How Republicans got their big government groove back

If there's one thing the fragmented Republican Party can still agree on, it's that government coercion is extremely bad. The whole conservative brand is about having the freedom to live one's life without being bothered by lots of pesky meddlesome bureaucrats.

It's an appealing notion. But it's also fiction. Conservatives, like all political tribes, are big fans of government coercion when it produces results they like. A decade ago, their favorite coercive policy was gay marriage bans, which they pushed with remarkable, though temporary, success. Now that battle has been lost, and the bleeding edge of civil liberties expansions has moved to transgender rights. Conservatives have responded as usual with coercive government policy.

I'm referring, of course, to the recent North Carolina state law mandating that all schools and public agencies have gender-segregated bathrooms, banning transgender people from using the bathroom of their gender identity, and preempting several local anti-discrimination statutes which included transgender people as a protected class. Seven other states are considering similar laws.

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The motivation here is obvious enough: Conservatives think transgender people are deviant, and so they should be prevented from gaining social status and broad respect. Some of them, like Ben Shapiro and Ted Cruz, seem obsessed with the prospect of "large men" peeing in the same room as girls to a frankly rather unhealthy degree (though of course such a description is itself wrong and transphobic). Nothing so surprising about that. Birds fly, cows go moo, and conservative politicians are weird about sex and gender.

But it's also a revealing instance of how conservatives actually use the state when they have the run of it.

Typically the conservative policy frame is at least nominally organized around "negative liberty," the idea that everyone should be left to their own devices as much as possible. Taxes should be low, regulations should be few, and nobody should be "forced" to do anything to which they don't freely agree.

One would think that for such a politics, the status of personal characteristics like gender ought to be given at least a respectful hearing. But no, conservatives reacted to the transgender movement with fear and disgust, and ran to the state to give their narrow vision of Approved Society the stamp of law.

So long as they are in charge, Republicans are happy to mobilize the police to enforce their ideas about which individuals should be using which bathroom. Only in a few years, when the tide begins to flow the other way, will they start moaning piteously about their own tribe being forced to accommodate transgender people.

At any rate, it seems virtually inevitable that transgender people, like gays before them, will eventually win their struggle for rights and recognition, and conservatives will be left with yet another culture war loss to stew about. I'd even guess that the whole idea of gendered bathrooms will go the way of the dinosaurs in about 10 to 15 years. A couple decades after that, conservative writers will pen goofy revisionist histories about how actually, liberals were the enemies of transgender rights. They could skip to the end of this process, and just let transgender people peacefully join society, but I wouldn't bet on it.