Drinking lead can damage people’s brains, but Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach opposes a plan to remove lead water pipes.
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In their letter, the attorneys general wrote, “[The plan] sets an almost impossible timeline, will cost billions and will infringe on the rights of the States and their residents – all for benefits that may be entirely speculative.”
Kobach repeated this nearly verbatim in a March 7 post on X (formerly Twitter).
Buttigieg responded by writing, “The benefit of not being lead poisoned is not speculative. It is enormous. And because lead poisoning leads to irreversible cognitive harm, massive economic loss, and even higher crime rates, this work represents one of the best returns on public investment ever observed.”
I don’t think that’s a conservative specific thing there, and if you do odds are you’re doing the same thing but privileging the ideologies and narratives you are using in a way that you don’t think they count as narratives or ideologies but as either facts, justice or something along those lines.
To put it another way, I suspect if I asked for a list of your ten mostly firmly held and allegedly defensible political beliefs and we really drilled down to the bedrock on them we’d hit some bits that are more ideology or narrative than you’d be readily comfortable to admit. Or cases where you built the position around a principle that only applies when it otherwise neatly aligns with your preferred ideologies and narratives.
For example, pro-choice people tend to be able to invoke one or more general principles that they often claim being pro-choice is an example or expression of (bodily autonomy is a popular one), but it’s shockingly common for nearly the only controversial case where they’ll apply those principles to be abortion (and I say this as someone who is pro-choice).
Kelly Oliver (philosophy professor at Vanderbilt specializing in feminism among a few other topics, ironically including ethics) once argued that feminist theory isn’t about producing true theories or false theories but rather strategic theories - in other words it’s not about whether or not it’s true but whether or not it is useful for activism. This sounds shockingly like something conservatives might say about some of their hot button claims of the moment if they were being unusually honest.