New York Magazine: “Among liberals, conservative hypocrisy has become something of a truism. They begin with a valid conclusion. To conservatives, the body of the fetus is sacrosanct, but the body of the child is not. A particular ideology leaves children vulnerable to gun violence, to hunger and homelessness, to the consequences of climate change. Victims of a power that holds life loosely in its grip, children have no true defenders on the right. But here, liberals inevitably run aground. People don’t think of themselves as hypocrites. They don’t experience cognitive dissonance in the ways you might expect. Abbott likely believes everything he says, both about personal responsibility and about the immorality of abortion. So, too, do his allies in the state legislature. What, then, should we make of this conservative consistency? What looks like hypocrisy should be understood as a deeper ideology. In Texas, the right to life is conditional.”

“It has always been conditional, at least to conservatives. Only the fetus has an absolute right to life because it cannot err. Women are more complicated. They sin, these Eves, and deserve punishment. The right to life is fragile. The right to a good life is more fragile still. A person must be poor because of some moral failing; they’re lazy, unmotivated, or simply ignorant. The free market is never to blame, and neither are capitalists. Gun violence exists because of innate criminality, which must be answered with incarceration and more guns, borne by the right kind of people. As climate change becomes impossible to deny, the same arguments will appear: Personal responsibility must guard against burned or flooded homes; if the wealthy appear less vulnerable to disaster, it’s because they’ve earned a better way of life. This isn’t hypocrisy, but authoritarianism.”