On the Inimitable Greatness of The Boss

Bruce Springsteen’s most famous and best-selling album, Born in the USA, is remarkably sandwiched between two works of music that are far less commercial and radio-friendly, 1982’s Nebraska and 1987’s Tunnel of Love. In sound and style, if nothing else, these two could not be more different from Born in the USA. So let’s examine this stunning trio.

In the summer of 1984 Bruce Springsteen released Born in the USA. The album would feature several of his most prominent hits (Dancing in the Dark, Glory Days, I’m on Fire, and the title track) and has sold some 30 million copies. The album helped to make Springsteen a household name and is one of the most recognizable works of the 1980s. It is perhaps fitting that the songs on this bestseller embody the anthemic, arena rock sound that would pack stadiums around the world during the following tour.

It is all the more remarkable to consider it in the context of the albums that precede and succeed it. 1982’s Nebraska is a dark, haunting folk album featuring only Springsteen’s voice, a guitar, and a harmonica. The tracks concern criminals, outlaws, the unemployed and underemployed, what Springsteen saw as the forgotten underbelly of Reagan’s America. It is not a pop album and has no ready-made hits. Springsteen did not tour for the album, perhaps fitting given its themes and sound. Nevertheless, to say it has aged well as it turns forty this fall would be a massive understatement.

Advance to the other side of Born in the USA and we have Springsteen’s highly anticipated follow-up, 1987’s Tunnel of Love. Although Springsteen largely abandons the Woody Guthrie-esque guitar and harmonica vibe of Nebraska, the album still parallels it in many ways. The songs cast aside Born in the USA’s grandeur for soft, somber compositions, led by light digital sounds and Springsteen’s voice. The topics also don’t feel ready for top-40 airplay. Yes, there are love songs here but not the bubble gum variety that dominates the charts. Instead, we get deep, probing reflections on commitment, aging, love, temptation, disillusionment, and heartbreak.

For instance, the two faces of love, “one that laughs and one that cries,” found in Two Faces, offer a stunning depiction of a man wrestling with his loving commitment for his partner and his propensity to damage the relationship. Meanwhile, the opening verse of the wedding song, Walk Like a Man, will send shivers down the spine of anyone who has pondered the mystery and commitment of marriage. And consider these lines from later in the same song, relayed from Springsteen to his father, “Well, now the years have gone and I've grown/From that seed you've sown/But I didn't think there'd be so many steps/I'd have to learn on my own.” Has any popular artist captured in so simple and powerful language what it is like to grow up?

Tunnel of Love is introspective and personal in a way that Nebraska is not. Nevertheless the albums are two sides of the same coin, the strangest sandwich one could imagine when Born in the USA is the crowd-pleasing filling. Writing for The Ringer, Elizabeth Nelson rightly recognizes that Nebraska is “notoriously on any short list of the bleakest LPs ever rendered by a major recording star near the apex of their commercial powers.” 

This is part of what makes Springsteen both brilliant and unique. For his Born in the USA follow-up also has to stand as an odd choice. Apparently, his thought process went along the lines of “Let me follow up these fist-pumping, relentlessly catchy sing-along anthems with twelve intensely personal, somber tracks that inspect the challenges and rewards of love and commitment in the late twentieth-century.” If nothing else, these albums deserve admiration for both their inherent brilliance and for Springsteen’s audacity to make them while at the height of his cultural influence.

Of course on further inspection Born in the USA is not as much of an outlier as it seems. Springsteen was working on Nebraska and Born in the USA at the same time and the shared themes strike a powerful chord when one focuses not on the sound but on the lyrics.

The aching desperation of Atlantic City (from Nebraska) is echoed in Downbound Train (from Born in the USA), both songs that feature not just economic hardship but relationships under strain, the first struggling to endure, the second dissolving in divorce. Listen to Atlantic City, “Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City” and now Downbound Train, “I got laid off at the lumber yard. Our Love went bad. Times Got hard.”

Both albums are filled with resonant parallels, to the point that one could almost claim Born in the USA is simply Nebraska with a stadium rock sound. The song Highway Patrolman from Nebraska details two brothers, one of whom works as a police officer while his brother, a struggling vet, frequently runs into trouble. But, as the officer sings, “sometimes when it's your brother you look the other way.” Born in the USA, both the album and the song, delve more deeply into the challenges facing Vietnam Vets as they return home. Meanwhile, Nebraska tracks like Used Cars and Mansion on the Hill tackle the hopes, dreams, and resentments of growing up poor.

This is but a glimpse into the strange, unexpected, and at times discordant greatness of this trio of albums. I haven’t even considered his first 1980s album, The River, which was released in 1980 and feels more like the capstone to his 1970s catalogue. But that would require another essay at least. Let me conclude with three cheers for The Boss and his 1982-1987 trilogy of albums. As he says, without offering much explanation or hope, “still, at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.”

Against AI

Reading Meghan O’Gieblyn’s deeply insightful book, God, Human, Animal, Machine, has me ruminating on some questions regarding consciousness, humanity, and AI.

Here are a few thoughts, organized around the following claim: The world would be much better off if the energy, money, intellectual effort, and prestige of Silicon Valley were redirected to more useful ends.

For instance, let’s say you find questions of consciousness, self-awareness, identity, and meaning to be fascinating. The world is already filled with billons of non-human sentient creatures—animals—who, through habitat destruction, pollution, overfishing, deforestation, sprawling horizontal development, ecosystem destruction, and the general effects of climate change, not to mention animal testing, roadside zoos, and factory farming, are being catastrophically wronged by humanity.

