Cultural Hegemony in the United States

Deplatforming

One of the most profound methods of the cultural hegemony is the deplatforming of alternative viewpoints. If the people dominated by the cultural hegemony are simply not exposed to viewpoints other than those of the cultural hegemony, then they are much less likely to deviate from that orthodoxy.

This can manifest itself in two ways, one more public and one more subtle.

Misrepresentation and Defamation

Once viewpoints that deviate from the orthodoxy favored by the cultural hegemony are deplatformed, the proponents of the cultural hegemony are left to explain why people disagree with the hegemony’s orthodoxy at all. It is in this void that another hegemonic tactic is deployed: the misrepresentation of alternative viewpoints in order to make them unappealing.

This recalls a humorous anecdote from my days as an undergraduate university student in which I was asked, “Do you support Communism?” When I replied in the negative, I was immediately told, “Then go tell poor people you want them to starve!”¹

While this is an obviously facile example of a viewpoint being misrepresented, it illustrates well the technique of misrepresentation. If people did believe my lack of support of Communism was due to my desire for “poor people to starve,” then people would be less inclined to deviate from Communism, which for many decades was the cultural hegemony of eastern Europe and other areas.

Because of the prominence of identity politics in the United States, many if not most of these misrepresentations of alternative viewpoints involve some invocation of “racist,” “misogynistic,” “homophobic,” “transphobic,” etc. Thus, misrepresentation of alternative viewpoints and defamation of the people who hold them are typically intertwined.

To be sure, there is some amount of racism, sexism, etc., in human civilization, and this prejudice² explains some of the viewpoints held by some people. We can be sure that it is not the case that 0% of viewpoints in the world can be attributed to bigotry. But we can also be sure that it is not the case that 100% of viewpoints that deviate from the cultural hegemony can be attributed to bigotry, though that is what some would like us to believe.

Coleman Hughes spoke about the ubiquity of people being called “racist” during his time at university:

And so I was definitely in that 1% that rebelled when I was at Columbia. I tried writing for the student newspaper, but it was so absolutely captured by students with far-left ideology that, you know, I could hardly write a sentence without them trying to fact check me on a book they’d never read.

And so I, you know, at some point gave up and just started – I had a hunger to not just say things I was supposed to say to get along. And I also had – I think what my friend Kmele Foster calls “the melanin force field,” which is, you know, the fact – the fact of the matter is as a – as a black person, a lot of the people critiquing me on campus were white. And in their mind that gave them less standing to critique me if I did have contrarian views and in some way made it easier for me socially to actually be honest about what I thought, I think relatively, because I couldn’t really be called a “racist,” which was just a ubiquitous slur hurled at people.

Many people in the United States today rightfully try to avoid racist viewpoints. Misrepresenting viewpoints alternative to the ones advanced by the cultural hegemony as “racist,” etc., thus discourages individuals from considering the alternative viewpoints. If people who are dominated by the cultural hegemony have never encountered an actual good faith exposition of an alternative viewpoint due to deplatforming, then this kind of misrepresentation is that much more effective at keeping those dominated by the cultural hegemony away from the viewpoint.

Fear and Self-Censorship

In addition to the removal of individuals that occurs through public cancellations or through ideological bias in admissions, hiring, and promotion, there is a silencing effect on individuals who remain. For every one person who is fired for expressing viewpoints unpopular with the cultural hegemony, there are many more who see this occur and are scared into self-censorship. As David Sacks said:

And a lot of it has to do with the cancellation tactics that they’re willing to use – the way that they will smear anybody who disagrees with their agenda. If you’re part of that, again, that 80, 90% of the herd, you just don’t want to stick your neck out. And there’s just no upside for you in challenging the untruths and being called – being accused of something. So this is a huge part of the dynamic.

