How an anti-abortion advocate sees the current Supreme Court and life after legalized abortion

It is good to consider various good faith points of view. Crackpottery doesn’t deserve much if any serious consideration, other than as a means to assess how deranged some people are. 

Considering other points of view, asserted facts and reasoning provides some understanding of why and how people think and draw their conclusions. A New York Times editorial by Erika Bachiochi, a conservative legal scholar, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute is staunchly anti-abortion. She has argued that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. She takes comfort in what the the current Supreme Court is likely about to do to abortion rights.

Ms. Bachiochi writes:

.... over the past two presidential election cycles, I felt a strong sense of relief that I was free from the hard trade-offs of voters in battleground states and could just cast my vote for a write-in candidate.

Yet listening to oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last week, I realized more clearly than before how grateful I am to those pro-lifers who did what I did not, would not, could not: cast a vote for Donald Trump.

Politics is an art of prudence, and what I regarded as a deal with the devil they took to be a prudential act to achieve an essential end. For ending the abortion regime must be the keystone of standing against the individualistic libertarianism that characterizes our politics, left and right — and privileges the powerful over the weak and dependent. Ironically, and perhaps accidentally and certainly boorishly, Mr. Trump may have brought about what others could not.

While oral arguments are no perfect indicator of how the court will vote, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all appointed by Mr. Trump, seem ready to join Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito (and perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts) in sending the issue of abortion back to the people to resolve. While Justice Kavanaugh homed in on the Mississippi solicitor general’s argument that the Constitution is neutral on abortion, Justices Gorsuch and Barrett (as well as Chief Justice Roberts) worked to discern if there was any way to uphold the moderate Mississippi ban without striking down both Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. (Both sides agree: There is not.)

If Roe goes, the pro-life movement can begin where it left off in 1973, working to convince fellow citizens (especially in blue states like mine) that we owe dependent and vulnerable unborn children what every human being is due: hospitality, respect and care.

But it’s not only that. Mr. Trump’s economic populism (at least in rhetoric) blasted through the libertarianism that has tended to dominate the Republican Party, a libertarianism that has made its alliance with pro-lifers one of strange bedfellows indeed. If the Republican Party wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere — it will have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself.

So what is the path ahead that he has now likely made possible? A post-Roe America will need to move beyond its wrongheaded obsession with autonomy. It will need to align both its rhetoric and its policies better with the realities of human existence and so should work to bring forth a renewed solidarity instead. We humans are not best understood as rights-bearing bundles of desires who progress through life by the sheer force of our autonomous wills. We are beings who are deeply dependent on one another for every good in life — first and foremost for our very existence, as we did not come to be by an act of our own will.

The Democrats were once a closer fit for the solidaristic vision, which is why before Roe, pro-lifers once happily made their home in the Democratic Party. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s party was one that long sought to put the culturally essential caregiving, character-shaping work of the home at the very center of the economy, ensuring that families enjoyed economic security while they did that most important work. Democrats once sought a family wage and saw the importance, as the Progressive-era feminist reformer Jane Addams put it, of the “family claim over the social claim.”

But today’s Democratic Party — though rightly intent to provide robust economic support to struggling families — seems also intent to contract out the nurturing of infants and toddlers to “caregivers” rather than attempt to ensure, as their predecessors did, the kind of economic security that enabled (especially) mothers to care for their young children themselves.

Support for the abortion license over the past half century helped transform the Democrats from the party of the family wage to the party of academic, technocratic and corporate elites. The abortion regime has been deeply complicit in preserving a modern economy built not around the needs of families but on the back of the unencumbered worker who is beholden to no one but her boss.

Individual and societal reliance on abortion for women’s participation in economic and social life was the linchpin of the Supreme Court’s decision to reaffirm Roe in its 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey. As such, it was perhaps the strongest argument in the abortion-rights lawyers’ arsenal at the Dobbs oral arguments. But as even Planned Parenthood’s Alan Guttmacher foresaw in a 1968 speech, reliance on abortion as a backup to contraception tends to discourage contraceptive use and otherwise increase sexual risk taking, with women, not men, left to manage the asymmetrical risks.

