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Identity politics have come to America, with a vengeance

Three big social issues plague America today: vaccination, guns, and abortion. On all three, Republicans are preferring harm to their constituency over commonsense public health measures, while Americans on the whole support them.

This is most obvious in Republican opposition to vaccination against COVID. As a result, the corona virus is killing far more Republican voters, mainly in rural areas and the suburbs, than Democrats. Hundreds of thousands of Republican voters have died, and likely hundreds of thousands more will die before the epidemic ebbs definitively. An epidemic of the unvaccinated means an epidemic of mostly Republicans.

Guns are a more complicated story. They kill more Americans by suicide than by interpersonal violence. Suicide is far more common in Republican-dominated rural areas than Democratic-dominated cities, where interpersonal violence is more common. The deaths from guns are an order of magnitude lower than the deaths from COVID, so tens of thousands of Republican voters are dying due to their party’s opposition to gun safety measures that Americans overwhelmingly support.

Abortion is more complicated still. But ending abortion in red states, which is what will happen if Roe v Wade is overturned in the Supreme Court, will saddle those states with the added welfare costs associated with unwanted children and poor mothers, while depriving those states of the economic flows attributable to abortion clinics and associated medical care. Abolishing abortion will also increase law enforcement burdens, as illegal procedures are likely to substitute for some legal ones. Americans on the whole favor the availability of legal abortion in many instances.

Why would a political party choose to harm its own constituency in these ways?

The justifications for the Republican position on vaccination and guns are similar: the issue, they say, is freedom. People should be free to get vaccinated or not and free to own and carry guns or not. This position entirely disregards the impact not only on the people opting for freedom but also on the rest of the population. The obvious analogy is seat belts: they are required to protect the people driving from physical harm as well as the broader population from the economic damage due to injuries in car accidents.

The justification for the Republican position on abortion is the inverse: the issue, they say, is not the freedom of a pregnant woman to choose but rather the right of a fetus, even a non-viable one, to live. Where that right is spelled out in the Constitution I don’t know. Certainly fetuses in the 18th century had no such right. I suspect that if men got pregnant the position would be reversed: freedom to choose would prevail, as it does for vaccines and guns.

Along with denying the validity of the 2020 election results and objecting to teaching about slavery in American schools, these three issues have come to define what it means to be a stalwart Republican today. Identity is not subject to logic or persuasion. Attempts to convince are treated instead as attacks on identity. Once people are convinced their identity is being attacked, they will regard almost any response as justified. Party becomes self. Self-defense is justified.

Thus the growing effort to bias elections irretrievably in the Republican direction, through gerrymandering, restrictions on voting, empowering of state legislatures to interfere in elections and even overturn election results. Texas has no problem with using the added members of the House of Representatives it is entitled to because of increased numbers of LatinX and other minorities to increase white Republican representation in Congress. Other Republican-controlled states will follow suit.

So the Republican positions on these three social issues, by establishing a clear identity, help to justify anti-democratic measures intended to keep Republicans in power no matter what. The consequent deaths are ignored. Those of you who follow the Balkans and the Middle East, about which I more commonly write, will understand what this is all about. Identity politics has come to America, with a vengeance.