First, kill all the health-care advisers?
As an empirical matter, I believe that national health care is going to kill a lot more people every year than the Iraq War when fully realized. Am I justified in shooting someone? No …
That's Megan McArdle, a blogger for the Atlantic, in moral-philosopher mode. First, let's be thankful for small things. McArdle, a semi-libertarian, might have answered that question differently.
But while advocates of state-subsidized health care may be able to breathe easier, McArdle -- who, not incidentally, is pro-choice -- believes that violence against abortion providers (as in the case of the murder of Dr. George Tiller) is understandable. That's because, as she sees it, the Supreme Court has removed the issue of abortion from the political realm, leaving anti-abortion activists no legitimate outlets for their views -- an invitation to violence, given how morally charged the issue is. The difference with health-care is that Americans will be hashing out their competing views through their elected representatives.
McArdle may be too young to remember the furor that occurred in 1997 when the journal First Things, then edited by Richard Neuhaus, featured a symposium in which several contributors made precisely the argument she is making. (Those authors, however, were decidedly anti-abortion, with several arguing that the Supreme Court had placed American law in contradiction with God's law.) The title of the symposium was "The End of Democracy?"; its inflammatory, quasi-revolutionary rhetoric led to the resignation of several members of the First Things editorial board, including the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb and the Boston University professor of religion Peter Berger.
Explaining her decision, Himmelfarb, a conservative who opposes abortion, wrote at the time that it was "absurd and irresponsible" to suggest that the United States under Roe stood in the same position as the colonies under George III, and that some form of rebellion was therefore to be considered a reasonable proposition. On the subject of governmental legitimacy more generally, she wrote:
Slavery did not illegitimize the Founding, as some radical historians suggest. Nor did the Vietnam War (an "unjust war," many claimed) illegitimize the government of that time. By the same token, the appalling errors of the present judiciary (in respect to abortion particularly) do not illegitimize the government today.
On a more practical level, if altering national law on abortion truly lay beyond the reach of political actors, as McArdle suggests, all the abortion-issue interest groups that leap into action when a Supreme Court seat opens would be wasting their time. Are they? Doubtful: the interpretation of the constitution, at least where abortion is concerned, remains within the ambit of democratic politics.