Meanwhile, Casey’s claim that society has relied on abortion for women’s progress at once discounts the legion of anti-discrimination laws passed over the past century — while capitulating to the demands of an increasingly hegemonic market. After all, easy access to abortion (not to mention egg freezing and other technopharmacological interventions) helps businesses ensure that women are readily available to meet the all-encompassing needs of the globalized marketplace, thereby delaying real accommodations for time-consuming (and sometimes unexpected) parenting, especially for those women at the lowest socioeconomic levels in our society.

Such abortion-for-equality arguments are a far cry from the revolutionary vision Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray enunciated in the original statement of purpose for the National Organization for Women in 1966. Therein, one finds not calls for abortion on demand (or abortion at all) but instead for the country to “innovate new social institutions which will enable women to enjoy the true equality of opportunity and responsibility in society, without conflict with their responsibilities as mothers.” The statement urged not only robust anti-discrimination law, which would come to pass, but also better recognition of the “economic and social value of homemaking and child care,” which would not.

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, the pro-life movement will need to redouble the efforts of pro-lifers on the ground who for a half century have offered support, assistance and care to pregnant women and their children, both born and unborn. And crucially, it should call men to task.

But it can also take its rightful place in the post-Trump Republican Party — if the party, especially in red and purple states, can prove itself capable of policymaking on behalf of workers and their families. This will require that Republicans not fall back to doing the bidding of the business class whose own daughters will be, in the near term, anyway, a short flight or car ride away from legal abortion even after Roe.

Unpacking that vision of reality and reasoning

I will assume that Bachiochi is sincere and take her at her word in what she wrote. She starts with the fact that she could not vote for the ex-president. But she is grateful for the anti-abortionists who voted for him did by making a deal with what she calls the devil. That means was to achieve an essential end, namely overturning Roe and getting rid of abortions. This brings up a point argued here repeatedly. Specifically, many Republicans believe the ends justify the means, including voting for the devil. From what I  can tell, Bachiochi makes a principled and moral stand. That makes her a rare thing in the Republican Party.

Maybe she will be RINO hunted out of the GOP for calling the ex-president the devil.

Next, she refers to a fetus as (i) the weak and dependent, and (ii) dependent and vulnerable unborn children. That is a standard anti-abortion rhetorical tactic. One humanizes a non-sentient fetus by calling it the weak and dependent or a child and by making pregnant women who want an abortion listen to little fetus heartbeats, even before there is a functioning heart. She does not believe that the rights of the fetus are any less than the rights of the mother. That is open to debate, but in her mind it isn’t.

Bachiochi looks forward with enthusiasm to what needs to be done once the court overturns Roe and Casey. What needs to be done include (i) convincing the unconvinced that unborn fetuses are morally due hospitality, respect and care, (ii) convince the Republican Party to offer the country ethnic diversity and economic solidarity, or a working-class brand of conservatism, and (iii) somehow give economic security to enable especially mothers to care for their young children themselves. Point i sounds like a rather hard sell, but it is legitimate politics. The anti-abortion folks are free to try to convince the unconvinced.

But on points ii and iii, Ms. Bachiochi is way off the GOP reservation. The Republican Party is about as laissez-faire capitalist as it is Christian nationalist. Bachiochi is clearly in the Christian nationalist wing of the party, but the capitalists are not going to accept her advice because of power and money. She is OK with women staying home to raise the children while dad is out hunting for food to put on the table. That is a bit of central Christian nationalist dogma. But providing economic security so mother can stay home amounts to redistribution of wealth. That is contrary to infallible Republican dogma that demands power and wealth to be concentrated with the elite White men and big industry. Can one feel a RINO hunt coming on? Hard to tell.

Her argument that women do not rely on abortion is not credible (to me). The tens of thousands of women who get abortions each year are in fact relying on an abortion to prevent having an unwanted child. Despite the thick clouds of smoke that conservatives spew on this issue, access to easy adoptions or not, women necessarily rely on abortion to prevent an unwanted birth. Adoption access is irrelevant.

Her argument about what the women’s movement in 1966 stood, moms stay home and raise kids, for is interesting. She argues that recognition of the “economic and social value of homemaking and child care” has not yet had tangible economic impact. Who is to blame for that? Not the Democrats. Her own party stand firmly in the way. Is abortion really mostly just about working for capitalists and women would to stay home if they could afford to as she argues? Could the GOP actually be capable of policymaking on behalf of workers and their families, as she hopes? Have women changed from what they were in 1966 and society really is static and she clearly implies?

