What makes me angriest about Vance is that I'm convinced he knows better, and is a purely cynical power-seeker. He knows that he sold his soul and that these ideas are stupid, but they were a gateway to power, so...
I’m not convinced he actually is that smart. He has the veneer of an educated person, but it’s like a switch is off in his brain. And clearly he starts with the conclusion (women should be home with their kids) and then reverse engineers the theory that prove why this is “science”.
Yes. The case for Vance being “smart” is that he was accepted to Yale Law School. His books and other writings do not suggest that he is a smart person. Perhaps the YLS admissions process is not the pristine signal of “smartness” we assume it to be? Vance seems about as smart as Nathan J. Robinson, another YLS grad.
I don't think so. I think at bottom he is who he told us he is in Hillbilly Elegy, a man who is angry at the world for failing his people, but who doesn't really know where to put the blame.
What he does know is that the elite view gives him no one to blame other than on his own people. The globalist, capitalist view doesn't help, nor does the "American dream", because those both say that people can lift themselves up, and his people obviously couldn't, or else they would have. The leftist view offers a hand to the downtrodden, but that doesn't work for him because his people are members of the white, misogynist oppressor class. He's a little too smart to buy into Jewish Space Lasers (though he'll wave at it from time to time), and he's spent too much time circulating in the elites to believe there's some sort of Illuminati gleefully keeping Ohioans' faces in the mud, or that there's some far-leftist cabal running the show since he knows the rich and powerful don't lean that way.
What's left but to construct complicated ideas about how it's actually the foundational Western ideals that are at fault? The idea that individual economic and social freedom and free trade are good and that people choosing to work hard can give themselves better lives, that must be the problem. Things were better when we couldn't afford independence and everyone had to rely on family and community because otherwise they'd starve.
And you know how he knows that was better? Because that's how things worked 70 years ago when his people were the rulers of all they surveyed. Never mind that they didn't survey much, and they leaned hard on racism and sexism to convince themselves that they were on top.
So, the solution is to make everyone poor, force the women back into the kitchen, push the minorities back under heel where they belong, and eject anyone who doesn't look like they belong in an episode of Leave it to Beaver. Because, clearly, once you've forced the world to *look* like a 50s sitcom, it will once again *be* like a 50s sitcom.
I think much of Vance's turn towards Trump and Trumpism are cynical power-seeking, but I think there's an underlying sincere set of feelings and ideas. Unfortunately, the feelings are mostly inchoate anger and a class victim mentality and the ideas are pure self-justification, untethered by any factual grounding. But I think they're actually real.
As has been pointed out many times, without economic growth the only way to make your situation better is to make someone else's situation worse. Surely that's going to make it more difficult to live together.
This might be the most impressive demonstration of horseshoe theory I've ever seen. Much of Vance's argument, taken out of context, sounds like it came from some leftist climate degrowther.
I basically agree with this article, and I'm happy to join any "JD Vance is bad" coalition. But this doesn't say much about the question of how we live together, despite our differences. There's a brief paragraph about how we might not agree on what community values we want to replace GDP with, but little else.
I think there's a lot more to say there, and maybe more to say about how GDP is a good measure for liberalism because it doesn't commit one to very much in the way of values. I hope this series has someone write something more on those questions.
I think Democrats would do well by adopting a rhetorical along the lines of “ you’re not worried about (x). You’re worried about the world changing ever faster, and you feeling out of control and unsafe. All these ideas – post-liberalism included – is an attempt to regain control in a scary world. Here’s an actual prescription of how one can do that.”
It's just pretext to fascism. They want to forced their view of 'common good' that doesn't come about when you give people a choice. Therefore, the only way to do is with punitive state power.
Also, I notice you (Phil) specifically (perhaps even actively!) avoided the great anti-gdp european vs american croissant conjecture in favor of the easily explainable strawberry problem. for shame.
because they realize everyone will hate it but they hope that by talking about The Good and The Common Good and Community without ever being really specific, people will buy into their idiotic policies without realizing what is being sold
Not to mention no one chooses to go to work or stay home to take care of kids or grandma because of the impact on GDP! Individual choices are not tethered to GDP metrics.
I think this piece has some possibly-good points, but rather overstates the case: GDP is a reasonable metric, but "lower GDP" and "poorer" are not really the same thing even though they are correlated. (For a trivially easy example, lower housing prices would make most people better off but show up as lower GDP.)
