Nobody (ed: I mean, "few people", as of course there are non-zero people who believe this) believes abortion is literal murder. They might say they do, but if t

Nobody (ed: I mean, "few people", as of course there are non-zero people who believe this) believes abortion is literal murder. They might say they do, but if there were buildings where actual literal murder were happening it wouldn't be long before people would destroy those places. Folks would lynch abortion providers -- not one or two, but en masse. Plenty of conservative women get abortions. If it were the type of thing that led to social ostracization as a general rule, you'd see articles being written about it. It doesn't. That's actually kind of the point of this article, as I read it: political opinions are very malleable. Tribal identification is one mechanism by which they can be changed. If the tribe decides we're cutting taxes, we change our opinion to favor cutting taxes. If the tribe decides that trans identity is extremely important, we do too. Not because of any overt pressure but simply because of natural herd and instincts. But self-interest is an even stronger hammer with which to shape political opinions. If it is strongly in my economic best interest to get an abortion, there's a pretty decent chance I'm gonna finagle my way to believing it's OK -- at least for me -- even if I "thought it was literal murder" before. It's easy enough to do because abortion has none of the physical hallmarks of literal murder (you know, struggling, screaming victims, blood everywhere, etc.) and society clearly treats it as a different thing, no matter where in the U.S. you live. I have noticed a similar pattern whereby rich liberal friends are slightly less in favor of eating the rich than poor liberal friends, even though the Twitter crowd has pretty much decided where they stand on this issue. Self-interest is a powerful motivator! Us rich folks like to talk about all the entitlements we support but we get a little less comfortable when it comes time to talk about who pays for them. This is just a general rule, it doesn't apply universally by any means. Even this article suggested that there's just a 15% shift in personal opinion directly after a tribe opinion change. But I guess the change grows over time too. I hadn't heard a damn thing about illegal immigrants from my conservative father until about 2016. Now sometimes it seems like every third article he sends me is on that subject. Hey, you know another interesting thing about this: everyone hates literal murder, but somehow murderers families often -- not always, but often -- come around to forgiving them. Sometimes they forgive the murderer so hard that they come to court to support them before they're even convicted, pay for lawyers, etc. You'd almost never do that for someone who wasn't family. Self-interest, family, and tribe are extremely powerful mutators of political and even moral opinion!