As a whole, Bachiochi’s facts and reasoning are not persuasive. Some of it is incoherent. Her own party will not lead to the vision of America she advocates. Her Christian nationalism blinds her to what her party really stands for, and it isn’t what she wants. Once Roe is overturned or gutted but left barely alive, the anti-abortion people are not going to come out and do outreach. They have been told and now most believe that pro-abortion people and Democrats generally are evil socialists and communists who want to impose tyranny and make Christianity illegal. On top of those inconvenient truths, her own party sure as death and taxes is not going to make things economically easier for women. Christian nationalist dogma stands directly in the way of that and so does laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., just about the entire GOP ideological framework and mindset. 

If one considers her words carefully, one can almost hear a Democrat asking for economic justice. She asserts that “this will require that Republicans not fall back to doing the bidding of the business class whose own daughters will be, in the near term, anyway, a short flight or car ride away from legal abortion even after Roe.” At least she realizes and publicly admits that inconvenient truth about the Republican Party, especially its laissez-faire capitalist wing. That seems to make Bachiochi a heretic in her own party. 

Questions: 

1. Is this unpacking of Bachiochi’s vision of facts and morality mostly reasonable, mostly unreasonable or is it mostly too hard to tell because reality and and morals about abortion are basically subjective and personal?

2. If one believes that reality and and morals about abortion are mostly subjective and personal, and an anti-abortionist refuses to compromise[1] by demanding the overturn of Roe, does that make them more democratic than authoritarian on that issue, or vice versa? 

Footnotes: 

1. Leaving Roe mostly intact, not overturned or gutted into near-oblivion, is a compromise between the competing interests in the woman and the state[2] that has stood since the case was decided in 1973. The Roe compromise was to leave the decision to the woman until viability, after which point the state could ban abortion. The alternative of forcing a woman to give birth against her will is no compromise at all. Overturning Roe destroys the compromise and shifts power to the state from the people.

2. The anti-abortion side strenuously argues the state has an interest in protecting the fetus and that state interest trumps the woman's interest in not wanting to give birth against her will. They have to argue that, because that's all they have got that isn't subjective and personal. I do not understood that argument as the anti-abortionists frame it. It just makes no sense to me. The state arguably does have an interest in seeing to it that a pregnant woman does not harm a fetus at any time during a pregnancy after a woman becomes aware, e.g., by taking drugs and bearing a baby that is drug addicted and/or brain damaged. Those harmed babies tend to impose significant burdens on society. But by what facts or logic does the state have any other interest in what a woman decides to do before her fetus is viable? That is why anti-abortionists have to, and do, strenuously argue that the rights of a non-sentient fetus attach from the moment of conception. 

The point of viability compromise in Roe has to be rationalized away somehow by anti-abortionists. Attaching constitutional personhood to a fertilized human egg is the core reasoning of what anti-abortionism and its refusal to compromise stands on. I find that reasoning to be deeply immoral because it is authoritarian and logically unjustified. It is a partisan political argument clearly grounded in subjective “religious logic” disguised as secular logic. Words such as God, Christ, and Christianity appear nowhere in Bachiochi’s attack on Roe and abortion rights. Obviously, that is not logical. It is theocratic, not secular and not democratic.

Money in politics dislikes transparency

Politicians can think up excuses to say that special interest money does not affect them. They dislike being asked about this. They prefer to operate in secrecy so that voters 'don't get the wrong impression,' or see conflicts of interest when there are actual conflicts, etc. The excuses for opacity are endless. In the case of the US Supreme Court, the absolute need for secrecy of its decision-making are said by the court to be obvious, but no judge has ever articulated what those obvious reasons are. It's like porn, you can't describe it, but you know it when you see it.

The New York Times writes on one current example of political corruption in operation in an article entitled De Blasio Fought for 2 Years to Keep Ethics Warning Secret. Here’s Why.:  

When Bill de Blasio first took office as mayor of New York in 2014, he called two powerful real estate developers who had active projects in the city, and asked them to donate money to a nonprofit organization that he had created to advance his political agenda.

The request to help his nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, seemed to violate the city’s ethics law, and a ban against asking for contributions from people who had business pending with the city. Within months of his solicitations, Mr. de Blasio was formally warned by the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board — in a previously undisclosed letter — not to repeat the behavior.