As is typical with the cultural hegemony, this phenomenon begins at the university and spreads outward into the rest of society, as reported by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Their recent report on free speech on campus found that “just over a quarter of students (26%) reported that they feel pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in their classes,” and that “at least a quarter of students said they self-censor ‘fairly often’ or ‘very often’ during conversations with other students, with professors, and during classroom discussions (25%, 27%, and 28%, respectively.)” (FIRE 2024)

The situation is even worse for professors. A 2022 survey found that “roughly one-third (34%) of faculty said they often feel they cannot express their opinions on a subject because of how students, colleagues, or the administration would respond,” and that “the percentages of faculty who said they were very or extremely likely to self-censor in different contexts ranged from 25% (in academic publications) to 45% (on social media).” (FIRE 2022)

While it is still a minority of students and faculty on campus who outright self-censor for fear of reprisals, majorities of both students and faculty at least worry about repercussions to their speech. “More than half of students (56%) expressed worry about damaging their reputation because of someone misunderstanding what they have said or done,” (FIRE 2024) and “more than half of faculty (52%) reported being worried about losing their jobs or reputation because someone misunderstands something they have said or done, takes it out of context, or posts something from their past online.” (FIRE 2022)

Arguments from Authority and Professional Organizations

Once we see that the cultural hegemony in the United States is specifically a professional-class cultural hegemony that proceeds from the university system out into the rest of society, it becomes obvious why proponents of the cultural hegemony so often resort to arguments from authority, particularly citing official-sounding pronouncements from professional organizations.

Professional organizations are dominated by the cultural hegemony because they are directly downstream of academia (and perhaps because they tend to attract a higher ratio of true believers to go-alongs). Thus, professional organizations are often mouthpieces for the orthodoxy of the cultural hegemony.

Many of these official-sounding pronouncements are value judgements and as such are not true-or-false claims amenable to expertise. Just as we would not feel compelled to agree with the value judgements of a random person standing on a soapbox shouting into a public square, we should not feel compelled to agree with the value judgements of any professional organization.

Sometimes these official-sounding pronouncements do contain some assertions about supposed facts. In these cases, again, the alleged authority of the organization is not helpful in resolving the truth or falsity of the factual question. Instead, we should resolve questions of truth or falsity based on what the evidence indicates, the quality of the evidence, how it was observed, what alternative hypotheses might better explain the evidence, etc.

Either way, the argument that we should feel compelled to agree with a statement merely because a professional organization says so is fallacious. The converse is, of course, also true; we should not feel compelled to disagree with a statement just because a professional organization says so. However, arguments from authority are usually of the former, not latter, variety.

Much has been written about the fallacy of arguments from authority, so I will not belabor this point further. It is worth pointing out, though, that because of the phenomenon discussed in this article, professional organizations are biased in favor of the orthodoxy favored by the cultural hegemony, and so arguments from authority based on their pronouncements are also biased in favor of the cultural hegemony.

Arguments from Partisanship and the False Left-Right Binary Spectrum

As discussed in The Myth of Left and Right, a binary spectrum – whether it is framed as “left-wing” versus “right-wing” or “liberal” versus “conservative” – fails as a description of socio-political viewpoints, for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that what has been considered “left-wing” or “right-wing” in the United States has changed from decade to decade and will likely change considerably in the future.

However, the left-right labeling does explain certain people who adhere themselves to partisan conformity, even if they are adhering to a fad that is transient, ephemeral, and unnecessary. This is true of partisan conformists whether they identify themselves as “left-wing” or “right-wing.”

Taking a broader view, the phenomenon of professional-class cultural hegemony partly explains the emergence of this partisan conformity in the first place, but for only one of the (currently) popular versions of the left-right spectrum.

The original popular use of the left-right spectrum in the United States was over whether someone supported the New Deal, with “left” denoting degree of support for the New Deal and “right” denoting degree someone rejected the New Deal. (Lewis and Lewis 2023, chap. 2) This has little to do with the professional-class cultural hegemony. Indeed, regardless of whether someone thought it was the best way forward, the New Deal was largely targeted at the problems of the working class.

Today, however, “left-wing” is sometimes used to denote the degree of conformity someone has to to a set of cultural norms such as identity politics, abortion³ destigmatization, and aversion to firearms. These are (currently) the norms fashionable among the cultural hegemons, i.e., administrators of elite universities, activists, and the billionaires who fund them.