We don’t like to talk about this. To do so is to offer another rant that can easily be categorized and put into a box—environmentalist, animal rights, vegan, hippie, and so on.

Alternatively, in the worlds of popular culture, private industry, and academia, AI is exciting, sexy, and supposedly future-oriented. Note the headline-dominating discussions, Ted talks, research grants, Silicon Valley symposia, obsequious media profiles, proliferation of robots on college campuses, and so on that indicate our (apparently) exciting future.

The focus on AI, sentience, and consciousness in big tech, from titans like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to futurists like Ray Kurzweil, is justified because it will supposedly help us live longer and make us more intelligent through cyborg enhancements. Eventually, technological advances will perhaps even allow us to achieve immortality as we are transferred into digital form and able to live forever in cyberspace. Many people in Silicon Valley, both visible and behind the scenes, seem to genuinely subscribe to such beliefs.

These questions of immortality and identity raise their own problems, since a digital copy of myself, even if fully conscious, would not be me but a copy of me, and I would still die. Fully conscious digital copies of ourselves, if ever possible (I am skeptical), would only offer metaphorical immortality, as a being like me would exist after I die. But this is immortality in the same way that my progeny offer me immortality—they share my genes, they may share and pass down many of my experiences and ideas, and thus I live on in a way, but it is not literal immortality. Philosophers of the mind have wrestled with these fascinating questions for decades. But I digress…

Meanwhile, in the real world, humans live longer through antibiotics, cholesterol and blood pressure medication, vaccines, public sanitation, preventive medicine and universal healthcare, functioning social systems that reduce violence and address despair, and so on. Note that these actual life-saving advances, from statins to respirators, are examples of technology, broadly defined, but they are not AI. As for AI, O'Gieblyn argues that "most commercial AI systems today are designed...to perform more narrow and specific tasks: delivering food on college campuses, driving cars, auditing loan applications, cleaning up spills at grocery stores." Hardly life-saving. And yet this is where massive amounts of private capital are invested.

On the other hand, the actual life-saving medicines and practices mentioned above, under-invested in the private sphere and under constant strain in the neoliberal public sphere, are not exciting or sexy or futuristic. The same goes for reckoning with the billions of conscious beings we already share the earth with, widely known as animals.

Our treatment of animals today, both in the US and globally, is paradoxical, at once rife with care and cruelty, use of them as mere instruments and respect for them as valuable entities in their own right. Recent efforts in the US congress, like the passage of the Big Cat Public Safety Act and bipartisan efforts to discourage the use of animal testing, embody this positive aspect, as do similar or stronger bills in the EU and elsewhere. Witness as well efforts to confer rights and other legal protections on rivers, lakes, and even ecosystems. (See, for instance, this book by Joshua Gellers). Moreover, millions of people around the world treat their pet dogs and cats as equal (or near-equal) family members and companions.

At the same time, the animals killed in factory farms, tested and discarded in labs, and devastated in the wild as their ecosystems are destroyed all stand testament to a glaring failure to address these genuinely important questions regarding what we owe non-human conscious beings.

It would be far more productive if we focused on improving the ledger here, by recognizing that consciousness exists on a spectrum and that mammals and birds, at the least, possess it in significant amounts. Even reptiles and fish have some consciousness. Perhaps plants do as well, though this seems less certain. Computers and robots, meanwhile, do not. (Whether they ever will is unclear). We currently inhabit a world filled with conscious humans and animals and unconscious machines. What does recognition of this entail, both in terms of how we live our individual lives and how we organize our institutions?

These questions and similar ones that O’Gieblyn’s book so forcefully addresses are as important now as ever. If we fetishized technology less, we would see that questions of animal consciousness--how humans relate to one another and how we relate to the conscious animals that populate the ecosystems of the world--should be a guiding concern of life in the twenty-first century.

To the roboticists, computer scientists, and engineers preoccupied with AI, spare a moment to recognize that the futuristic world you envision, one rich with billions of conscious non-human life forms, already exists. And we are failing it miserably.

Reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom

The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 by Friedrich Hayek, is a beloved text of libertarians and conservatives. Written during World War 2 while Hayek was living in the UK, the text offered a powerful condemnation of totalitarian forms of government and has remained popular, selling more than two million copies as of 2010. As a political theorist on the left and a lover of ideas, I figured it was well worth my time to read and engage with this influential book.

A few positive thoughts before I get to the heart of the text.

In so far as Hayek critiques the totalitarian systems of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, I couldn’t agree more. Representative democracy, with respect for liberal rights and a capitalist economy, is a much more just and less oppressive system of governance.

When Hayek uses the term “socialism” to mean central planning in the context of a massive, bureaucratic, unaccountable, Soviet-style state, I agree that this is not something to emulate. (Although the word “socialism” also has meant and continues to mean other, much more democratic and admirable arrangements).

And, finally, Hayek is rightly horrified at the monstrous power and genuine evil of Nazi Germany. It comes through viscerally in the text. Hayek also stands in admirable contrast to many other intellectual figures on the right who embraced fascism, from the three prominent elitists in Italy (Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels) to influential scholars like philosopher Martin Heidegger and legal theorist Carl Schmitt in Germany.

A similar humanitarianism pervades The Road to Serfdom with regard to the horrors of war and the dangers to truth and human decency that ongoing war poses. It is in many respects a deeply humane text.

Now for the disagreements.