But even after that warning, the mayor continued to hit up well-connected donors for money, according to documents that the city has now released after years of an extraordinary legal campaign by the de Blasio administration to keep the documents secret.

The new details of Mr. de Blasio’s outreach to donors were contained in a pair of secret letters from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board to the mayor. In the first letter, dated July 2014, the board said the mayor had violated ethics laws with his two fund-raising calls to developers and warned him not to do it again.

The second letter, sent in September 2018, found that Mr. de Blasio had continued the practice and included a forceful reprimand of the mayor. The letters were released this week, after the State Court of Appeals denied a final effort by the mayor’s office to keep the documents secret.

The city had, for more than two years, fought The New York Times’s efforts to obtain the board’s correspondence with the mayor, denying an initial Freedom of Information request and then fighting a lawsuit filed by The Times.

“By soliciting these three donations from firms with business pending or about to be pending before executive agencies,” the second letter said, referring to the mayor’s 2018 fund-raising efforts, “you not only disregarded the board’s repeated written advice, but created the very appearance of coercion and improper access to you and your staff that the board’s advice sought to help you avoid.”

The NYT goes on to point out that the mayor’s spokeswoman, Danielle Filson, said in writing statement that “the calls the mayor was making at this time were to support affordable housing legislation and his effort to achieve universal pre-K for every child in New York City, which is now a national model. He has consistently acted in good faith and followed the process set out for him. The board closed these cases and determined no enforcement action was necessary.” 

Filson also claimed that the mayor made “appropriate disclaimers” during his fund-raising calls. She asserted that potential donors were told that they would not benefit or be punished if they chose to give or not give money. But de Blasio did not do that.

One disappointing thing here is that, once again prosecutors flat out refused to prosecute a sitting politician. Some of the companies that broke lobbying laws were just wrist slapped with fines. When it comes to politicians and companies or rich people making illegal donations, the rule of law has mostly simply collapsed and vanished. Ethics is irrelevant. Laws are irrelevant. Democracy and the rule of law are crumbling before our eyes.

Another disappointing thing is that the NYT had to fight in court to get access to the two incriminating letters from the ethics board. If there was nothing to hide, then why did de Blasio spend tax dollars to fight in court to keep them hidden? 

Questions: 

1. Should campaign contributions be outlawed and public financing of major elected offices be made mandatory? Or, do campaign contributions affect nothing and are good because the cash is just innocent free speech?

2. Is de Blasio's assertion of acting in good faith plausible or more likely just a politician’s lie?

The allure of democracy: Even tyrants claim to be democrats

North Korea is among the world's most repressive dictatorships. The dictators named the country the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The DPRK holds elections and if you don't vote, you get shot dead, or maybe spoken to in stern terms. If you don't vote for the dictator, you get shot dead or put in work camps and worked to death. Voter turnout is above 95% and votes for the dictator are at least about 99%.

That is real democracy in action. Or maybe not.

Now, China is claiming that it is a better democracy than America. The New York Times writes:

As President Biden prepares to host a “summit for democracy” this week, China has counterattacked with an improbable claim: It’s a democracy, too.

No matter that the Communist Party of China rules the country’s 1.4 billion people with no tolerance for opposition parties; that its leader, Xi Jinping, rose to power through an opaque political process without popular elections; that publicly calling for democracy in China is punished harshly, often with long prison sentences.

“There is no fixed model of democracy; it manifests itself in many forms,” the State Council, China’s top governing body, argued in a position paper it released over the weekend titled “China: Democracy That Works.”

It is unlikely that any democratic country will be persuaded by China’s model. By any measure except its own, China is one of the least democratic countries in the world, sitting near the bottom of lists ranking political and personal freedoms.

Even so, the government is banking on its message finding an audience in some countries disillusioned by liberal democracy or by American-led criticism — whether in Latin America, Africa or Asia, including in China itself.  

China’s paper on democracy was the latest salvo in a weekslong campaign seeking to undercut Mr. Biden’s virtual gathering, which begins on Thursday.  

In speeches, articles and videos on state television, officials have extolled what they call Chinese-style democracy. At the same time, Beijing has criticized democracy in the United States in particular as deeply flawed, seeking to undermine the Biden administration’s moral authority as it works to rally the West to counter China.  