For this one – and only this one – specific use of “left-wing,” the term is synonymous with domination by the professional-class cultural hegemony. The degree to which someone is either a true believer using hegemonic tactics to promote these viewpoints or a go-along acquiescing to these viewpoints can be a measure of how “left-wing” someone is, but only for this limited definition of “left-wing.”

Where does this leave the corresponding term “right-wing?” More generally, what kind of left-right spectrum does this specific definition of “left-wing” lead to?

It does not lead to a left-right spectrum, at least not a binary one. Under this definition, there is a specific culture – the one promoted by people who have an outsized impact on American society – and then there are all the other ones. “Right-wing” under this specific definition is a catch-all for all the people who do not conform to the professional-class cultural hegemony. Under this specific definition, “right-wing” is just dissent.

Instead of a linear spectrum with “left-wing” on one side and “right-wing” on the other, this definition leads to a star-burst pattern, with “left-wing” constituting an area of conformity to the cultural hegemony in the middle of the pattern, and many lines away from this middle, each representing one of the many ways an individual can disagree with the cultural hegemony.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay.

Thus, even under this definition, the binary left-right spectrum makes no sense, and I do not recommend using the concepts of “left-wing” and “right-wing” even with this limited definition.

However, this star-burst model does help explain what is going on when people dominated by the cultural hegemony use terms like “right-wing,” “conservative,” “alt right,” or “far right.” People dominated by the cultural hegemony, be they true believers or go-alongs, have been prejudiced away from viewpoints that deviate from the cultural hegemony. These terms induce a knee-jerk reaction to avoid serious consideration of alternative viewpoints and to default back to conformity to the cultural hegemony.

Renowned economist Melissa Kearney relates an anecdote illustrating this phenomenon in which she received pushback against her work:

I thought about a conversation I had recently had with a different economist in a different setting who reacted negatively when I mentioned the importance of family structure to children’s outcomes. He bristled, suggesting to me that I sounded “socially conservative,” in a way that implied “not academically serious.” I countered, “You are always talking about the things you are doing for your kids and how much time their activities take up in your life. Why would you be offended by the suggestion that maybe other kids would also benefit from having the involvement of two parents, and in particular a father, in their lives?” (Kearney 2023)

Thus, a fifth hegemonic tactic is illustrated by this phenomenon – one that is the most facile, but unfortunately far too effective. That is simply to assert that a viewpoint is “right-wing” or some variation thereof and then watch as people dominated by the cultural hegemony arbitrarily dismiss consideration of the viewpoint without any argument or evidence.

This “argument from partisanship” merits no analysis because it itself proceeds without argument or evidence and so has no intellectual merit. Yet, in our unfortunately partisan age, much of the sad excuse for discourse today consists of precisely these arguments from partisanship.

One flaw (of many) of this fallacy is that it conceives of all the other rays of viewpoints that deviate from the cultural hegemony as if they were the same. However, even if it were the case that there were only two viewpoints in the universe, it still would not justify adopting a viewpoint without any reasoning. Such behavior is indicative of minds so subdued by the cultural hegemony that they are basically inactive.

Perhaps three or four of the rays out of center of the star-burst pattern are the rays of racism, sexism, etc. However, all of the other rays represent ways of thinking and feeling that deviate from the thoughts and feelings of the hegemons of culture in the United States and that are not racism, sexism, etc. People subjugated to the cultural hegemony are therefore alienated from the great diversity and wealth of human experience, thinking, and values.

“Liberal”

Sometimes proponents of the cultural hegemony are called “liberals,” but this is a misnomer. For one, the “liberal” political party in most countries is the “center-right” party. “Neoliberal” economic policy is often associated with the “right-wing” of the political spectrum.

More importantly, there actually is a political philosophy of liberalism, which in the English-speaking world was articulated by authors such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill. This includes such ideas as representative government, freedom of religion, free speech, private property, and the marketplace of ideas.

Since the political foundation of the United States is largely derived from thinkers like John Locke, the United States has a lot of liberalism built into it. Free speech and freedom of religion are enshrined in First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The entirety of the system of government in the United States is an experiment in representative government. Therefore, we are all liberals to some extent because we have inherited (philosophical) liberalism.

