Discomfort with abortion itself doesn’t rule out discomfort with a lightning rearrangement of expectations, either. The government is suddenly in a place, or threatening to be in a place, where many people did not expect it to be, intervening in what were recently private decisions, cutting in on an unpredictable basis. “Every single woman [who] has been in a relationship has experienced the ‘being late’ moment,” an Arizona Republican strategist told Politico last year. “Every woman can relate to that, but it’s an intangible that’s hard to explain to men.” That story detailed a Republican-led focus group with women voters in Arizona after the midterms. “It’s about control,” offered one independent voter. A Republican participant said, “If they are demanding control here, where does it end?”

The Dobbs decision coincided with a re-embrace of state power across both left and right — a reconsideration of the bargain. There’s a sense, broadly, of American complication and stasis at total scale, that things are kind of too messed up and dense for incremental changes. That’s clear in the rise of the new left and the return toward European-style visions of health care and industrial policy, along with calls for more enforcement and pressure on the private sector around wages and climate change.

On the right, a wave of intellectuals and politicians have called for conservatives to unapologetically embrace the use of state power, including (for some) a more populist, family-oriented welfare state. The animating idea of the right in the 2020s tends to be that society’s crises demand a response beyond the limits of traditional conservatism, which comes through in the way Donald Trump talks about “retribution” and Ron DeSantis promises a “Leviathan” to clear out the administrative state. And as much as a contingent of anti-abortion conservatives wants the government to expand maternal care and family assistance, little of that has happened so far. Instead, the edge of crisis and battle that’s been attached to government power permeates politics.

The contours of the bargain between the governed and the government had been changing anyway. The central change to everyday life of the last two decades — phones and the social internet — obliterated distance between people and places. For all the good in that, there’s a paranoid vision of it too. The phone can become a weapon against the individual, who couldn’t look something up, couldn’t talk about something the way they normally would, couldn’t go somewhere without some app’s location services capturing that movement, couldn’t control what people text them, couldn’t stop the ads following them, couldn’t claw back the information already out there, couldn’t undo what they’ve searched, said and done.

It’s overwhelming to think that way, about a phone or the law unexpectedly intruding in a moment of crisis or deep grief. But things are changing, with sometimes chaotic intersections of broad laws and personal circumstances. There’s a lot to say about the limits and failings of American government and the way it’s been in the past, but one thing that can be said for a less-for-more view of American government, is that it created the space for privacy, pluralism and the complexity of being an individual.