Hayek’s basic thesis concerns the dangers posed by central planning of the economy and how even democratic socialism will likely lead, in time, to Stalinist tyranny. Hayek grants that the intentions of democratic socialists, in the UK and elsewhere, are good, and that they believe in representative democracy and individual rights, and indeed want to expand these. But, by concentrating economic power in the national government through the mechanism of central planning and the state ownership of the means of production, they will inevitably (or at least very likely), and basically against their will, slowly transform the state into a totalitarian one.

This leads to one of the problems with the book. What exactly counts as central planning? When does social democracy, or a welfare state, slide into the central planning that Hayek warns of? Do the wartime policies of the Roosevelt administration regarding production and rationing count as central planning? What about the high levels of public ownership that characterizes Scandinavian social democracy? We will return to these questions shortly.

At times Hayek suggests that various regulations of business, to deal with externalities affecting the environment as well as other issues, are justified and pose none of the authoritarian dangers he identifies with central planning. (The author of the introduction to the book says as much, thus attempting to head off the critique that pretty much of all of Europe adopted various socialist policies post-world war 2 and none of them became totalitarian.) But at other times Hayek seems to suggest that any left-wing economic policies, however well-intentioned, will inevitably lead to Stalinist tyranny, a claim that is obviously false.

Now the dangers of authoritarianism, and extreme concentrations of state power are well noted, as is the importance of the left remaining democratic. For those of us on the left, we shouldn’t be status-quo centrists or milquetoast liberals but we must remain committed to democracy and the protection of essential rights (including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and so on). This is important to remember. Fuck Leninism, celebrations of the power of the Chinese Community Party, and any leftist embrace of authoritarianism. But also, I think Hayek’s central thesis is basically false, though any assessment of its empirical validity requires engaging with very complex historical questions.

If Hayek’s critique does apply to Europe, as many casual readers on the right seem to assume, it is clearly false, since Europe went down a social democratic route and is arguably the most democratic and rights-respecting region on Earth. The only European countries tending in an authoritarian direction are led by right wing governments. 

If Hayek’s thesis does not apply to Europe, because social democracy and welfare states are not real socialism (i.e. central planning and an authoritarian, bureaucratic state), then it’s not clear if his critique applies to any country on earth.

It is not a good depiction of the rise of the Nazi Party. The Nazis were not a democratic or liberal party but a violent, racist, dictatorial party committed from their inception to overthrowing democracy, eliminating all individual rights, jailing or killing all political opponents, and conquering all of Europe, if not the entire world. They didn’t slowly and accidentally create a totalitarian state. It was their monstrous goal from the outset. They were genuinely evil, and deeply undemocratic and illiberal, from the start. 

(Although they arguably became even worse and more brutal as the war dragged on. This touches on a good point of Hayek’s, that war is brutalizing and damaging to the cause of human decency and freedom. Howard Zinn, from the opposite side of the political spectrum, makes a similar point regarding the evils of war accelerating the evils of Naziism).

Hayek’s thesis does not appear to be a good depiction of the USSR either, whose authoritarianism likely owes more to a brutal, prolonged civil war, desperate famine, and the authoritarian ideology of the Bolshevik party (apparent from the beginning), than it does to a slow, unintentional slide into total state power by unwitting democrats. Maybe this is part of the story but not much. The leftist believers in democracy were largely silenced and crushed by the Bolshevik state.

Nor does it seem to apply to the rest of the Communist countries, which largely and unthinkingly embraced the Soviet political and economic model of centralized political and economic power. These state actors weren’t naive believers in democracy, as Hayek suggests democratic socialists in the UK were. There may be traces of Hayek’s story with regard to Cuba  in the 1960s but I’m not convinced. Cuba embraced the Soviet bloc at least in part because the US began sanctioning them, diplomatically and economically, pre-missile crisis, thus pushing them into the arms of the Soviets, at which point they shut down the free press and knowingly embraced, fairly quickly, the rigid authoritarian system of the USSR. They didn’t slowly and accidentally concentrate economic power.

I think, maybe, Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and especially Nicolás Maduro could be an example of Hayek’s thesis, in which implementation of democratic socialism led to a concentration of state power that ended with the defeat of democracy. Indeed, Venezuela has not had a free election since 2015 and has crumbled into a dysfunctional, economically broken, authoritarian state. But again, the actual story strikes me as much more complex than Hayek’s thesis allows. Was Maduro’s authoritarianism (and note, Venezuela is not totalitarian) an inevitable result of the policies enacted under the democratically elected Chavez? If not inevitable, was it highly likely? More specifically, did a concentration of economic power lead to a concentration of unaccountable political power? If so, then this may be a good case for Hayek. But explaining this slow slide into authoritarian government requires far more detail and careful analysis than today’s would-be Hayek’s are given to undertake.

This again leaves us with these questions that need much more specification—what exactly is central planning? Which “socialist” policies lead down the road to serfdom and which are safe? How and why countries become authoritarian (and when they democratize) are incredibly complex questions studied by political scientists, sociologists, and historians. They don’t readily lend themselves to glib answers, nor is it clear that the paths taken in the 21st century will mirror those taken in centuries past.

So by all means read The Road to Serfdom, for its condemnation of the evils of Nazi Germany, Stalinist tyranny, and war, and for a reminder that this book, and its author, are far more thoughtful than many of their proponents today. It also serves as a healthy reminder to those of us on the left to reject any remnants of authoritarianism from our past.