If anything, the cultural hegemony, in its hostility to free speech and in its attempts to shut down the marketplace of ideas, is rather illiberal compared to the norms of the United States for the past several centuries. Thus, not only is “liberal” an inaccurate term to use to describe the cultural hegemony, but it is often the opposite of what the cultural hegemony actually is.

“Progressive”

Similarly, proponents of the cultural hegemony are sometimes called “progressives,” but this is again a misnomer.

For one, there already was a “progressive” movement in the United States in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The cultural hegemony today with its emphasis on identity politics and abortion-is-liberation ideology has very little to do with the ideas of Upton Sinclair or the political careers of Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson.

Indeed, the progressive movement of the early twentieth century was largely characterized as a rebellion of the middle class against the upper class, whereas the professional-class cultural hegemony today is an elitist phenomenon that flows from prestigious universities out to the rest of the country and is funded by billionaires. Like “liberal,” the term “progressive” is not only inaccurate when applied to the cultural hegemony, but often opposite to what the cultural hegemony actually is.

Furthermore, there is a larger problem with people calling themselves “progressives.” Everyone wants what is good. Everyone wants for the society in which they live more of what is good and less of what is bad. It is just that people have different value judgements about what constitutes “good.” Thus, if anyone is a “progressive,” then everyone is a “progressive.” The term has no substance because a label is only useful if it picks out some individuals from a population, but not others.

People who appoint themselves as “progressives” as if it is a useful identifier are thus nothing more than conceited. Such people have the conceit that they are the only ones who care about improving society. They are necessarily dismissive of all the other judgements in the world about what constitutes progress to the point that they think the word “progressive” uniquely describes them.

Why So Many Misnomers?

It is likely that terms like “left-wing,” “liberal,” and “progressive” are used anachronistically, that is, people got used to either censuring or lauding the “left-wing,”, to either complaining about or praising “progressives,” or to either decrying or lionizing “liberals,” and once use of these labels became a matter of habit, people continued to use them without noticing that the referents of these terms had changed entirely.

This explains those self-identified “liberals” who feel uncomfortable with the hegemonic tactics used in the service of what is alleged to be “liberalism” today. It is not that liberalism has changed, but rather the word “liberal” is being used to refer to something different from before. This is likely because the professional-class cultural hegemony has grown in power over the past several decades and displaced what was originally called “liberal.”

The fact that the most popular terms for the professional-class cultural hegemony are misnomers speaks volumes to the extent to which people today are not fully cognizant of the professional-class cultural hegemony phenomenon. It is also indicative of the extent to which the cultural hegemony is not one predicated on a coherent theory, but rather predicated on power – specifically the power wielded by universities, media, activists, and the billionaires who fund them.

Open and Honest Discourse

As recently as the 1960s, American society could have a discourse about abortion. In the early 1960s, the case of Sherri Finkbine and “thalidomide babies” – i.e., babies with severe developmental issues due to the use of thalidomide as a medication by their mothers – was brought to public attention, including as the cover story of Life magazine on August 10, 1962. This attention prompted widepsread discussion on the issue of abortion.

By mid-decade, National Opinion Research Center polling in December 1965 found an overwhelming 77% to 83% Americans opposed to abortion for economic or discretionary reasons, but a small 55% to 56% majority of Americans who approved of abortion in the case of serious fetal defect and in the case of rape. (Forsythe 2013, 70–73)

Therefore, the normal legislative process was active throughout the 1960s, with nearly every state legislature in the United States considering bills with regard to abortion. Fourteen states had passed exceptions to their criminal abortion laws for circumstances such as severe fetal deformity or rape. Four states had allowed some version of “abortion-on-demand” (i.e., for any reason, including economic or discretionary reasons), but nine states had overtly voted down abortion-on-demand bills in their legislatures. At the end of the decade, abortion-on-demand was illegal in forty-six out of fifty states, and had remained legal in New York only by governor’s veto.⁵ (Forsythe 2013, 74–76)

Two mutually supporting phenomena have happened since then: the political coup d’état that made abortion-on-demand legal in all fifty states, and the cultural shift that changed the framing of the discourse from abortion as a social problem to abortion as liberation. The political coup d’état was accomplished by judicial activism, which is beyond the scope of this article, whereas the change in the discourse has been driven by the very phenomenon of professional-class cultural hegemony discussed here.