Putting on my economist hat - economics is the study of choices given scarcity: more resources enables a larger set of choices. So more GDP should mean more resources, and more choices - but a lot of GDP growth doesn't look like it really is providing more choices. It's not easier to be a 2-parent, one-income family in a neighborhood of 2-parent, one-income families. A closer look at the "household production" link shows why - the wages for household production should be those that person would earn working, not the sub-minimum-wage value used.
GDP is useful but not as a target for optimization. If you’re just measuring it naturally and see points where it goes up or down you can compare that with degrees of new automation and get some insight into its effectiveness.
If you’re targeting 2% inflation so prices always go up and putting essential services behind insurance systems so we can find the exact relative value of emergency medical care because it’s good for GDP, it’s very dumb.
I think the reason for 2% inflation is to preserve liquidity in the market and reward investment into building more while minimizing the negative effects of rapid price hikes, isn't it?
I’ve only ever heard people explicitly say they think people enjoy their careers more when they see pay constantly go up even if it’s the same buying power. “The hamsters love their wheel.”
There are practical benefits (also devaluing debt) but “spending more currency is better than spending less currency” is not one
I didn’t use it to make a model of allocating resources but I’ve had this experience with korean strawberries which aren’t quite as expensive as the Japanese prices but for 3 months a year they are the best thing in the world. I also had these eating lemons in southern Italy that as a food obsessed person was shocked by.
On the other hand the fact that I can get almost any fruit I want literally any season at Costco for reasonable prices is a miracle. Like it’s high summer and I’m getting mandarins from who knows where for under 5 dollars.
Yeah Vance is a clown, the strawberry thing should follow him around forever. But there's a real critique of the "Cult of GDP" underneath that shouldn't get buried with him.
The serious version isn't "GDP is fake." It's that a lot of what got sold as neutral measurement had value judgments baked in. Pick a discount rate and you've made a moral call about how much future people matter. Willingness to pay weights preferences by wealth. Nobody voted on those choices, they just got treated as arithmetic. And on trade specifically the profession really did get ahead of the evidence. The China shock work showed the adjustment costs were way more concentrated and lasting than the consensus said. That failure is a big part of why the crank version sells.
How GDP is utilized is a baby of the WWII mobilization effort and Bretton Woods. There was an explicit choice made to go with a "how much output can a state command" over a "how well are people living" metric. The pioneer of GDP himself said the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from national income. GDP cult members should listen and maybe question whether a metric designed to answer what is our productive capacity is, is actually useful for answering the question of how we are doing.
Obviously, Vance draws bad conclusions, and probably offers them in bad faith. But that doesn’t mean the strawberry story has no lessons for our relationship to economics. The question isn’t whether GDP is a bad measure. It’s whether it should be our ONLY measure. The problem is that too much focus on GDP and not enough focus on other (possibly qualitative!) measures of human flourishing puts us in a situation where we can have endless quantities of flavorless strawberries at $6/pint but not a single $10 strawberry to be found. The best way to maximize GDP (which we do better than Japan) may be to give everybody lots of cheap strawberries. But the best way to maximize human flourishing might for strawberries to cost a little more and taste a little better, even if it’s less efficient and makes us “poorer” in economic terms. It’s not that we should reject economics and its measurements. It’s that we shouldn’t accept economics as the only way to measure “the good.” The problem isn’t listening to economists. It’s listening to them to the exclusion of everything else.
>endless quantities of flavorless strawberries at $6/pint but not a single $10 strawberry to be found
You can actually get the super premium japanese strawberries in the US, we grow some of those varietals domestically now. And we import the ones grown in japan. Multiple options for people who want to spend an absurd amount on strawberries.
No group of economists decided from on high what strawberries should be available in any given grocery store. It's ultimately the customers at those stores who decided that the cheap ones are fine and they don't value the expensive ones enough to pay up if the store stocks them. And it's their right to decide that--which is the point of this post.
Of course. There’s no cabal of economists running the country. All I’m saying is that economists do not have a monopoly on truth and that our politics and policy decisions may place a little too much emphasis on their insights and not enough on insights from other fields. This is not a rejection of “science” or “data.” It’s an admission of disciplinary humility.