On Sunday, the foreign ministry released another report that criticized American politics for what it described as the corrupting influence of money, the deepening social polarization and the inherent unfairness of the Electoral College.

Here, China is making an obvious dark free speech ploy. People, including some or many Americans, are openly questioning the value and viability of democracy. That idea has been promoted for years by Russia, China and the American radical right, especially the Republican Party at least since the 1980s. China can and probably will convince nearly all of its people that it is a real democracy, and one that works better than American democracy. 

China's blast is another example of an intense global and radical right internal attack on true democracies. China and Russia attack us online all the time by sowing social distrust, disinformation and polarizing propaganda and lies. In the US, Republicans do the same, while they hob knob with European dictators, thugs and kleptocrats. They like what the see in dictatorship and kleptocracy, i.e., power and wealth. What could be more appealing to politically ambitious people with big egos than power and wealth?

Questions: 

1. Is American democracy under attack by China, Russia and the Republican Party?

2. Is China an honest democracy or a lying dictatorship?

Democracy in action -- see! Everyone agrees!

American democracy: An increasingly unstable complex adaptive system

Complex adaptive system

Complex adaptive system (CAS): a system that is complex because it operates as a dynamic network of interactions, but the behavior of the ensemble or the whole may is not always predictable according to the behavior of the components; examples include nations, groups of people, traffic flow, the internet, systems of government, ecosystems, financial markets, army ants, bee hives, and individual brains (discussed here before)

Consilience: agreement between different approaches to a topic of different academic subjects, especially science and the humanities; agreement among different approaches increases the likelihood that a belief supported by consilience is more apt to be real and more accurate than one based on data and analysis from a single source of research

Consilience has emerged regarding American democracy. Researchers applying CAS theory to it see that our democracy is in serious trouble. Researchers assert that a major component feeding the instability is political and social polarization and the loss of mental diversity among people in groups who self-associate and are not exposed to different facts and political opinions.

One source comments on several papers on American democracy and its status as a CAS. The papers were published together on Dec. 6, 2021 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS):   

Much like an overexploited ecosystem, the increasingly polarized political landscape in the United States — and much of the world — is experiencing a catastrophic loss of diversity that threatens the resilience not only of democracy, but also of society, according to a series of new studies that examine political polarization as a collection of complex ever-evolving systems.

Ultimately, as social interactions and individual decisions isolate people into only a few intractable camps, the political system becomes incapable of addressing the range of issues — or formulating the variety of solutions — necessary for government to function and provide the services critical for society.

“The complex systems perspective demonstrates that the loss of diversity associated with polarization undermines cooperation and the ability of societies to provide the public goods that make for a healthy society,” according to an introduction by issue editors Simon Levin, Princeton’s James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Helen Milner, the B.C. Forbes Professor of Public Affairs and professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, and Charles Perrings, professor of environmental economics at ASU.

“Polarization is a dynamic process and that is what complexity theory can best help us understand,” they wrote. “As environmental and complexity scientists have shown in other contexts, diversity maintenance is critical for many systems to thrive, and often to survive at all.”

Complex adaptive systems are widespread in fields from physics and financial systems to natural systems driven by evolution and socioeconomic-political systems, said Levin, who is director of the Center for BioComplexity based in Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI).

Neurologist Steven Novella at Neurologica blog comments on this research:

What various researchers found is that when we obtain our political news from a network of like-minded people several things happen. First, the group tends to narrow over time in terms of political diversity. This happens because those who are considered “not pure enough” are ejected from the network, or leave because they feel less welcome. Further, people within the network tend to get access to less and less political news total, and the news they are exposed to is increasingly polarized. This doesn’t happen when such networks do not routinely share political news to begin with.

The core problem, therefore, seems to be the diversity of sources of information. Similar networks of people, in fact, can have a moderating effect on individual members, if the group maintains a diversity of sources of information reflecting a diversity of political opinions. Further, a healthy moderating effect is supported by individual members exploring outside the group for sources of information.

These patterns follow similar mathematical trends to other very different phenomena in other complex adaptive systems. For example, such trends tend to be non-linear, meaning the more extreme they get the more the trend accelerates. Further, there seems to be tipping points of no return. Once such information networks are radicalized beyond a certain point there may be no way back. Their models indicate that Republicans are likely already beyond this tipping point, while Democrats are rapidly approaching it.

