I was having a discussion with a friend recently that turned onto politics and they trotted out the whole “personal responsibility” shtick, and how it’s important that people aren’t “let off the hook” and “evade the consequences” of their actions.
(We got into this because when I told them about the attack in the Pelosi residence, and that it seemed politically motivated, they pulled a literal whataboutism and kept going on about all the destruction and death caused by the BLM riots, neatly sidestepping that the most well-known “deaths from BLM protests” were actually at the hands of Kyle Rittenhouse, a minor who traveled across state lines with a rifle and then killed two protestors, and injured a third.
I had to remind them that before we can start talking about being hard on crime and making sure that people don’t evade consequences for their crimes, we need to first recognize that we determine what counts as a crime in the first place, and then we set the consequences.
Because we set the consequences, we can also change the consequences. In light of that, their position amounts to “this person should be punished because I think they should be punished.”
Fat people don’t deserve tax-payer funded healthcare because they ought to be forced to lie in the bed that they made. I had to remind them (they, a devout catholic, I an atheist) that we should probably give to others greater than they deserve.
But that’s the mentality: people deserve to suffer. Treating people who deserve to suffer cruelly is not a moral problem because they’re bad people and bad people don’t deserve good things.
They brought up several false accusations about George Floyd’s past and insisted that the cops were called because of an attempted rape. I had to reinform them of the actual facts and then explain to them that if we want an incarceral prison system we have to be willing to let go of people’s actions after they do their time. If being locked away for four years is the fair and just punishment for prior actions, a prior record should have absolutely no bearing on police response to a separate incident. To even mention it should be considered dishonorable.
And so we end up with that mentality you’re observing where Americans will explicitly pay homage to a system of morality while simultaneously denying that it should be applied to people they deem to be criminals.
Cue prison rape jokes.
Cue “too bad Nancy wasn’t home….that was a joke.“
The cruelty is the point; the point is that the individual suffer on a personal level for falling afoul of what they consider “criminal.” You see it all the time when discussing the police’s use of deadly force, and you see it when people rightfully earn large felony sentences: lex talonis takes over the reptilian part of their brain and suddenly they’re ok with retribution.
But when the retaliation is on the other foot, and you have a flipped police cruiser being torched, all of a sudden it’s “violence is never ok,” “property destruction is never ok,” “they need to act in a civilized manner and seek justice through the courts and other approved channels in a nonviolent manner.”
Never mind that it’s that very apparatus of justice that is being protested against.
We have a system where it’s acceptable to condone heinous things, even torture, for those incarcerated, under some kind of idea of proportional retribution. You raped someone? Don’t drop that soap because you’ll have it coming.
But when the roles are reversed, lex talonis is suddenly no longer a morally viable framework. Unilateral disarmament becomes the only acceptable response. Cops murdered somebody in cold blood due to a deep-seated racial animus entrenched by our very institutions? And you do anything but complain meekly…Hell, if you block traffic on a public road in response – which is just a fraction of a proportional response – then you’ve crossed the line, you criminal, and the law will ensure that justice is delivered, and anything short of this kind of “justice” is “evasion of consequences.”
I’ve written enough already, but you also see this line of thinking with discussion about abortion as well, where women are expected to suffer through pregnancy as the “consequence” for not adhering to abstinence if they don’t want kids. Abortion is wrong not necessarily (or solely) because of some flim flam about foetal personhood, but because it avoids some kind of required punishment for running afoul of what the community considers “criminal” or otherwise transgressive. You had sex and you don’t want kids and now you’re pregnant. You don’t deserve liberty. You deserve your own kind of incarceration and we will heap the appropriately analogous cruelties upon you.
Edit: thank you for my first platinum. Since this will certainly start attracting more attention I want to say one last thing: the modern conservative movement in America isn’t about traditional values, or heritage, or being anti-establishment, or small government, it’s about the right to transgress, consequence free, and it’s about cruelty.
That’s why the taglines of conservative politics are things like “law and order,” and “personal responsibility.” It’s politics as the distribution of just desserts; the primary concern here is not, in fact, the general welfare of the people, but instead to determine whether cruelty is or is not authorized against them based on an individual’s moral worth.
It’s that old canard: rules for thee, but not for me. If I’m to get ahead in a zero sum world I’m gonna need to figure out who belongs below me. Better if I can believe they’re below me because they deserve to be there.
Whether it’s owning the libs, fighting against bail reform, intimidating drag queens or voters, redrawing congressional districts, or withdrawing the civil liberties of women, this kind of right wing populism and illiberality acts to create a punitive society, reducing politics to control over who gets to decide the punishments and who gets to dole out the punishments.
And then this of course determines who is gonna be on the outside, to receive the punishments, and which groups and individuals are inexplicably immune to scrutiny, immune to accountability, immune to punishment.
The former President. State legislatures and voting rights. Police officers. Dog-whistling pundits who encourage stochastic terrorism. Propagandists “just asking questions.” Billionaires who undermine democracy on a global scale. Senators and their stock portfolios.
Supreme court justices and their wives.
Go vote.
