Balkanization: A Recipe
One of the most basic features of American life is freedom of travel and easy passage between states. Heading south out of Vermillion, South Dakota, you’re not going to be interrogated at Nebraska’s border checkpoint. As I’ll never get tired of saying, I responded to the worst of the pandemic fearmongering in the summer of 2020 by putting a tent in the car and camping my way through Wyoming and South Dakota, where the locals looked at my California license plate and then greeted my terrifying outsider presence by bringing me beer and offering me dinner and hanging out by the campfire, and I was forced to ask a bunch of dogs if they knew who was a good girl.
We pass freely between states on the presumption that we share values and an identity, and firefighters in Iowa and Arkansas have 9/11 displays to honor the New York City firefighters — their brothers — who died. Idaho farm kid watches the towers fall, then heads down to the recruiting office. If you attack Manhattan, you attack Lubbock.
But a question in the last comment thread has me thinking about our trajectory. This ad…
…is a fascinating cultural artifact for the things it assumes, and for the things it expects viewers to assume. A dad is taking his young daughter, a minor, to another state for an abortion, but the vicious redneck cop interrupts that healthy, decent family behavior, because he’s a vicious redneck in a vicious redneck state. Imagine some mean cop intervening in a child’s abortion!
But the questions are pretty obvious: Who got that child pregnant? Where’s mom? Does she know? Is dad sneaking his daughter off for an abortion? Why? The teenaged girl is under arrest for “denying motherhood,” but the cruel, puritanical authority figure doesn’t have some questions about who got a minor pregnant, and under what conditions?1
The wonderfully progressive world of secret abortions for middle schoolers lives on these unasked questions.
California is very good; for example, a 12 year-old can get a secret abortion or secret treatment for domestic violence injuries. That’s freedom, see, and the heartwarming expression of progressive values: seventh-graders who have sex a lot, and get beaten by their lovers, but it’s all hidden from mom and dad, who don’t need to know about it. The extremists in the red states are trying to take that away from you!
Remember, Democrats in the California legislature were angry that a Republican colleague introduced a bill to increase the penalties for child sex trafficking. Freedom is passing around a tween girl to your adult friends and clients, using violence to keep her in line, but maybe you red state losers don’t understand that. Click here to watch a California state senator (who has since termed out) talk about his day job as a pediatrician, and how he handles childhood STDs and pregnancies secretly, so mom and dad don’t find out. That person goes home at night thinking he’s a good man.
We talk a lot about a national divorce, or the emergence of a low-intensity civil war, or the sudden rupture of a hot civil war. But the nearest-term consequence of blue state Jacobinism and demoralization will be the emergence of cultural barriers in the federalist system — the arrival of anger and suspicion in daily interaction.
Why are you sneaking your child into California might actually become a pretty good question. And that’s why the “why don’t you just move?” approach doesn’t work. California is attached to the rest of the country. A sick organ infects the whole body, so heal that sickness in place while it’s still localized.
Federalism allows different political paths, but federalism unbalanced by some degree of shared culture is unsustainable. Sharp cultural divergence breaks our political order, inevitably. So the Lincoln Project has produced an effective wake-up call, but not in the way they intended. Fascinating, given their history, that they had a blind spot around an ad about an adult man sneaking an underaged girl to an abortion clinic. Do you want to live in a world where you can’t sneak children to the doctor after you have sex with them?
Maybe he needs to sit down with that handmaid’s commander!
Stripe -- the payment processor for Substack -- has informed me this morning that they have concerns about the site, and they're preparing to pause payments. Interesting.
EDITED TO ADD: After a long discussion, fixed. Problem solved.
It's almost as though White Dudes for Harris know, somewhere in the back of their minds, that one day they may need to sneak an underage girl across the state line.