It was one of the best pieces of advice I've gotten when it comes to parenting young children – don't make disciplinary decisions in the heat of the moment. Emotion clouds judgment, passion confuses reason.
I have thought a lot about that self-evident truth these last couple days as I've watched the furious explosion of emotional outrage detonating in response to the looming Supreme Court Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Just watch:
That is at least temporary derangement. It's far from measured opposition. It's not healthy. Nor are those who share bizarre, unhinged memes like this:
But here's what has weighed heavily on me these last few days. Those responses may not be rational or lucid, but they represent perfectly the mental and emotional capacity of our people, particularly young Americans.
We aren't a thinking people anymore. And we have raised an entire generation now coming into adulthood to feel their way through everything. The polarized, hyperbolic, unstable seizures that play out pitifully through hashtag activism are a testament to the real threat to our civilization.
As much as I firmly agree with former liberal Supreme Court icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg that Roe v. Wade was terribly reasoned, bad law (there's a reason Justice Alito quotes her twice in his draft opinion), once overturned, little will change ideologically or practically:
- Abortion will still be legal up to the moment of birth in half the country.
- Politicians will still fundraise gratuitously off the issue, playing on the frayed emotions of the warring factions.
- Young women will still face crisis pregnancies.
- Unscrupulous men will still do all they can to pressure girls they have abused into aborting away the evidence.
The primary difference is that the people will have a voice in how their state handles abortion law rather than being the powerless subjects of black robed oligarchs in D.C. Thinking people know this; people imprisoned by their emotions do not.
Consider the primary reasoning of Justice Alito in this leaked draft:
"The Constitution makes no reference to abortion."
"[Roe's] reasoning was exceptionally weak…"
"[F]ar from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division."
"Heed[ing] the Constitution [means] return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives."
"The authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives."
To a thinking person on the left or right, there is absolutely nothing outlandish, inflammatory, anti-woman, misogynistic, authoritarian, or radical about any of those statements. Quite the contrary, they are all reasoned, placatory, people-empowering, and constitutional.
That's why I contend that the great problem we face is that so many Americans are completely incapable of rational discernment unencumbered by their tribal passions. Evidence for that is legion, even found in the comically manic senior senator from Massachusetts.
The Supreme Court writes that they are returning the power to regulate abortion to "the people and their elected representatives." Elected representatives like Senator Elizabeth Warren. She then furiously rages on the streets of D.C. about how power is being taken from her. And fools lap it up, applauding and throwing money at her.
That is what we won't survive. Not our philosophical differences; our galling inability to think.
