Jimmy Carter is garnering more attention for becoming a centenarian on October 1 than he did when he was the first former president of the USA to celebrate a 96th birthday. