Is the Government Our Enemy?

Ronald Reagan's conservatism insisted that the government is the enemy of the ordinary citizen. When the government makes its appearance you had better watch out. Contemporary conservatives still hope to reduce the scope of government involvement in the lives of ordinary citizens. This is an attractive position. Everyone has stories of being frustrated by the demands of official bureaucracies. There is very little any citizen can do even with his or her private property without the intensely annoying need to ask permission from some government bureau.

But government does not only regulate where we often feel regulation to be unnecessary or even destructive – destructive of citizen initiative and self-determination - government also supports significant portions of the population. In some parts of the country such as coal country in Kentucky, more than half the population is supported by government payments for food, for healthcare, for housing. (NYTimes, Saturday, December 22, 2018)

One would think that the people who effectively live off government support would not vote the Republican ticket. They would not buy the anti-government propaganda because they know that were it not for the government, specifically for the federal government, they would starve and so would their children. In different parts of the country the jobs that maintained parents and grandparents – jobs in the mines, in steel mills and in manufacturing, well-paying, skilled jobs that maintained previous generations - are no longer there. Those jobs did not make anyone rich but they maintained families without too many financial worries and they created a working class that took pride in their accomplishments. The paycheck they took home at the end of the week, they felt, was earned by hard work and by skills they slowly learned on the job.

But now these jobs are gone and for many there are no other jobs available, other than temporary work that rarely lasts. In some of these areas about half the people are pretty much out of work and live, as we would say, "on the dole."

The surprising fact is that in spite of their dependence on the government, many of the citizens support the conservative position and vote for Donald Trump, regarding the government that actually keeps them alive as their enemy. One of the sources of Donald Trump’s support is actually in areas where work is scarce, does not pay well and many people are dependent for their livelihood on government handouts.

Not surprisingly that has perplexed a lot of observers. How could people dependent on the government be hostile to it? The explanations usually offered are that these segments of our population are mostly poorly educated, not very intelligent people who voted on their feelings instead of thinking about where their real interests lie. It seems undeniable that they vote against their most pressing self-interest and no one would do that if they were paying attention or if they had average intelligence.

However reasonable that explanation may seem, it has left many people uncomfortable. Why should our political enemies all be mentally deficient? Is there no one on our side who does not fail to think hard about political choices and is inspired by random emotions instead of careful thought? The explanation that poor people support the champion of the rich, Donald Trump, because they are plain stupid does not appear to be satisfactory.

Observers who hesitate to question the intelligence of conservatives sometimes try instead to explain their apparent voting against their own interests by portraying them as victims of propaganda. The poor people who vote against their own interest, it is said, are confused by the constant drumbeat of propaganda in the media, in entertainment, and in religion in favor of capitalism, in favor of the system that enriches some and leaves many others without work they can be proud of. But of course accusing people of being deceived by propaganda which would not for a moment deceive you and me is drawing an invidious distinction which is no more acceptable than calling conservatives stupid.

Now comes a professor from Cornell who, in a recent book, argues interestingly that the hostility against government does not only consist of hostility to government regulation – although that is an element in this conservative stance. (Suzanne Mettler, The Government Citizen Disconnect). The hostility to government is a result of putting people on the dole, paying for their food and lodging, making them completely dependent on various government bureaucracies. The complaint of workers in coal country, in towns supported by steel mills or heavy manufacturing plants is that there is no work for them. Working, especially if the work requires skills, supports self-esteem. Doing a good day's work that produces valuable goods, that leaves you tired at the end of the day gives you satisfaction. If the work requires skill you can be proud of having those skills and of doing what not everyone could do.

But those jobs have disappeared and no one in the government is at all concerned to bring them back or to replace them with comparable work. Just giving out of work miners or workers in the steel mill money so they can live and feed their children these miners and workers see as profoundly disrespectful. No one cares about their lives, no one cares about whether they can do work that is a real contribution, whether they can stand tall for being workers in what ever industry.

This is an interesting and important insight. It raises questions about what the role of government should be. Many people , especially on the left, are perfectly content to think of the government as a dispenser of funds to support the livelihoods of ordinary citizens. The role of government is to help people. But here now is a different conception of the role of government. It needs to create the conditions for citizens to have good lives, lives that satisfy, lives that one can look back on proudly with the sense that one has made a contribution to the betterment of all, that one's life had been worth living, that one’s goal had been more than simply not starving or freezing as a homeless person. What is valuable is not merely biological existence but life as a member of a community where one makes a contribution that is needed.

Given current economic realities, given the rise of robotics as a serious threat to human activity, no one, including governments, may be able to find good work for everyone. If that is so, governments need to be the agents of finding alternative activities for everyone to do their part in the life of their communities. What such activities that government might foster would look like is not totally clear. On the one hand, there is necessary work, for instance, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, that the government should set in motion by financing it (instead of enriching the super rich through tax cuts.). On the other hand, the New Deal Projects like the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the WPA suggest how to think about creating good work.

Merely objecting to the government is not helpful here. If the role of government is going to change in a positive way towards enabling people to have good lives instead of merely staying alive, we need many different positive suggestions and reflections about them. Significant social changes is needed to resolve the challenge of men and women whose work has disappeared.

