bases of both sides.  The Supreme Court verdict to overturn Roe vs. Wade couldn't have happened at a worse time, pouring gasoline on our tribal divisions.  Expect to see much more of the tit-for-tat we saw this past week with the story of the 10-year-old rape victim who had to flee Ohio for Indiana to get a legal abortion, where one side seizes onto the story before it's confirmed and the other side summarily dismisses it as fake news, all to leverage the political debate.  Given the polling, the Democrats should be poised to benefit mightily from the uneven split on this issue and cut their losses in November's midterms, as I've been suggesting for months.  To some degree, I expect they will.  But not as much as they could, even discounting the rotten fundamentals for the incumbent's party.

The biggest problem for both parties is that, now more than ever, they're seen as putting the thumb on the scale to reward their supporters and punish their critics, greatly limiting crossover appeal.  The heated rhetoric of cable news and the world of online political warfare are the biggest contributors to this poison, but not the exclusive contributor.  When parties are seen as cherry-picking their messaging to suit their preexisting coalitions at the expense of ideological coherence, voters are gonna pick up on it, now more than ever with so many voices from equally tribalized media sources telling them so.  Trying to be libertarian on abortion rights or marijuana legalization while calling for vaccination mandates or gleefully supporting criminal penalties on more than 40 million tobacco and vape users are a couple cases in point.  If you're not seen as negotiating in good faith, voters will assume you're not interested in negotiating at all.  That's what our politics have become....and we're worse for it.