Because I couldn’t not post
In 1973, the US Supreme Court enshrined the right to abortion—considered by me and ~95% of everyone I know to be a basic pillar of modernity—in such a way that the right could be overturned only if its opponents could somehow gain permanent minority rule, and thereby disregard the wills of three-quarters of Americans. So now, half a century later, that’s precisely what they’ve done. Because Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t live three more weeks, we’re now faced with a civilizational crisis, with tens of millions of liberals and moderates in the red states now under the authority of a social contract that they never signed. With this backwards leap, Curtis Yarvin’s notion that “Cthulhu only ever swims leftward” stands as decimated by events as any thesis has ever been. I wonder whether Yarvin is happy to have been so thoroughly refuted.
Most obviously for me, the continued viability of Texas as a place for science, for research, for technology companies, is now in severe doubt. Already this year, our 50-member CS department at UT Austin has had faculty members leave, and faculty candidates turn us down, with abortion being the stated reason, and I expect that to accelerate. Just last night my wife, Dana Moshkovitz, presented a proposal at the STOC business meeting to host STOC’2024 at a beautiful family-friendly resort outside Austin. The proposal failed, in part because of the argument that, if a pregnant STOC attendee faced a life-threatening medical condition, Texas doctors might choose to let her die, or the attendee might be charged with murder for having a miscarriage. In other words: Texas (and indeed, half the US) will apparently soon be like Donetsk or North Korea, dangerous for Blue Americans to visit even for just a few days. To my fellow Texans, I say: if you find that hyperbolic, understand that this is how the blue part of the country now sees you. Understand that only a restoration of the previous social compact can reverse it.
Of course, this destruction of everything some of us have tried to build in science in Texas is happening despite the fact that 47-48% of Texans actually vote Democratic. It’s happening despite the fact that, if Blue Americans wanted to stop it, the obvious way to do so would be to move to Austin and Houston (and the other blue enclaves of red states) in droves, and exert their electoral power. In other words, to do precisely what Dana and I did. But can I urge others to do the same with a straight face?
As far as I can tell, the only hope at this point of averting a cold Civil War is if, against all odds, there’s a Democratic landslide in Congress, sufficient to get the right to abortion enshrined into federal law. Given the ways both the House and the Senate are stacked against Democrats, I don’t expect that anytime soon, but I’ll work for it—and will do so even if many of the people I’m working with me despise me for other reasons. I will match reader donations to Democratic PACs and Congressional campaigns (not necessarily the same ones, though feel free to advocate for your favorites), announced in the comment section of this post, up to a limit of $10,000.