But, for all its many insights, Hayek’s thesis strikes me as too simplistic and, in practice, mostly false. Historically, most countries and parties that proclaimed leftist ideals were either authoritarian (or totalitarian) from the beginning, and remained so, or democratic from the beginning, and remained so. The latter, democratic leftism, remains something for those of us on the left to aspire to, with continued commitment to the defense and expansion of democracy and individual freedoms as well as egalitarian economic policies.

In a word, the slow slide from democratic socialism to totalitarian socialism, i.e. the slippery road to serfdom that Hayek warns of does not seem to be something that happened much, if ever, in the past 100 years. As I said above, most parties and governments of the left either started and remained authoritarian, or started and remained democratic. The Scandinavian model of robust social democracy, or democratic socialism, whatever ones wishes to call it, remains a great path to emulate.

The "Return of the Strong Gods"

This post is adapted from a chapter in my new book, How to Think About Democracy in the 21st Century.

R.R. Reno, a conservative theologian, offers an interesting thesis. According to Reno, the first half of the 20th century was defined by the very powerful “strong gods” of nationalism, racism, communism, and fascism. The postwar world, in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, is defined in reaction to and against these things, as a series of “anti-“ ideas. Anti-racism, anti-fascism, anti-communism. In their place we have promoted “weak gods” like tolerance, difference, openness, and so on, to preserve our society against those earlier, bloody threats that mobilized people’s passions with religious fervor. In some manner, these earlier strong gods seem to be coming back.

Like conservative political theorist Patrick Deneen, Reno argues that this postwar liberalism was too weak and too individualistic to hold a society together. It therefore undermined itself, which led in turn to people seeking stronger forms of meaning, connection, and politics. Hence, the “return of the strong gods.” There is much to this thesis. We could think of it as the return of history thesis, an antidote to the triumphalist (and misguided) end of history thesis.

This thesis overlaps with and resonates with much of the critique offered by the left, which is deeply opposed not just to extreme neoliberal economic policies but to the very individualist political theory that informs such policies, which deprives us of community, the common good, and other shared elements necessary for participation in democratic citizenship (Wendy Brown, for instance, makes some of these points).

Francis Fukuyama was right when he stressed that 20th century state-centered communism, as a challenger to the west, was not just an economic or political ideology but really a comprehensive worldview and powerful collective narrative. When it died it left many countries and people without any shared narrative to make sense of their world. The problem, as conservatives like Reno and Deneen note, is that the liberal democratic countries also lack a unifying narrative. Hyper-individualism is not adequate to bind a society together.

These concerns are not limited to the right. If anything, they have become as or more prominent on the left. Whereas many on the right have embraced the attempt to marketize and privatize all aspects of life, participatory democrats like Benjamin Barber have demonstrated how local participation could create strong, democratic forms of citizenship. Historians like Christopher Lasch combined elements of left and right thinking in their critique of American individualism. Communitarian-oriented thinkers from the center to the left, such as Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer have been exploring these considerations for decades. Radical democrats like Wendy Brown and Sheldon Wolin have critiqued the totalizing and hollowing power of markets. It is some of these very concerns that led to my dissertation chapter “Is Democratic Community Possible?”

Thus these concerns regarding the eroding power of modern individualism are not limited to the right. Further, it seems clear that elements of Reno’s thesis are true. Why are eastern European countries like Hungary and Poland turning to authoritarianism and xenophobia? For one, they lack any other cohesive narrative. The oligarchic, privatizing neoliberal conception of citizenship, economy, and state is not enough to bound a society together. If anything, it only rends it further apart. Thus, citizens in these societies which have very few immigrants find themselves turning to exclusionary and authoritarian visions of nation and meaning. In Reno’s terms, the “weak gods” of markets and privatization were inadequate—leading many to unsurprisingly, if lamentably, turn back to the “strong gods” of nationalism and exclusion.

Reno characterizes the postwar US consensus as the belief that “a sense of solidarity based on widely shared prosperity rather than on the strong gods will allow us to achieve a stable common life.” There is much truth to this. It also leads directly to the power of the leftist diagnosis of the contemporary crisis—a major part of the breakdown of this postwar consensus is the loss of “widely shared prosperity.” For if that is the basis of institutional legitimacy, then stagnant wages, precarious labor, declining benefits, growing inequality, longer work hours, more expensive housing, education, and healthcare, rising deaths of despair, urban deindustrialization, and a society in which children are no longer guaranteed to be more prosperous than their parents all contribute to the collapse of legitimacy, the demise of the postwar American dream, and the consensus it informed.

With the center disappearing, the middle class falling apart, and community hollowed out, the strong gods rush in to fill the void.

Some Hypotheses on Crime and Poverty

This is just a brief conceptual piece and not fundamentally concerned with empirical claims. It addresses crime and incarceration.

One basic empirical starting point: in the US prisoners are disproportionately low-income and low education. So what are some possible reasons for why our prisons are mostly full of the worst off? There are at least three reasons why those with lower socio-economic status (SES) might be more likely to end up in jail. We can think of them as working hypotheses.