The moral status of the human fetus has been controversial and debated for millennia, at least as far back as the time of Plato and Aristotle, yet the cultural hegemony has declared that those who reach a conclusion that abortion is homicide do not actually believe what they say, and instead are secretly “misogynists” who “hate women” and want to “control women’s bodies” because they are against “gender equality” and “women’s freedom.”

This is a result of how, for decades now, by way of universities and the organizations downstream of the universities, the cultural hegemony has been deplatforming those opposed to abortion, misrepresenting the views of those opposed to abortion, defaming those who hold such views, crowding the professional organizations and government bureaucracies with shills for abortion, and indoctrinating people to arbitrarily dismiss any criticism of abortion because such criticism is “right-wing.”

Nowadays, if those of us who have moral compunction about abortion attempt to express what we truly believe in an academic paper or an op-ed in the mainstream media, our words will not be allowed past editorial review. You are not allowed to write about “life” or “death” occurring in the womb. You are not allowed to describe abortion as an act of “killing.” Such discussion is dismissed by the cultural hegemony and censored, but these words get at what is the actual and central point of disagreement about abortion, as it has been for thousands of years. This is an example of how the cultural hegemony controls thinking by controlling language.

What has been the effect of this on the discourse? A recent FIRE survey on free speech on campus asked students what topics are “difficult to have an open and honest conversation about on their campus.” The response of “abortion” was the most common answer to this question, with 49% of respondents giving “abortion” as an answer. Unsurprisingly, the only other topics that come close are also topics on which the cultural hegemony is very active, namely “gun control” (43%), “racial inequality” (42%), and “transgender rights” (42%). (FIRE 2024)

The effect of the cultural hegemony is to ruin the possibility of an open and honest discourse. One might look at the survey responses as akin to a glass half full, rather than half empty, since 51% of students did not respond “abortion” to the question. However, it is likely that many of those who do not believe it is difficult to have an open and honest discussion about abortion on campus are the people who are making it difficult. For those who are dominated by the cultural hegemony, all the deplatforming, misrepresentation, and defamation is what they think is an “open and honest” discussion.

Education, Money, and Power

In my article “Induced Abortion is Controversial,” I discussed how abortion has been the most controversial moral issue identified in Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs polling since the survey’s inception in 2001, with the United States nearly split in half between those who find abortion to be “in general” either “morally wrong” or “morally acceptable.” However, an interesting thing occurs when you examine the results of the same polling, broken down by whether respondents have a college degree or not.

Figure 1: Percentage of responses that induced abortion of pregnancy “in general” is “morally acceptable” by whether respondent is college graduate, from the Gallup Poll Social Series, Values and Beliefs. (Gallup 2014)

Depending on the year, there is a noticeable gap of up to twenty-five percentage points in the proportion of those who find abortion morally acceptable by whether the respondent is a college graduate. Since college graduates have spent four years or more at a university and are more likely to have family and friends who are also college graduates, they have on average more exposure to the cultural hegemony than working-class people. The effects of this on their views on abortion can be seen.

Furthermore, because of the economic advantages that college graduates enjoy in the United States, there is a noticeable gap in viewpoints on abortion based on income. Recent Gallup polling found that a majority (54%) of those with an annual income of $40,000 or less identified as “pro-life,” while a similar majority (also 54%) with an annual income of $40,000 or more identified as “pro-choice.” Among those with an annual income of more than $100,000, there is an even larger majority who identify as “pro-choice.”

Thus, people with more influence on society and more money tend to have more approving views of abortion, while those with less money and influence are more likely to judge abortion to be morally wrong.