Also, I’m a free market guy, but let’s not kid ourselves that the shelves of your average Walmart are a perfect reflection of the wants and needs and dreams of the American people.
How can you with a straight face say our politics and policies place too much emphasis on their insights when you have presumably been adult for at least the last 20 years? Certainly Trump has placed no value on their insights, Biden placed very little, Obama placed more but absolutely put dozens of other "insights" above the insight of the economics field.
I don't understand how you can have lived in this world, be a free market person, and say that politics and policy place too much emphasis on economic insights. The sentiment seems almost completely divorced from reality.
Who's saying that economists have a monopoly on truth?
And I'm not really sure what's wrong with the shelves of the local Walmart. Everyone wants US-made, expensive products for their own career protection but they spend their money on cheap stuff because of course they do. So that's why Walmart looks the way it does. If people wanted bespoke, locally-made furniture that's what they'd have. You can think of the growth of "cage-free" eggs, grassfed beef, etc., over the last year. Customer preferences changed and so that stuff became more broadly available.
The problem is that Vance is not proposing anything better. Free market has been proven to solve these problems. Eventually if enough people like Japanese strawberries we are going to produce more of them.
Vance's critique that GDP doesn't include domestic labor is a valid critique, but that isn't deliberate and doesn't invalidate GDP entirely. It would be extremely difficult to measure domestic labor and put that into GDP.
I do think public policy has often incorrectly discouraged domestic labor, but this has most often been done by conservatives through work requirements. For example, we require that in order to get welfare a poor single mother with three kids must work, even though the childcare she'll now needs costs more than her salary. We then subsidize that childcare, but it would be cheaper for taxpayers if we just provided the welfare without childcare subsidies and the mother would often prefer to do that domestic labor instead of working a minimum wage job. But doing that is derided by Republicans like Vance as enabling welfare queens.
It'd be great if Vance fought against work requirements for mothers, but he was part of passing massive new work requirements with OBBA. Vance seems to imply that the issue with a focus on GDP is coming from companies and regular people, but that doesn't make any sense. There is a valid critique around government policies, but Vance is making those worse.
I'm not sure that all of JD Vance's views on economics are intended to be epistemically sound arguments against mainstream economics. He just says things that will enflame his base and make them angry at "other" people. Whether he actually understands economics or not is almost besides the point because the people he's speaking to aren't themselves equipped to know if what he's saying is horseshit. As long as he identifies a "bad thing" and convinces them that their preferred way of life is under attack from that "bad thing" he's done his job.
The dem's best alternative message has to acknowledge the voters concerns about their preferences being under attack and provide their own solutions. They can't just dismantle Vance's criticism of the GDP and call it a day, because to voters, that's not really what matters. What matters is that they feel heard by someone and that someone has a solution.
"Post liberals, he argues, are willing to dismiss evidence that their policies make people poorer and impose their vision of the common good anyway."
Okay. But we can say the same about liberals or socialists or libertarians or pretty much any other political group. They all want to impose their own vision regardless of the consequences. This piece struck me as an oddly personal attack on the VP, such as trying to link Vance to pro-slavery arguments.
I agree that no one will mistake Vance for an economics savant. But neither is anyone else who may run for office. Rather than harping on one guy, why not explain what GDP does and does not measure, and perhaps make an argument that a good economy should allow space for different people to live out different lives rather than hew to idiosyncratic ideology. THAT is how we live together.
I kept thinking that just as Vance tries to make too much of a strawberry, this author tries to make too much of Vance's vacuous glibness. Pick any random person and odds are they know next to nothing about how a modern economy works. It's not unique to "post liberals."
He's the VP! He's not "any random person". And when you are building your entire persona out of "I'm smarter than the consensus and everyone who has devoted their lives to this subject is a moron or a scammer", it's reasonable to expect a little more out of your argument.
Also: pointing out that Vance is coyly (or accidentally) gesturing at pro-slavery literature seems like fair game, given that he is a culture warrior first and foremost.
What makes me angriest about Vance is that I'm convinced he knows better, and is a purely cynical power-seeker. He knows that he sold his soul and that these ideas are stupid, but they were a gateway to power, so...
I’m not convinced he actually is that smart. He has the veneer of an educated person, but it’s like a switch is off in his brain. And clearly he starts with the conclusion (women should be home with their kids) and then reverse engineers the theory that prove why this is “science”.