1. Lower SES Americans do commit some types of crime at higher rates. For instance, many crimes in America are property crimes. It would not be surprising if the poor commit more property crimes due to entrenched poverty and a lack of alternative options. This is also a plausible hypothesis for homicide. Homicide rates tend to be highest in urban areas with entrenched poverty, collapsed social institutions, and a lack of job prospects. In so far as this is the case, the poor are disproportionately present in jail because they commit some crimes at a higher rate. But this hardly suggests that they do so out of some free “choice” to be criminal—they do so in the face of narrowly circumscribed life opportunities, none of which promise a secure and comfortable middle-class life.
2. Enforcement is primarily targeted at the poor. Breaking and entering as well as other forms of material theft are enforced with vigor, whereas white collar property crimes are not. For instance, as a recent piece noted (still trying to place it), if a home or business is broken into, the owner calls the police. If a worker experiences wage theft, who do they call? You can’t call the police and have them arrest the manager of the McDonald’s franchise where you work, let alone the McDonald’s CEO or its Board of Directors who together might be said to incentivize such behavior. But why not? There is no inherent rule that says enforcement has to be this way.  Similarly, drug laws appear to be enforced largely in poor areas, particularly in the inner city. On the other hand, in wealthy areas, from the Los Angeles suburbs to the offices and condos of Manhattan, drug laws are virtually non-existent. Again, this is not preordained by nature. It is a consequence of a country that is run by the wealthy. This leads to the third reason.
3. In some cases, at least, the laws criminalize the behavior of the poor. It is not only the case that the enforcement of white collar crimes is lax, though this is true. The penalties for such crimes are themselves small or non-existent. The forms of tax evasion that wealthy individuals and corporations engage in are often legal, not by nature but by design. The tax laws are written by and in response to such constituencies. And when their behavior is criminalized the penalties are minor, often ranging from fines to months-long prison sentences. Compare this to the often decades spent in prison for those who rob a bank or convenience store. The in-person theft of the poor is criminalized far more harshly than the out-of-sight, largely online theft of the rich. On another note, in many American cities it is effectively illegal to be homeless. If one cannot secure a shelter bed for the night, they risk being chased out of parks, parking lots, alleys, tent camps, and anywhere else a person seeking shelter might settle down for the night. Satirizing this injustice, Anatole France famously said that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

None of this is necessary. A key goal for a more democratic and egalitarian polity would be precisely to eliminate these disparities.

Star Wars: Originals, Prequels, and Sequels

In a time of growing authoritarianism we need a reappraisal of the Star Wars prequels. And on a lighter note, it is always fun to talk about Star Wars.

The original Star Wars trilogy tells a coherent story. The prequel trilogy, in terms of plot and themes, adds to this story, something for which it does not receive enough credit, particularly in the context of contemporary politics, since it concerns the transformation of a democratic republic into an authoritarian empire. The sequel trilogy, I will argue, fails to contribute to the original story or tell its own story.

Star Wars, in terms of the original trilogy, the sequels, the prequels, and the general universe, is an epic space fantasy. But its basic story can arguably be boiled down to two simple components, one personal and one political: the father-son relationship between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rebellion against the Galactic Empire.

In other words, the two most fundamental components of Star Wars are the political battle against tyranny, as the rebels attempt to overturn the Galactic Empire and restore the Republic, and the personal Skywalker drama, specifically the father-son dynamic as Luke attempts to convert his father back to the light side of the force.

By the end of Return of the Jedi, the two fundamental components of the story are resolved. The political and the personal dramas have both come to an end. The Empire is defeated and the Republic restored. Just as importantly for the story, Darth Vader returned to the light side of the force and killed the Emperor, saving his son Luke in the process. Furthermore, when Vader kills the Emperor and abandons the dark side of the force, the Sith are effectively destroyed.

The new movies, episodes 7-9 (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker), add nothing to this. They are fundamentally apolitical, though internet right-wingers deride their “agenda” because they include many women and people of color in the cast.

Episodes 7-9 do not explain or contribute to the political story that develops and is resolved in episodes 1-6. They don’t explain how the Galactic Empire effectively returned, now rebranded as the New Order, or what happened to the Republic. Wasn’t the Empire destroyed at the end of Return of the Jedi? Wasn’t the Republic restored? Why are those fighting for the Republic called “the resistance”? Aren’t they the government? How did a massive fascist state, the New Order, arise and come to take power with only token resistance from the previously victorious opponents of fascism? What were Han, Leia, Luke, Chewie, Lando, and all our other beloved heroes doing in between episodes 6 and 7? For any adult these are pretty glaring omissions, all the more so because of the explicitly political component of both the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy.

Alas, the new films also fail to add anything of value to the personal drama of the first six films.  Darth Vader is dead while Luke is virtually non-existent in two of the three films, and his depiction is mediocre in the other. Meanwhile the films resurrect an Emperor-like figure in Supreme Leader Snoke and then in one of the lamest examples of Hollywood writing in decades, literally resurrect the Emperor himself in episode 9.

Even episode 8, The Last Jedi, directed by Rian Johnson and celebrated by critics, is derivative and uninteresting. The final battle is a ripoff of the Hoth battle from The Empire Strikes Back but without the tactile, in-the-cockpit feel of Irvin Kershner’s masterpiece. Luke’s training of Rey is a sad, borderline parodic ripoff of Yoda’s training of Luke on Dagobah, complete with a Luke in the cave ripoff but with far less power or insight. The widely discussed confrontation with Snoke is visually cool but completely derivative of the Luke-Vader-Emperor confrontation in Return of the Jedi. A Luke figure (Rey) is brought by a Vader figure (Kylo Ren) to an Emperor figure (Snoke). The Emperor figure (Snoke) then taunts and tortures the Luke figure (Rey) before being surprised and killed by the Vader figure (Kylo Ren). So original! It is, however, superior to the embarrassing episode 9, which the less said about the better.

