The Moral Austerity Trap: How reducing politics to the moral simplicity of "saving lives" leads us to elite oppression.

Over the past half-decade, a series of political passions have swept across the Democratic coalition. Despite their intensity, these moments of moral fervor have tended to fade as the news cycle moved on. Nevertheless, one thing has remained consistent in various slogans that have galvanized this constituency: an advocacy for “lives.” This word is a through line that connects the rhetoric of several otherwise tenuously linked causes.

The most obvious instance is Black Lives Matter, which emerged in the final years of the Obama administration but was sidelined for much of the Trump era until its resurgence around the middle of 2020. Somewhat forgotten lately, on the other hand, is the March for our Lives, the anti-gun violence movement that appeared in 2018 in the wake of the Parkland, Florida massacre. More recently, statements of support for measures instituted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic seized on the same word: “stay home, save lives” and “masks save lives.”

At first glance, especially to those sympathetic to these causes, this rhetoric may look like a self-evident expression of basic human decency. However, this relatively recent innovation in liberal messaging should surprise us somewhat, since slogans emphasizing the protection of “life” have long been associated with religious conservatism. The formation best known for positioning itself on the side of “life,” after all, is the anti-abortion movement.

Liberals tend to dispute the association between opposition to abortion and concern for “life.” For decades, they have alleged that the pro-life movement overvalues the life of the fetus while undervaluing the life of the mother; and that conservatives’ simultaneous opposition to abortion and support for policies evidently hostile to “life”—from military buildup to the death penalty—reveals their inconsistency. The pro-life cause, according to this account, lacks a holistic vision of life; it cordons off one particular category of lives and designates it as needing protection, but devalues the right to pursue the positive goods that make living worthwhile.

However, the “lives”-based liberal causes of late might be subject to similar critiques. Their slogans imply sweeping moral concern, but in practice, they translate to a demand to prevent a particular subset of deaths. For instance, mass shootings comprise a tiny portion of gun-caused deaths in the US, but the March for our Lives has ensured that this category continues to play an outsized role in the debate around this issue. At the same time, as in the abortion debate, the demand for the protection of a subset of “lives” often entails bracketing off tradeoffs and complexities. For instance, the fact that social distancing saves some lives but may put others at risk is rendered invisible by the standard exhortation to “stay home.”