What, then, can be done? As individuals the apparent solution is to maintain a diversity of information sources, and continue to explore for new sources. Don’t rely on any one or limited number of networks of like-minded people for your information. Further, strive to be tolerant of a diversity of opinions among your various social circles.

What can we do as a society? This is a tougher question. Some have argued, I think reasonably, that we may need to bring back the fairness doctrine in news reporting. There is also a lot of focus on social media algorithms, which seem to have automated the very effects that these researchers warn against, sucking people into an epistemic bubble of increasingly narrow and radical views.

Local depolarization vs. global polarization

A PNAS news site comments:

In the polarization studies that have been done to date, says Macy, one of the most striking insights is how much of it can be explained by the interplay of just two sociological forces. One of them is the assimilation, or “influence” effect: People who interact a lot will eventually start to think and act alike.

This effect is so strong, and so well documented in the literature, that social scientists spent decades trying to figure out why polarization exists at all—or why, for that matter, humans are divided by language, fashion, cuisine, music, folkways, and a host of other differences. Why do these divisions often endure for centuries, instead of gradually fading away as the assimilation effect seemed to predict?

A big part of the answer turned out to be the second force, homophily: people’s preference for hanging out with others like themselves. One influential study of the power of homophily was Robert Axelrod’s 1997 model of culture formation. This model turned out to anticipate today’s rural–urban split between Republicans and Democrats, as well as the self-reinforcing echo chambers that have now become familiar on Twitter and Facebook.

Recent modeling work has also yielded a second key insight about polarization: namely, the crucial role played by negative emotions, which can turn both influence and homophily inside out. Just as people can be drawn together by the influence effect, says Macy, “they can also become more different from each other through negative influence,” also known as “repulsion.” And the flip side of homophily is xenophobia, he says, “which is the tendency to run away from those who are different.”

Negative emotion is obviously crucial for understanding the intergroup venom we’re seeing today. But Noah Friedkin, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, points out that efforts to model its effects actually date back to the birth of “balance theory” in the 1940s and 1950s.

Recent years have seen a marked rise in “affective” polarization, a feeling of mutual dislike and mistrust between the two sides. The trend is illustrated in data from the American National Election Survey: People's feeling of warmth toward members of their own party (green) has held steady since 1980, whereas their feelings toward members of the other party (purple) have dropped. The difference (black) is a measure of affective polarization.

But just about everyone in this field is considerably less optimistic about proposals to reform social media. For one thing, it’s not clear how effective any such reforms would be. Even though Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms are widely viewed as vectors for misinformation and employed as partisan echo chambers, researchers are still arguing about how much they actually contribute to polarization. According to some studies, in fact, the algorithms that determine what users see in their feeds are just bit players; most of the online divisions come from people sorting themselves the way they always have, through “birds-of-a-feather” homophily.

For another thing, the reforms could easily backfire. In 2018, for example, Bail led a team that tested a frequently proposed idea for opening up the echo chambers. They paid more than 1,600 Republican and Democratic Twitter users to follow bots that would periodically show them tweets from figures in the opposite party. “The hope was that this would lead to moderation,” says Bail. But in fact, he says, people mostly just recoiled from the discordant information. “Nobody became more moderate,” he says. “And Republicans, in fact, became significantly more conservative.”

That is sobering news. It seems that the Democrats are polarizing, presumably significantly or mostly in response to Republican polarization, which has been building for decades as social changes became increasingly unpleasant for what appears to be most or nearly all conservatives. When a CAS like American democracy becomes too unstable, it enters a period of chaos starting at a bifurcation point. The end result is unpredictable. Some form of authoritarianism, autocracy, fascism, plutocracy, kleptocracy, laisses-faire capitalism, and/or Christian theocracy could be plausible end results and the start of a new period of equilibrium. Far less plausible outcomes would seem to be true socialism, communism or anarchy. 

Since the election of the ex-president in 2016, it has felt as if the US entered a period of relative social and political chaos and unpredictability, which continues today. However, that is just a personal observation.

Other information source: Political sectarianism in America, A poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion, and moralization poses a threat to democracy, 2020

Question: Do CAS research results indicating increasing instability in American democracy seem plausible, or is this merely an academic curiosity?

Bifurcation map of the CAS of population growth of an animal

(when the line splits in two, the CAS has bifurcated 

and the system changes in ways that tend to be unpredictable)