On the other hand, the prequel films, for all their flaws (and there are many), actually tell a story worth telling. They tell the story of how the Republic weakened and was finally taken over and transformed by Palpatine into the brutal Galactic Empire. They tell the story of the defeat of the Jedi and the exile of the two surviving Jedi (Obi wan and Yoda). They also give us more insight into the Skywalker family drama as we witness Anakin Skywalker grow up, from a slave boy into a Jedi, and then turn to the dark side, becoming Darth Vader. We also see him marry Padmé, gain insight into the nature of their relationship, and witness the birth of Luke and Leia, accompanied by Padmé’s death.

The political dimension in the prequels is also fascinating—watch Palpatine’s moves as he goes from Senator to Supreme Chancellor to Emperor. Does he try to overthrow the Republic from outside? Of course not. The Republic, for all its flaws, is too powerful. Rather, he foments a civil war and consolidates his power as Chancellor of the Republic, concentrating it more and more, while also generating a base of support in the Senate, such that in time he can simply proclaim himself Emperor and turn the Republic into the Empire. We watch the Republic weaken, crumble, and ultimately get taken over from within. It is sad, powerful, and for a space fantasy, surprisingly real.

And yet the prequel films have faced considerable criticism, from professionals and fans, in the roughly two decades since their release. It should come as no surprise, then, that the only lesson Disney learned from the prequels was that original stories, especially concerning politics, are boring. So, their rules for the new films, episodes 7-9, appeared to be as follows: Explain nothing. Don’t try anything new or risky. Have no politics (other than a diverse cast, which offended racist fanboys online). Use the old characters for nostalgia and make all the new characters archetypes of the old—Rey (Luke), Poe (Han), Kylo (Vader), Snoke (Emperor Palpatine). Don’t have a death star, have a death planet! Don’t mess with the tried and true formula of rebels fighting the empire, only now they are the “resistance” fighting the “new order.”

The prequels have problems. The writing is often mediocre, the acting often is as well (though some of the actors are great), the prequel films all rely too heavily on cgi, Jar Jar was a mistake, the Trade Federation leaders have strong and offensive east-asian style accents. One could go on. But the prequel films also serve a purpose. To add to and enrich the story of the original trilogy. They are actually brave, in that George Lucas did not just feed people the same old crap. Unlike the new films, which just give us three more rebels-versus-empire films (the Resistance versus the New Order), the prequels told a different story. How the Jedi were defeated by the Sith, how the Republic was turned into the authoritarian and murderous Galactic Empire, and how Anakin skywaker became Darth Vader. That was a story worth telling, even imperfectly. And it matters today.

The new films, on the other hand, have no story to tell and thus it matters little how effectively executed it is (A Force Awakens) or isn’t (The Rise of Skywalker). Disney’s hunger for market share and profits, combined with fans’ hunger for infinite content, virtually ensures that there will be new Star Wars films and television shows in perpetuity. But let’s not pretend that these are all of a piece. Something very special happened between 1977 and 1983, when the original trilogy was released. And something flawed but brave and worthwhile happened when the (surprisingly original) prequel trilogy was released between 1999 and 2005. Nothing similar has happened since. Perhaps this is because George Lucas, who created the story, characters, and themes, was last directly involved in 2005’s The Revenge of the Sith, the final prequel film. To be a little melodramatic, that was the last time Star Wars was a genuine story and not simply corporate intellectual property.

Follow Up Notes on Mass Incarceration and Crime

Here are a few more thoughts on mass incarceration, policing, and crime, in both the American and global context. 

I haven’t heard the following argument but conservatives might make it in defense of mass incarceration: America has more prisoners because America has more crime. This argument would say, in effect, that we aren’t more punitive than a country like Canada—rather, we just have more criminals and thus more people in jail.

And the argument isn’t totally crazy. America does have much higher rates of one type of crime—homicide. Our national homicide rate is anywhere from two to eight times that of other, similar wealthy democracies. So, all things equal, we should be expected to have more people in prison for murder than these other countries. And we do.

The problem is that this hardly explains the disparities in prison rates. The incarceration rate in America, as of 2020 according to World Prison Brief, was more than six times as much as Canada, though our homicide rate is about twice as high. Do we have more violent crime, specifically homicide, than similar countries? Yes. Does this explain the disparity between America and other similar countries? No. Because we also have a far more punitive criminal justice system, with much harsher initial punishments, mandatory sentencing, three strikes provisions, and extreme drug laws that are enforced with severity in poor and especially urban areas. 

If Canada were to unfortunately experience the American homicide rate it would have more prisoners than it currently does but it would not remotely approach the American incarceration rate. This is in part because as political scientist Marie Gottschalk documents, long prison sentences compound on one another. Unlike almost every other country on earth, America has many prisoners serving life sentences and many others serving multi-decade ones. These people remain in the prison population for extended periods of time, whereas criminals in other countries, even serious ones, rarely serve sentences of more than ten or fifteen years. This makes it difficult for the prison population to shrink since so many prisoners are in there for life. Even the recent (possibly temporary) covid-related drop only took a 14% bite out of our prison population.

The American system of punishment used to resemble that of other wealthy democracies. In the old American prison system, before the massive expansion brought on by the war on crime and the war on drugs, we were more like Europe. An example of this was the so-called Dime and a Half sentence, in which those sentenced to “life in prison” usually only served 10 and a half years before being released. Not anymore. Life without the possibility of parole, as well as other multi-decade sentences, are common here.