Yes. The case for Vance being “smart” is that he was accepted to Yale Law School. His books and other writings do not suggest that he is a smart person. Perhaps the YLS admissions process is not the pristine signal of “smartness” we assume it to be? Vance seems about as smart as Nathan J. Robinson, another YLS grad.
Or he was a DEI admit due to his social class.
I think he's turned himself into a true believer purely from negative polarization
I don't think so. I think at bottom he is who he told us he is in Hillbilly Elegy, a man who is angry at the world for failing his people, but who doesn't really know where to put the blame.
What he does know is that the elite view gives him no one to blame other than on his own people. The globalist, capitalist view doesn't help, nor does the "American dream", because those both say that people can lift themselves up, and his people obviously couldn't, or else they would have. The leftist view offers a hand to the downtrodden, but that doesn't work for him because his people are members of the white, misogynist oppressor class. He's a little too smart to buy into Jewish Space Lasers (though he'll wave at it from time to time), and he's spent too much time circulating in the elites to believe there's some sort of Illuminati gleefully keeping Ohioans' faces in the mud, or that there's some far-leftist cabal running the show since he knows the rich and powerful don't lean that way.
What's left but to construct complicated ideas about how it's actually the foundational Western ideals that are at fault? The idea that individual economic and social freedom and free trade are good and that people choosing to work hard can give themselves better lives, that must be the problem. Things were better when we couldn't afford independence and everyone had to rely on family and community because otherwise they'd starve.
And you know how he knows that was better? Because that's how things worked 70 years ago when his people were the rulers of all they surveyed. Never mind that they didn't survey much, and they leaned hard on racism and sexism to convince themselves that they were on top.
So, the solution is to make everyone poor, force the women back into the kitchen, push the minorities back under heel where they belong, and eject anyone who doesn't look like they belong in an episode of Leave it to Beaver. Because, clearly, once you've forced the world to *look* like a 50s sitcom, it will once again *be* like a 50s sitcom.
I think much of Vance's turn towards Trump and Trumpism are cynical power-seeking, but I think there's an underlying sincere set of feelings and ideas. Unfortunately, the feelings are mostly inchoate anger and a class victim mentality and the ideas are pure self-justification, untethered by any factual grounding. But I think they're actually real.
He's been rewarded in multiple ways from association with a small number of weirdos.
As has been pointed out many times, without economic growth the only way to make your situation better is to make someone else's situation worse. Surely that's going to make it more difficult to live together.
This might be the most impressive demonstration of horseshoe theory I've ever seen. Much of Vance's argument, taken out of context, sounds like it came from some leftist climate degrowther.
I basically agree with this article, and I'm happy to join any "JD Vance is bad" coalition. But this doesn't say much about the question of how we live together, despite our differences. There's a brief paragraph about how we might not agree on what community values we want to replace GDP with, but little else.
I think there's a lot more to say there, and maybe more to say about how GDP is a good measure for liberalism because it doesn't commit one to very much in the way of values. I hope this series has someone write something more on those questions.
Yeah, it's not that it was a bad piece but I too feel like it didn't quite make the jump to "and this is how we live together".
Postliberal are so obviously wrong about what they want to impose on people that it is not really worth discussing much.
I think Democrats would do well by adopting a rhetorical along the lines of “ you’re not worried about (x). You’re worried about the world changing ever faster, and you feeling out of control and unsafe. All these ideas – post-liberalism included – is an attempt to regain control in a scary world. Here’s an actual prescription of how one can do that.”
It's just pretext to fascism. They want to forced their view of 'common good' that doesn't come about when you give people a choice. Therefore, the only way to do is with punitive state power.
Also, I notice you (Phil) specifically (perhaps even actively!) avoided the great anti-gdp european vs american croissant conjecture in favor of the easily explainable strawberry problem. for shame.
Why should anyone accept their view of common good? They are not really selling it to anyone but religious nuts.
because they realize everyone will hate it but they hope that by talking about The Good and The Common Good and Community without ever being really specific, people will buy into their idiotic policies without realizing what is being sold
Not to mention no one chooses to go to work or stay home to take care of kids or grandma because of the impact on GDP! Individual choices are not tethered to GDP metrics.