However, even more important than these differences in viewpoints by educational level or income is the effect that the extremely wealthy have had on views on abortion. From the get-go, abortion advocacy in the United States has been funded by some of the richest people in the world, such as John D. Rockefeller III. (Forsythe 2013, 59–62)

The movement to destigmatize abortion in the United States has been a classic case of the cultural hegemony at work, funded by a few billionaires over the popular sentiments of the less wealthy and less powerful masses. In time, through the quid pro quo of the university system and reinforcement by professional-class media outlets, the views of the billionaires have spread from a minority of Americans to about half or so of the country. Since the half of the country that subscribes to the views of these few billionaires is the more affluent and powerful half of the country, cultural hegemony has been achieved.

Thus, while it is the case that the people of the United States are split on abortion, only one side of this split has managed to run away with almost all of American institutions – universities, media organizations, professional associations, government bureaucracy – through the process of professional-class cultural hegemony.

In a country that is split virtually in half on whether abortion is morally wrong or morally acceptable, do half of researchers study abortion as a social ill while the other half of researchers study abortion as a social good? Far from it. It is closer to the case there are no professionally employed researchers studying abortion as a social problem, and that all of them study abortion as a social good. For example, I have only ever found one public health researcher who studies abortion as a social problem, rather than a social good, and this researcher is currently being cancelled.⁶

How can it be said, when half of Americans view abortion as morally wrong, that an academia which entirely views abortion as a social good is “inclusive” of America – all Americans? For all its talk of “inclusion,” academia excludes half of America based on viewpoint. This is an academia that serves cultural hegemony, not the people, of the United States.

My Career Mistakes

This article is largely what I wish I could tell myself twenty years ago. I have spent most of my adult life not paying attention to politics, much to my detriment.

My problem is that I wanted (and still want) to live a life of scholarship, and scholarship in turn is centered on the university system, which is the belly of the beast of the cultural hegemony. Thus, I have been unwittingly trying to find my voice among institutions and people who do not think I, because of my views on abortion, should be allowed to have a voice. You cannot “find yourself” among people constantly trying to deplatform and slander you.

The effect of all this is that I have wasted many years and much money. I had a lucrative career as a software engineer, and I saved up a lot of money for me to go back to university. My initial back-to-school plan was to become a life scientist so that I could do research on developing innovative contraceptive technologies. This seemed to check a lot of boxes for me because I was “following my interests.” However, this was dumb for a variety of reasons.⁷

The reason most germane to this article is simply that the people who decide admissions, hiring, and promotions in academia do not want me around. I was so naive that I even applied to a life sciences department at UC Berkeley in 2019, right before the infamous “Initiative to Advance Faculty Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Life Science at UC Berkeley” report was discovered by the popular culture. I did so because one of the few scientists doing research pertinent to contraceptive technology was a faculty member there.

The important takeaway from all of this is you cannot go through life “pursuing your interests.” I thought if I was doing something I believed in, studied diligently, got good grades, and ticked all the boxes off, I would finally find my path. This is not how the world works. We live in a culture dominated by a hegemony.

After my abortive biology career, I made another mistake of pivoting into a master’s degree in statistics. In retrospect, I should have just admitted my mistake and returned to software engineering, but I was still clinging onto the idea of finding a more intellectually fulfilling career. I spent two years working as a statistician after earning my master’s degree. I found myself no closer to research work or the pursuits of the life of the mind, but I was closer to the cultural hegemony, receiving emails from C-suite executives proclaiming their abortion-is-liberation ideology to the whole company.

I could have spent the years in which I pursued additional university education and then an alternative career doing almost anything else, and it would have been more productive. I could have kept working as a software engineer and saved up money for an early retirement so that I could pursue my intellectual interests full-time. I could have developed hobbies. I could have started a family.

The opportunity cost of this misadventure was great. In just raw economic dollars, I forsook just greater than one million dollars in lost salary. In terms of other lost opportunities, I will never know how much I missed.

One of the reasons I avoided politics is that many if not most people interested in politics are partisans. I have gone at length in this blog discussing the fallacies of people who think this way. I do not think that way, so I tacitly assumed politics was not for me.

I will always have heterodox values and beliefs. I will always be an independent thinker. This is how I am, but it is not the world I live in. I live in a world of tribalism and uncritical conformist parrots.

