Process and Outcome

American society finds itself in peak outrage season, again, with the debate in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting unfortunately being constrained to guns rather than to the cultural underpinnings of the phenomenon, and with the actual Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (that's the "Overturn Roe" case) due to be released soon.

That outrage includes much righteous indignation over the Court itself, with all sorts of id-sourced "what can we do to stop these radicals" ideas flooding social media (can the Court be defunded? can a Justice be impeached? let's add Justices until we get the outcomes we like!). Old, cranky history such as the Merrick Garland nomination maneuvering is brought up, the usual low-level but steady buzzing of attacks on Clarence Thomas has increased in volume and stridency, and inquiries as to whether the new Justices can be unseated for supposedly lying to Congress are sprouting like mushrooms after a storm, all in efforts to assert that the Court is illegitimate - simply because it appears that it's going to reverse one decision from 50 years ago.

Thing is, whatever your views on abortion itself, any honest assessment of the Roe decision must conclude that it was a bad one , a fabrication of a "right" and a government power that's neither implicitly or explicitly codified in the Constitution by Justices more interested in outcome than process.

This “outcome over process” isn't limited to the abortion debate, either. Consider the equity movement in education, where underperformance by minorities is considered de facto evidence of structural racism in the system. Consider the arguments that majority-white towns or neighborhoods are proof that laws were written to ensure that outcome. Consider that an overall disparity between the average income of men vs women is proof of discrimination against women, with no allowance for other, nondiscriminatory factors. Consider that a couple bad cops are proof that the entire concept of policing is corrupt and discriminatory (statistics notwithstanding).

Note the difference between results and outcome. Progressives demonstrably don't care about policy results, as Thomas Sowell ably covered in his Vision of the Anointed. Merely "doing something" that one can feel good about is the metric of success. Schools are underperforming? Increase the budget, then go home to celebrate. Crime is up? Pass a law restricting gun rights, then go home to celebrate. Global warming is happening? Pass laws that restrict carbon energy (or, against all logic, shut down nuclear plants), subsidize "green energy," then go home to celebrate. If the desired results don't appear? "We tried - the failure is someone else's fault." Yet, they also obsess about outcomes.

What's the difference?

Origin and blame.

If an undesired outcome can be blamed on the other team, then it's all that matters. If the Court returns the abortion issue to the legislature (where it always belonged), then the Court is illegitimate. When a previous Court took the issue out of the public's hands in order to preemptively issue the 'correct' ruling, that Court acted legitimately.

You'll see the same sort of noise if the Court rules for the plaintiffs in the upcoming gun rights case. If the Court extends the "shall-issue or better" doctrine that's currently the law for 75% of the US populace to the 8 blue states where it's not, you'll hear screams about child murder and callousness. If it doesn't, you'll hear applause for the respect for federalism (no matter that progressives have no use for federalism in general and no matter that Bill of Rights protections are supposed to extend to the States via 14A).

Pay attention, and you'll see this writ large throughout the political sandbox. Any outcome that is desired or fits the narrative is "legitimate." Anyone that does not is not, and is instead the product of systemic something-ism and/or radicals who must be removed from positions of authority - by whatever means can be snuck past the system's checks, balances, guard rails, and limits. The process is only useful when it can be leveraged to ensure an outcome. Anything less invites the same assertions of illegitimacy, with a concomitant justifying of ignoring or subverting it.

This form of thinking fosters moral relativism and the othering and depersonalization of anyone who disagrees or who has contrary viewpoints. It's fundamentally anti-egalitarian, which makes it anti-human.

An article that crossed my path while writing this bit drove the point home:

Socialists will rarely admit to this but they do not really like humanity very much. They like some artificial idea of what we should be or could be one day – but are disgusted and unsettled by our flaws.

Which elicits this bit from Master and Commander:

Jack Aubrey : Men must be governed! Often not wisely, but governed nonetheless.

Dr. Stephen Maturin : That's the excuse of every tyrant in history.

While Aubrey was speaking in the moment about military service, the sentiment transcended that stricture, and speaks to the irony of the term "public servant." To those of a collectivistic, progressive mindset, "public service" is not about acting as surrogate for the public will within the strictures of our limited, Republican, rights-based society. It's about management and the imposition of the will of the self-styled Best-and-Brightest, a will that's more often sated by intent than by results. Where a state of affairs is not to their liking, respect for process goes out the window, because there never was such a respect in the first place.

If the free, unmanaged interaction of humans doesn't produce a desired outcome, or produces an outcome with which fault can be found, then there must be nefarious intent and illegitimate action behind it. That's the Left's attitude of today, and it's as corrosive as anything the Soviets ever concocted. The coercion that's an inevitable product of this is now appearing everywhere, like the aforementioned mushrooms, tells us that this attitude is metastasizing across our culture.

The key to countering it starts with understanding it. It's not a humanistic worldview, and when we recognize that this crowd doesn't see the rest of us as equals deserving of golden-rule treatment, we have a baseline for how to interact with them.

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A footnote: In abortion and gun rights, as Kevin D. Williamson recently noted, both abortion opponents and gun rights activists respected process. Those who sought to overturn Roe voted for Presidents who’d nominate Justices who’d return the matter to the legislatures, and have voted in representatives who’d write laws they like. Gun rights, as I’ve written about frequently, are being restored at the state level across a span of four decades, through the same election of pro-gun representatives, and via a couple landmark Court rulings, actualized by process. It is the petulant progressives, on the losing end of process in these matters, who are threatening to overturn the apple cart via bullying, packing, and executive action. While we have the recent example of NY’s legislature and governor writing a laundry list of new gun restrictions as an example of the Left using process, that carries a caveat that any process that violates our individual rights can be challenged as illegitimate, and I expect that gun rights advocates will take the fight to the courts. I don’t expect any of them to suggest the Court be packed in order to ‘get their way’ on this matter, however, nor should they.

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Peter.