The people who may seem to vote against their own self interest are not unintelligent, they are not confused by propaganda. They need their society to care enough about them to develop new possibilities for leading lives that are worthwhile because they make significant contributions to this society.

What do you think about prisons?

According to common wisdom prisons serve several functions. The most important one is to punish people who break the law. The purpose of punishment is not just to seek revenge on people acting badly but also to discourage lawbreakers. The expectation is that someone who is tempted to break the law, will think twice for fear of getting caught and being sent to prison for a long time.

Prisons are often called "correctional" institutions. We expect that during their time in prison, inmates will learn not to break the law again. We expect them to learn to be better persons, better citizens, to learn to control their antisocial impulses, to learn to get along with their friends and neighbors and people at work. Prisons are supposed to "rehabilitate" prisoners.

Prisons are expected to mete out punishment and thereby deter potential lawbreakers and to really train and improve actual lawbreakers. There seems to be no doubt that prisons are important and valuable institutions in our society, well worth the cost of building, and maintaining, and running them.

In recent years, historians and social scientists have looked more closely at the history and functioning of prisons. They have found that the common wisdom about prisons is not as self-evident as we have thought. Prisons have served and still serve quite different functions. It is not as obvious, as it often seems, that prisons are valuable social institutions.

First, let's look at the past. At the end of the Civil War we passed the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery. Slavery and involuntary servitude were abolished "except as punishment for crime, where all the parties shall have been duly convicted." The condition of slavery was no longer legal except in the case of convicted criminals. Former slave owners made elaborate use of this clause in the 13th Amendment. Many southern states passed so-called "Black Codes" – laws for which only black people could be convicted. Thus former slaves, just recently freed from having to work without pay, could now once again be subjected to penal servitude. Black codes made vagrancy illegal. Anyone could be declared a vagrant who was "guilty of theft, had run away from a job, was drunk, was wanton in conduct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money carelessly of was in other ways, an idle and disorderly person." Almost any black person could be arrested and sent off to prison. Once in prison, convicts were leased out to private parties. Convict labor, not at all or barely remunerated, produced the bricks that paved the streets of Atlanta, Georgia. Convicts were leased out to cotton farms to do the work they had done as slaves. Convicts worked in mines, built railroads, and labored in steel mills.

In some respects, the condition of convicted laborers was worse than that of slaves. When buying the slave, the owner had invested a certain sum of money; they were not interested in working the slave to death. The mine owner who leased a convict had no investment in that person and did not hesitate to push them beyond human limits.

The prisons after the Civil War populated primarily by black men did not serve to punish or rehabilitate. They served to produce a new class of quasi-slaves. The purpose was to provide the cheapest labor possible in order to enrich the capitalist owners of steel mills, coal mines, and other profit-making enterprises. These prisons were difficult to justify. They were racist, unjust institutions in which the state made common cause with large capitalists to exploit the labor of black Americans. There was no possible justification for maintaining those kinds of prisons.

Convict leasing is still being practiced albeit not in quite as brutal form as previously. But inmates of American prisons are producing all kinds of products – license plates are the best-known but not the only ones. For this work inmates may earn two cents an hour or some other ridiculous pay. The purpose of prisons remains the same: to provide free labor to industry and commerce.

In our day prisons have acquired a new function which has little to do with punishment or rehabilitation. Prisons have become private enterprises designed to make as much money as possible. The more inmates a prison has, the more profitable it is. Private prison companies are therefore lobbying state legislatures to pass new criminal laws, or to increase the punishments mandated for any given crime. The prison companies manage to have more inmates and to keep them for a longer time and the only purpose of those changes is to increase the profit of the prison company. The well-being of inmates, their re-education are of no interest. Profit for private corporations is the only goal.

The common sense understanding of prisons is clearly defective and wildly incomplete. Responding to these facts a movement of "prison abolition" has become powerful. But the meaning of that term – prison abolition – remains unclear.

The best way of thinking about prisons is to ask ourselves what the purpose of different prisons are. Some of them are clearly illegitimate. Prisons designed to make money for private companies should be abolished. Prisons that provide more or less free labor to capitalist enterprises should be abolished. If prisoners work in prison, they should be paid a decent minimum wage.

Prisons are populated through the so-called "school – to – prison – pipeline." Students, primarily students of color, are expelled from school for being difficult, they are arrested by police in the schools, and before we know it they are locked up in juvenile detention centers and from there in adult prisons. Prison abolition means, in practice, that this school to prison pipeline must be closed.

Prisons are today used to warehouse patients with mental illness. That is a practice that should be condemned and ended. Prisons are often used to lockup patients with addiction problems. Rich people can go to addiction clinics that charge more than $1000 a day. Poor addicts are incarcerated. Clearly that is an unjust and destructive practice. We need treatment facilities for all addicts who want them.

There is much more to think about. What shall we do with women who have children? When their mothers are imprisoned there is no one to look after them. What does it take to rehabilitate someone?

The role of prisons and our society is very problematic and extremely complicated. Common sense accounts are lazy ways of avoiding this problem.