I think this piece has some possibly-good points, but rather overstates the case: GDP is a reasonable metric, but "lower GDP" and "poorer" are not really the same thing even though they are correlated. (For a trivially easy example, lower housing prices would make most people better off but show up as lower GDP.)
Putting on my economist hat - economics is the study of choices given scarcity: more resources enables a larger set of choices. So more GDP should mean more resources, and more choices - but a lot of GDP growth doesn't look like it really is providing more choices. It's not easier to be a 2-parent, one-income family in a neighborhood of 2-parent, one-income families. A closer look at the "household production" link shows why - the wages for household production should be those that person would earn working, not the sub-minimum-wage value used.
GDP is useful but not as a target for optimization. If you’re just measuring it naturally and see points where it goes up or down you can compare that with degrees of new automation and get some insight into its effectiveness.
If you’re targeting 2% inflation so prices always go up and putting essential services behind insurance systems so we can find the exact relative value of emergency medical care because it’s good for GDP, it’s very dumb.
I think the reason for 2% inflation is to preserve liquidity in the market and reward investment into building more while minimizing the negative effects of rapid price hikes, isn't it?
I’ve only ever heard people explicitly say they think people enjoy their careers more when they see pay constantly go up even if it’s the same buying power. “The hamsters love their wheel.”
There are practical benefits (also devaluing debt) but “spending more currency is better than spending less currency” is not one
I didn’t use it to make a model of allocating resources but I’ve had this experience with korean strawberries which aren’t quite as expensive as the Japanese prices but for 3 months a year they are the best thing in the world. I also had these eating lemons in southern Italy that as a food obsessed person was shocked by.
On the other hand the fact that I can get almost any fruit I want literally any season at Costco for reasonable prices is a miracle. Like it’s high summer and I’m getting mandarins from who knows where for under 5 dollars.
Yeah Vance is a clown, the strawberry thing should follow him around forever. But there's a real critique of the "Cult of GDP" underneath that shouldn't get buried with him.
The serious version isn't "GDP is fake." It's that a lot of what got sold as neutral measurement had value judgments baked in. Pick a discount rate and you've made a moral call about how much future people matter. Willingness to pay weights preferences by wealth. Nobody voted on those choices, they just got treated as arithmetic. And on trade specifically the profession really did get ahead of the evidence. The China shock work showed the adjustment costs were way more concentrated and lasting than the consensus said. That failure is a big part of why the crank version sells.
How GDP is utilized is a baby of the WWII mobilization effort and Bretton Woods. There was an explicit choice made to go with a "how much output can a state command" over a "how well are people living" metric. The pioneer of GDP himself said the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from national income. GDP cult members should listen and maybe question whether a metric designed to answer what is our productive capacity is, is actually useful for answering the question of how we are doing.
This is what I meant in my comment. Thanks for your much better formulation.
Obviously, Vance draws bad conclusions, and probably offers them in bad faith. But that doesn’t mean the strawberry story has no lessons for our relationship to economics. The question isn’t whether GDP is a bad measure. It’s whether it should be our ONLY measure. The problem is that too much focus on GDP and not enough focus on other (possibly qualitative!) measures of human flourishing puts us in a situation where we can have endless quantities of flavorless strawberries at $6/pint but not a single $10 strawberry to be found. The best way to maximize GDP (which we do better than Japan) may be to give everybody lots of cheap strawberries. But the best way to maximize human flourishing might for strawberries to cost a little more and taste a little better, even if it’s less efficient and makes us “poorer” in economic terms. It’s not that we should reject economics and its measurements. It’s that we shouldn’t accept economics as the only way to measure “the good.” The problem isn’t listening to economists. It’s listening to them to the exclusion of everything else.
>endless quantities of flavorless strawberries at $6/pint but not a single $10 strawberry to be found
You can actually get the super premium japanese strawberries in the US, we grow some of those varietals domestically now. And we import the ones grown in japan. Multiple options for people who want to spend an absurd amount on strawberries.
I hear you. And I can get them in my tony Connecticut suburb. But that’s not necessarily most Americans’ experience.
Yeah totally Vance is going to start selling them in Walmart in Bumfuck, IA.
No group of economists decided from on high what strawberries should be available in any given grocery store. It's ultimately the customers at those stores who decided that the cheap ones are fine and they don't value the expensive ones enough to pay up if the store stocks them. And it's their right to decide that--which is the point of this post.