On another note, why do the poor, in some cases, commit more crimes? As Geo Maher notes in his new work, inner cities, which have high rates of property and violent crime, are characterized by “systematic neglect and active looting, a lack of social welfare programs, and unequal access to education and opportunities.” They have also experienced substantial deindustrialization in recent decades, with good manufacturing work replaced by minimum wage service work. We can connect this to the more recent deindustrialization of rust belt and small town white America which has seen its own growing problem—deaths of despair due to drugs, alcohol, and suicide. So part of the explanation, for both inner city crime and rural deaths of despair, is that people in both groups experience such hopelessness and desperation that they cannot access or imagine accessing the aspirational middle class life that defines the mainstream American Dream. They are thus more likely to spurn it through the turn to crime or abandon it through the turn to drugs and suicide. (There is much to say here— this paragraph really merits its own blog post).

The question remains—How do we get to the virtuous feedback loop of so many other countries, with both low violent crime rates and low incarceration rates? In the most general sense, our system of policing and incarceration does not work. It has failed to create a society that is safe by the standards of the wealthy democracies of the world while at the same time creating the authoritarian stain of mass incarceration. The answer to this question will look very different than the practices that have defined America for the past half century.

Mass Incarceration in America: Defenders and Critics

The latest edition of National Review (October 4, 2021) contains a piece by Andrew McCarthy entitled “Fictions of the carceral state.” In this essay McCarthy takes to task leftist critics of mass incarceration in America. At no point in the essay does McCarthy identify any leftist writer or organization by name. Let’s not make this same mistake. Here I will engage with and critique this specific article by conservative writer, lawyer, and former assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Andrew McCarthy, writing for the prominent conservative magazine National Review.

Okay, let’s get started. In 2019 there were some 2.1-2.3 million Americans behind bars, depending on how and who ones counts. (Technically, prisons hold those sentenced to long terms while jails hold those serving one year or less. I will use the term “prison population” more loosely to refer to all Americans behind bars). That number dropped by a few hundred thousand over the course of 2020, due to covid and the impact of some mild pre-covid criminal justice reforms in California and other states. According to data compiled by the Vera Institute of Justice there were approximately 1.8 million Americans behind bars in late 2020, a notable drop.

McCarthy spends much of his essay harping on these numbers. Of course it is important that we get the numbers right. Though, as I discuss below, it is not yet clear whether this drop represents a temporary or more long-term decline. But what is the broader point here? Why spend so much energy and time stressing the exact numbers? Does this disprove the arguments of the left? Does this small decline disprove the basic thesis that America has a system of mass incarceration and what can be called a “carceral state”? Does mass incarceration cease to exist when the number of incarcerated Americans falls under 2 million?

The fact remains that the USA still has the highest, or one of the highest, prison populations in the world, in both absolute and per-capita terms, even accounting for this small covid-related drop. As the detailed study by the Vera Institute of Justice notes, “the decrease was neither substantial nor sustained enough to be considered an adequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and incarceration in the United States remains a global aberration.”

And this is indeed a key part of the case against mass incarceration in the United States. The system of imprisonment developed in the US from the 1970s to the early 2000s (at which point prison numbers began to level off) was historically unprecedented both within America and around the world. Not only do the other wealthy democracies of the world have much lower prison rates—Canada, for instance, imprisons around 104 people per 100,000, compared to the US rate of 639 per 100,000—but even authoritarian states like China have lower rates. Indeed, according to the World Prison Brief, China incarcerated around 1.7 million people in 2020, a far lower rate than the US. Only a few countries, such as Cuba and Turkmenistan, even come close to the absurdly high rates of American incarceration. This should stand as a damning indictment of the American prison system. We do indeed have a carceral state, if any country on earth can be said to possess one.

McCarthy claims that “in point of fact our prisons are not teeming at all,” a response to supposed leftist arguments that our prisons are “teeming” with non-violent offenders. But McCarthy’s claim is absurd on its face. According to his numbers, the American incarceration rate peaked between 2006 and 2008 at 1,000 prisoners per 100,000 people, which is likely the highest incarceration rate in recorded human history. Even with the post-2008 slow decline and the more recent covid-related drop, America’s imprisonment rate remains the highest in the world. (The Vera Institute estimates that the American prison rate dropped to a low of around 550 per 100,000 in mid-late 2020, roughly tying Turkmenistan for the highest rate on earth).

It is also important to note that much of the recent drop in the American prison population occurred in the early stages of covid, i.e. the first half of 2020. The overall incarcerated population in the US started to increase again by late 2020, particularly in local jails. So we don’t know how many people are incarcerated in America in September 2021, partly because it takes time and careful scholarship to pinpoint the exact number. The point is, the decline in 2020 may have already partially reversed itself by now, data for which we won’t have until 2022. The broader point? While this drop in prison population is welcome to those opposed to mass incarceration, it should not be overstated, nor presumed to be permanent.

Back to McCarthy, who in his essay never mentions any other countries. But all other wealthy democracies manage to have low incarceration rates and lower rates of violent crime, particularly homicide. Why is this? The answer is complicated, and related to easy access to firearms, entrenched poverty, social and economic inequality, race relations, and many other factors. What we can say with confidence is that a world that has low levels of violence and low levels of incarceration is possible. So why not here?

At a more basic level, these absences in McCarthy’s essay point to the sheer inadequacy of his evidence and arguments. At no point does he seriously engage with any of the arguments on the left regarding mass incarceration nor does he engage with the criminal justice systems of any other country on earth. This myopia is common in conservative circles. For instance, it was only possible to fear-monger the prospect of universal healthcare, as Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and McCarthy himself have done, if one ignores the experiences of every other wealthy democracy on earth. Not a very promising line of argument.

