"South Dakota did not do any mandates. We trusted our people, gave them all the information and told them that personal responsibility was the best answer."
Tweeted South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, roughly quoting her recent CPAC speech and quoted in a Philip Bump WaPo column with the aggressive headline "Kristi Noem leans into her people-can-choose-to-die-if-they-want-to 2024 messaging."
Here's the text of the column that might support the headline:
What’s fascinating about this argument is that it’s actually immune to a seemingly challenging response — um, but a lot of people died — using a straightforward rhetorical trick: pinning those deaths on the personal choices of the dead.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean people chose to die! People individually assessed risk and chose which precautions to take, but they were hoping not to die, I think we can presume. A lot of people died — it's true — but does Bump know how the deaths correlated to the choices people made?
For example, I almost never wore a mask because I didn't like mask-wearing, but what I did instead was avoid going places where I was close enough to other people to need a mask. I kept my distance. That was an individual choice, and I won't say that's why I never got Covid (or never had any condition that caused me to get tested for Covid). I don't know!
Bump acknowledges that Noem's position is "a natural extension of a conservative small-government philosophy: If people want to put themselves at risk from the virus, who are we to stop them?" It's not that people want risk. It's that people are balancing risk against freedom. The question is just whether to let people do their own balancing. Noem's "leaning" is just the conventional conservative preference for individual choice. Bump leans in the conventional progressive direction, allocating more choices to government.
You probably know which way you lean, so it's an old topic, perhaps too dull to write a column about. To disguise the dullness, they cobbled together the adjective "people-can-choose-to-die-if-they-want-to."
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