In retrospect, my best chances to have the intellectual life I wanted would have been to lean into “right-wing” spaces. I could have been a lawyer, a journalist, or an economist, since these are the few scholarly fields that have carved out “right-wing” areas within them (though the “right-wing” spaces are still subcultures within the larger culture that is dominated by the hegemony).

Since I enjoy quantitative research more than legal argumentation or short-form articles about the news cycle, I think economics would have been the best fit for me, especially if I got a coveted spot at a “right-leaning” think tank.

Knowing what I know now, I would have avoided any topics related to abortion for my actual paid career work. I would have studied something banal like retirement or housing costs or economic inequality and social mobility. Once I became secure in my career, then I would have done research in reproductive responsibility on the side.

How I Could Be So Naive

Given the state of today’s popular culture with regard to abortion, one might wonder how I could be so naive.

In my defense, I was born before what has been called the “Big Sort.” In the twentieth century, there were both “liberal” Republican politicians and “conservative” Republican politicians, and there were both “conservative” Democrat politicians and “liberal” Democrat politicians. There were rural areas where Democrats were more successful, and there were metropolitan areas where Republicans were more successful.

In the twenty first century, after the Big Sort, “conservatives” accumulated in the Republican Party and “liberals” in the Democratic Party. Furthermore, Republicans began to dominate in rural areas while Democrats dominated politics in metropolitan areas. This led a clustering of abortion advocacy among Democrats and, more importantly, made maximalist abortion advocacy a more potent platform in the United States because abortion became an issue that Democrats could use to excite their base.

Before the Big Sort, politicians more often had to appeal to undecided and swing voters in order to gain an advantage in an election. Issues like abortion that divided the country were not issues that were good for this. However, after the Big Sort, politicians have become more likely to emphasize issues that excite people among their voter base in order to increase voter turnout, even if their stance on these issues alienates people who were not going to vote for them anyway.

Because of the Big Sort, the dynamics of politics around “culture war” issues like abortion have changed. As a result, the cultural hegemony is more flagrant and less moderate about abortion now than in the twentieth century.

When I was growing up, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the United States Congress passed a partial-birth abortion ban no less than four times, with bipartisan support that included senior Democratic members of Congress. During this time frame, the official rhetoric of Democrats was that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” and there was at least lip service to treating abortion as a social ill that ought to be reduced.

Those days are over. The rhetoric now is that abortion is “healthcare” and of no moral consequence whatsoever, like getting your appendix removed. Indeed, since most Democrats believe in government funding of healthcare, it follows that the government out to pay for abortions, given their logic.

When I was at university (for the first time), I lived in Pennsylvania, which had just had Governor Bob Casey Sr., a “pro-life” Democrat, succeeded by Governor Tom Ridge, a “pro-choice” Republican. Because of this, the platforms of politicians on abortion in Pennsylvania were not sorted by party, and you had to check each individual politician’s platform on abortion regardless of party affiliation.

In short, when I was young, views on abortion were less sorted and, in the aggregate, more moderate. One can imagine, growing up in that environment, how I could look at the Gallup polling that indicated the country was divided roughly in half on abortion and think, “well, this is divisive, but if half the country agrees with me, I should be able to find my path.”

In this way, I was naive. The opportunities we have in life are not determined by the views of all Americans; they are determined by the views of a small number of billionaires and cultural elites. There are dozens of think tanks at which researchers can seek full-time employment to do research that supports activists to advocate for fundamentalist abortion policy that rejects any restrictions, regulations, and reporting of abortion.

In contrast, I have only ever found one think tank – the Lozier Institute – that treats abortion as a social problem, rather than as a social good, and it is basically a shell organization that gives honorary fellowships to researchers, but does not employ researchers itself.

Thus, it is true that I was naive, and I should have realized that research in reproductive responsibility was a dead end before I went down this path. However, given the way American political life has changed in the past twenty to thirty years, it is understandable how I was so naive.

The principal flaw in my worldview was not paying attention to politics in the United States over the past twenty years. In avoiding politics, I accidentally avoided living my life to the fullest.