On Nov 16, 2007, at 3:36 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> I myself don't believe what follows, and if someone else made a
> serious
> claim along these lines I would scoff at it. I offer it just as a
> marginal possibility to speculate on.
>
> The War on Crime and the War on Drugs -- as almost all on this list
> would agree -- are mindless idiocies if they are serioulsy intended to
> affect either crime or drugs. Now comes the speculation:
>
> Do these events, along with at minimum a tolerance by the media and
> other leaders of hysteria over pedophilia, gay marriage, abortion,
> etc.
> exhibit a real sense within ruling circles that their position is
> fragile? That there is real danger of mass resistance unless there is
> sufficient diversion?
I go back & forth on this question. There was a spike in crime in the late 1960s. That, and the association with antiwar protest, hippies, and the black revolution, upset a lot of the white middle ranks. So it was easy for politicians to play on those fears. And, since it all threatened the ruling class's status, the electoral calculus fit in well with the elite's social needs. There's also the surplus population angle. As the economy hit rough waters in the mid-1970s, there were a lot of people (especially the poor, dark, and less educated) who became unemployable. The best thing to do with them, from a social order point of view, was to put them behind bars. Still, something seems too neat about this - something too functionalist. What were social theorists saying at the time?
Doug