Of course. There’s no cabal of economists running the country. All I’m saying is that economists do not have a monopoly on truth and that our politics and policy decisions may place a little too much emphasis on their insights and not enough on insights from other fields. This is not a rejection of “science” or “data.” It’s an admission of disciplinary humility.
Also, I’m a free market guy, but let’s not kid ourselves that the shelves of your average Walmart are a perfect reflection of the wants and needs and dreams of the American people.
How can you with a straight face say our politics and policies place too much emphasis on their insights when you have presumably been adult for at least the last 20 years? Certainly Trump has placed no value on their insights, Biden placed very little, Obama placed more but absolutely put dozens of other "insights" above the insight of the economics field.
I don't understand how you can have lived in this world, be a free market person, and say that politics and policy place too much emphasis on economic insights. The sentiment seems almost completely divorced from reality.
Who's saying that economists have a monopoly on truth?
And I'm not really sure what's wrong with the shelves of the local Walmart. Everyone wants US-made, expensive products for their own career protection but they spend their money on cheap stuff because of course they do. So that's why Walmart looks the way it does. If people wanted bespoke, locally-made furniture that's what they'd have. You can think of the growth of "cage-free" eggs, grassfed beef, etc., over the last year. Customer preferences changed and so that stuff became more broadly available.
The problem is that Vance is not proposing anything better. Free market has been proven to solve these problems. Eventually if enough people like Japanese strawberries we are going to produce more of them.
Vance's critique that GDP doesn't include domestic labor is a valid critique, but that isn't deliberate and doesn't invalidate GDP entirely. It would be extremely difficult to measure domestic labor and put that into GDP.
I do think public policy has often incorrectly discouraged domestic labor, but this has most often been done by conservatives through work requirements. For example, we require that in order to get welfare a poor single mother with three kids must work, even though the childcare she'll now needs costs more than her salary. We then subsidize that childcare, but it would be cheaper for taxpayers if we just provided the welfare without childcare subsidies and the mother would often prefer to do that domestic labor instead of working a minimum wage job. But doing that is derided by Republicans like Vance as enabling welfare queens.
It'd be great if Vance fought against work requirements for mothers, but he was part of passing massive new work requirements with OBBA. Vance seems to imply that the issue with a focus on GDP is coming from companies and regular people, but that doesn't make any sense. There is a valid critique around government policies, but Vance is making those worse.
I'm not sure that all of JD Vance's views on economics are intended to be epistemically sound arguments against mainstream economics. He just says things that will enflame his base and make them angry at "other" people. Whether he actually understands economics or not is almost besides the point because the people he's speaking to aren't themselves equipped to know if what he's saying is horseshit. As long as he identifies a "bad thing" and convinces them that their preferred way of life is under attack from that "bad thing" he's done his job.
The dem's best alternative message has to acknowledge the voters concerns about their preferences being under attack and provide their own solutions. They can't just dismantle Vance's criticism of the GDP and call it a day, because to voters, that's not really what matters. What matters is that they feel heard by someone and that someone has a solution.
"Post liberals, he argues, are willing to dismiss evidence that their policies make people poorer and impose their vision of the common good anyway."
Okay. But we can say the same about liberals or socialists or libertarians or pretty much any other political group. They all want to impose their own vision regardless of the consequences. This piece struck me as an oddly personal attack on the VP, such as trying to link Vance to pro-slavery arguments.
I agree that no one will mistake Vance for an economics savant. But neither is anyone else who may run for office. Rather than harping on one guy, why not explain what GDP does and does not measure, and perhaps make an argument that a good economy should allow space for different people to live out different lives rather than hew to idiosyncratic ideology. THAT is how we live together.
I kept thinking that just as Vance tries to make too much of a strawberry, this author tries to make too much of Vance's vacuous glibness. Pick any random person and odds are they know next to nothing about how a modern economy works. It's not unique to "post liberals."
He's the VP! He's not "any random person". And when you are building your entire persona out of "I'm smarter than the consensus and everyone who has devoted their lives to this subject is a moron or a scammer", it's reasonable to expect a little more out of your argument.
Also: pointing out that Vance is coyly (or accidentally) gesturing at pro-slavery literature seems like fair game, given that he is a culture warrior first and foremost.
He is trying to impose religious rules on private life.