Widening the Gaps

Southern Republicans want to secede, despite the fact that by most measures, life is much worse in conservative states. "Pro-life" laws are only exacerbating the problem.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Congress’s #1 nut, tweeted on President’s Day that she wants red states to secede. Greene wrote:

We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.

She’s not alone, at least not among her ilk. While most Americans do not want the nation to break apart, Southern Republicans — which largely means southern Whites — are the exception: Two-thirds of them wanted to secede, as of 2021. No majority of other partisan group in any region in the US supported a national divorce.

This is interesting, because the truth is that blue states heavily subsidize conservative southern ones. The reddest parts of America are by nearly every measure also the worst off: They are the places where the most children live in poverty, where children and adults alike die the earliest, where the fewest women survive childbirth, where babies die the most often, where the most people struggle with debilitating medical debt, where there are higher-than-average rates of suicide and drug overdoses, where people have the lowest levels of education, where rates of child marriage are the highest, where people are the most likely to die by gunshot, where unintended pregnancies remain common and girls are the most likely to become mothers, and where health is generally the worst.

This doesn’t just happen by accident, and nor is it simply a function of lower educational attainment and higher poverty rates in conservative areas — even controlling for those factors, Republican districts are worse off than Democratic ones. Research is clear: This happens because of policy choices. Republicans choose policies that result in widespread death and despair. Democratic policies are much, much better for citizens in Democratic-run states.

And so of course Republicans are doubling down. With abortion bans, they are making life worse — more dangerous, more deadly, less stable, more impoverished — for women and girls in particular.

You can see the affect of right-wing policy-making in how the mortality gap has widened over time between Republican counties and Democratic ones:

Look at the above graph: While deaths in Democratic counties generally tick down with time, deaths in Republican ones have either leveled off and even ticked up.

From Scientific American:

In the intervening decades liberal states enacted more policies to address health concerns while conservative states went in the opposite direction, with inflection points in the early 1980s 1994 and 2010. Montez notes that those dates line up with Ronald Reagan’s election as U.S. president, Newt Gingrich’s control of Congress and the rise of Tea Party politics. Political affiliation drives social policies and spending, says Lois Lee, a pediatric emergency physician at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Conservatives tend to see health as a matter of individual responsibility and to prefer less government intervention. Liberals often promote the role of government to implement regulations to protect health. The Democratic approach has included expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Access to health care and having health insurance are important for well-being, Warraich says. Democrats also spend more on what are known as the social determinants of health. “We know things like your housing situation, your socioeconomic status, your access to healthy foods and healthy lifestyles, as well as exposure to toxic stress—all these things affect your overall physical as well as emotional and mental health,” Lee says.

Several kinds of policies—around tobacco, labor laws, the environment and guns—repeatedly emerge as significant. “Each party has bundled multiple policies together,” Montez says. In Mississippi, for example, there are no statewide clean indoor air policies restricting smoking in bars, restaurants or workplaces, Montez says. In California, on the other hand, smoking is restricted in all three environments. Cigarette taxes also differ dramatically. “The places where you can’t smoke indoors are also the places where cigarettes cost a lot,” Montez says.

The GOP positions itself as the party of economic prosperity, but the truth is that people in conservative states are poorer and financially worse off, too. Is part of that long-standing poverty trends? Yes. But part of it, again, is policy: If you refuse to raise the minimum wage, refuse to provide an adequate social safety net, don’t invest in the kind of education that keeps workers competitive in a modern economy, and keep healthcare expensive, you’re going to wind up with populations that are poorer. Red states citizens, for example, have much worse credit ratings than blue state ones, even controlling for education and income, largely because red state citizens are much more likely to have medical debt — and they’re much more likely to have medical debt because (1) people in red states are more likely to have the kinds of chronic health conditions that come from Republican de-investment in medical care, workplace safety, and environmental protection measures, and (2) many of the Republicans who run those states refuse to expand Medicaid so that more people have health coverage.

The level of despair and ill health we see in red states is a man-made problem. And it’s specifically a Republican-made problem.

So why do Republican voters keep electing Republican politicians who pass laws that kill, maim, and impoverish those same voters? Why keep doubling down on these failed, dangerous policies?

The answer is racial and gender resentment.

We’ve heard a lot about educational polarization, with the better-educated flocking to the Democratic Party, and the working class (or at least the White and to a lesser extent Hispanic working class) increasingly Republican. But racial resentment is an even sharper predictor of voting patterns. White Republicans vote against their own interests because they have so thoroughly latched on to racial and gender grievance that they’ll support a party that is killing them and their children because that party makes them feel superior.

I’m not sure what to say about this dynamic. In my less generous moments I think, well, you can’t cure stupid, and if White Republicans want to continue signing their own death warrants and sacrifice their children to the cult of gun culture while believing their biggest political problem is a children’s book about two daddy penguins raising a baby, well, have at.

But of course these White Republicans are not just dictating the demise of their own lives. They’re taking everyone around down with them — their neighbors, their fellow citizens, their kids. It’s no surprise that southern Democrats, who are much more likely than southern Republicans to be non-White, are among the least likely in the nation to support secession. Millions of people who didn’t vote for these backwards laws are nevertheless suffering under them.

It’s troubling to see how the abortion rights have slotted right into this widening chasm:

While Democratic blue state governors are forming an alliance to protect abortion rights, red state Republican politicians are competing to see who can be the cruelest and most extreme, banning abortions for rape and incest victims, refusing exceptions for abortion bans even to save a pregnant woman’s life, and toying with the idea of jailing women who have abortions for homicide (homicide, in many red states, also comes along with the threat of the death penalty).

Anti-abortion laws put most of the pressure — and most of the threat — on doctors, who face fines, the loss of their license, and jail time if they perform an abortion that they deem medically necessary but that a prosecutor does not. There’s already a major shortage of doctors in conservative states; that’s especially true for doctors specializing in OB/GYN care, and in rural areas in particular. Good luck attracting medical professionals if your state is constantly threatening to throw them in jail for trying to save their patients’ lives.

We also know that abortion bans exacerbate maternal and infant mortality rates; that they keep women in poverty or push them into it; that they result in generations of kids who face higher levels of neglect and abuse and, as a result, are worse off by many measures; and that they curtail women’s opportunities for everything from escaping abusive partners to going to school to earning a decent living.

But “pro-life” laws also cement male power and authority. They relegate pregnant women to second-class status, imposing upon them a series of restrictions and burdens that would be legally impermissible if applied to any other group of people. And given the racial breakdown of abortion rates, anti-abortion laws place these burdens disproportionately on Black women.

That’s not a coincidence or an accident. It’s that singular desire for power to be concentrated in the hands of White men that drives anti-abortion lawmaking — and so much of the red state governance that leaves their own citizens poorer, sicker, and dying younger.

xx Jill