Everyone Into The Grinder
Everyone Into The Grinder
It is good to make powerful people participate in public systems.
One of the most direct ways to improve a flawed system is simply to end the ability of rich and powerful people to exclude themselves from it. If, for example, you outlawed private schools, the public schools would get better. They would get better not because every child deserves to have a quality education, but rather because it would be the only way for rich and powerful people to ensure that their children were going to good schools. The theory of “a rising tide lifts all boats” does not work when you allow the people with the most influence to buy their way out of the water. It would be nice if we fixed broken systems simply because they are broken. In practice, governments are generally happy to ignore broken things if they do not affect people with enough power to make the government listen. So the more people that we push into public systems, the better.
Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.
This sort of mandatory equality is obviously not what powerful people prefer. They will object that it infringes upon their rights. Because the right in question is the right to pretend that the rights of others are not as important as their own, it is not a right that we should be too bothered about violating. If they want to file a complaint, they can get in line at City Hall, like everyone else.
This general principle of good government was on my mind as I watched the Republican Party unite as one to wail about the injustice perpetrated upon convicted felon Donald Trump in that New York courtroom this week. What we winkingly refer to as “the justice system” is at the very top of the list of things that rich and powerful people are not subjected to in the same way as everyone else. It is the most pervasive and the most devastating example of this principle in action. If you can afford a lawyer, your sentence will be lighter. If you can afford bail, you will not sit in jail. If you can afford a nice home in a nice neighborhood it will be generally understood by police that their job is to work for you and not against you. In every aspect of its operation, our system of crime and punishment produces vastly nicer outcomes for the rich than for the rest of us. A private state prison full of poor people sitting not far from where Donald Trump frolics freely at Mar-a-Lago is a child’s picture book-style illustration of this whole thing in action. Here is where we send the regular crooks, and there is where we send the rich crooks.
The best reason to reform America’s system of mass incarceration is that it is an inhuman atrocity that will, in time, be viewed as the next step after slavery in our country’s list of unjust crimes of persecution. Even right wingers agree with this proposition in their own tacit way—notice how people rush to hire the very best lawyer they can possibly afford and pull every political string available to them to free themselves from the clutches of the criminal justice system whenever they face it. Notice how not too many rich people accept public defenders. This is rather inconsistent, philosophically speaking. Law-and-order Republicans should be the first ones to meekly accept the system’s harshest punishment when they do wrong. But of course, those harsh punishments are not meant for them. They are meant for the others.
The sight of the very same people who routinely demand more police and harsher criminal sentences competing to scream the loudest about the injustice of convicting a blatant crook for a blatant crime does not really require any ornamentation from me. It all speaks for itself. These people are not interested in justice; they are interested in oppression. That is the project they are enthusiastic about. From that point of view, the whole spectacle makes perfect sense.
It’s easy to laugh when all of this happens to Donald Trump. His punishment, whatever it is, will be richly deserved. But if you’re interested in using this moment for something other than schadenfreude, ask yourself: To what degree do I fall prey to the same tendencies to protect myself and let the rest of the world burn? How often have I focused my energy on using my time and resources to insulate myself from the many fucked up public systems in America, rather than thinking about how to make them better? I would never charge any of you with being as bad as Donald Trump or his enablers. But all of us have done some of this, somewhere. You send your kids to private school rather than crusading to make public schools better; you join TSA pre-check rather than writing letters to the Department of Transportation; you get the good health insurance from your job and scarcely think about the misery of the inner city hospitals; you spring for the Uber to the airport and don’t attend the public hearings about the MTA budget. This is human nature. I say this not as a condemnation, but as, perhaps, a gentle spur to action. All of us can think more deeply about the injustices that surround us. All of us can resist the temptation to purchase our way out of public problems and promptly forget about them. And all of us can enforce a social sanction—shaming—against extremely rich and powerful people who, one way or another, build a rocket to go to space while the planet burns in their wake.
There are nearly two million incarcerated people in the United States of America. Donald Trump deserves all of the same rights that they have. He can get in line behind all of them, and wait his turn patiently.
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Here is a list of charities fighting mass incarceration. Feeling helpless in the face of socioeconomic problems that seem overwhelming? Join DSA! Or, hell, the PTA.
Another way to change the world for the better is to join the labor movement. I wrote a book about that, called “The Hammer,” which is now for sale wherever books are sold. I’ve been coast to coast on book tour talking to many of you about these issues and it is very cool. I have two more book events scheduled this month: On June 20 at 7 pm, I’ll be in Rochester, New York at the Workers United union hall, in conversation with veteran union organizer Richard Bensinger. And on June 22 at 6 pm, I’ll be in Louisville, Kentucky, speaking at a DSA fundraising dinner. Tickets are here. If you’re interested in bringing me to your city to speak, email me.
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Totally agree. Have thought it about schools, and happy to see the other examples. I'll give a more controversial one: the military. Rich people would feel differently about sending folks off to war if their kids had to go.
"One of the most direct ways to improve a flawed system is simply to end the ability of rich and powerful people to exclude themselves from it."
Interesting point.
"If, for example, you outlawed private schools, the public schools would get better."
Alternatively, one can also collect enough taxes to make the public good good enough. Where I went to school in Germany the state schools were better than the private schools. Private schools had the reputation of being schools for rich kids who were not bright enough to make it in an ordinary "gymnasium".