Turning back to the development of the modern American prison system, McCarthy claims the prison boom from the 1970s to the 2000s contributed to the dramatic drop in violent crime that began in the early 1990s and lasted for roughly twenty years. It may have contributed, though the evidence is mixed. Sociologist Bruce Western’s detailed study, Punishment and Inequality in America, finds that the massive increase in imprisonment rates had only a limited impact on crime reduction. Many other factors contributed as well, which social scientists are still sorting through. The point is that it is not at all clear how much mass incarceration contributed to the twenty year drop in violent crime rates in America.

McCarthy also implies, and at times explicitly says, that the recent reductions in America’s prison population have caused the recent increases in violent crime. But he offers no evidence for this claim. Isn’t it likely that a series of more complex factors led to the 2020 and 2021 increase in violent crime? Do we, for instance, have any evidence that those released in 2020 in response to the pandemic went on to commit violent crimes? Again, we should recognize that these are complicated questions. They will require better data and careful analysis. However, it is presumptuous, and presented without evidence, for McCarthy to make the claim that those released in 2020 to reduce crowding and the dangers of covid infection went on to commit a wave of violent crimes. Some states, like New Jersey, were explicitly not releasing those convicted of murder or sex offenses. And more basically, there is zero evidence that those recently released contributed to a wave of violent crime.

Two final points to make in my critique of McCarthy, regarding recidivism and racism. First, recidivism. McCarthy writes as if all prisoners are hardened, repeat offenders. In his words, “the jails are filled with recidivist criminals, most of them violent.” He points to the high rates of recidivism. This is not a good argument. 

Imprisonment erodes the life chances of the incarcerated, who are already among the least well-off. In a careful summary of his research, Bruce Western notes that “ex-prisoners can find jobs after incarceration but these jobs usually offer no earnings growth and little employment security.” In addition, “few relationships survive incarceration…the life course [i.e. marriage, career employment, parenthood, homeownership] builds a web of social ties and obligations that prevents young men from straying into crime and other antisocial behavior, but incarceration prevents the life course from unfolding.” These rich ties are the glue that prevents a life from coming unstuck and devolving into crime. The formerly incarcerated do not have access to this glue.

Furthermore, recidivism rates indicate that prisons do not rehabilitate. Ex-convicts re-enter a society without training, resources, connections, or opportunities, and navigate a legal web in which they are always in danger of violating parole and frequently unable to procure gainful employment. They are, understandably, much more likely to be homeless than the general population. It is no surprise that they often return to a life of crime. Many also return to prison as “repeat” offenders because they violate parole. This of course raises the question as to why similar countries don’t suffer as much from these problems.

Second, racism. Even if the carceral state were not racist it would still be a monstrosity, a massive network of totalitarian institutions corroding our (imperfectly) democratic society. However, this is not the case. America’s prison population is disproportionately black and latino, in addition to poor and uneducated. Why? McCarthy insists it cannot be due to institutional racism. As he says, “the legal profession, including most prominently judges and leading criminal-justice practitioners, predominantly educated in elite law schools, is among the most self-avowedly progressive in the world. The notion that it would preside over a “systematically racist” process of prosecution, sentencing, and incarceration is ludicrous.”

This comment demonstrates a failure to understand how institutional racism operates. It is not premised on the participants possessing and acting on openly racist attitudes, although undoubtedly some police, lawyers, and judges are indeed racist. Institutional racism persists through subtler means (although not that much subtler). The infamous crack-cocaine disparity in sentencing punished possession of crack (a poor, black drug) 100 times more severely than possession of cocaine (a wealthy, white drug) even though the drugs are very similar. Similarly, prisons are not racist because the guards hate black people--they are racist because they disproportionately swallow up and destroy the lives of black and latino men.

McCarthy does note that black Americans commit homicide at a higher rate than white Americans, which partly explains the higher rate of black incarceration. But only partly. When it comes to the use and sale of illegal drugs, white Americans violate the law at higher rates. And yet drug violations are policed more heavily (one could almost say primarily) against inner-city blacks and hispanics. Criminologist Michael Tonry has demonstrated that it is primarily with regard to the war on drugs that the racism of the criminal justice system is most manifest.

More generally, those of us on the left ask: Why are the prisons so full of the least well off? The prisons are literally warehouses and cages filled to the brim with society’s cast aways—the poorest, least educated, most mentally ill, and most desperate Americans. If this is how we treat the least well off, by locking them in cages for extended periods of time, what does that say about us as a society? What would Jesus (“whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me”) say about our carceral choices?

What we see with McCarthy is the embodiment of two standard conservative claims regarding significant cases of injustice: it’s not a big deal and nothing can be done about it anyway. (We have seen this for the past year and a half with the covid crisis). Thus, first the claim that American mass incarceration is not real, or not a serious problem, and second, the claim that it cannot be remedied without destroying American communities by releasing thousands of hardened criminals into the streets. Unfortunately for America, mass incarceration is in fact a big deal, indeed a profound injustice. Fortunately for America, something can be done about it. We are not stuck with a system of mass incarceration, as virtually every other country on earth demonstrates. And in the best cases, across Europe and much of East Asia, we have examples of countries that have both low rates of incarceration and very low rates of violent crime. Two related goals that we must achieve.

We do indeed have a carceral state. What we don’t have, and won’t have until we dismantle it and replace it with something far more humane, is a fully free, just, and democratic society.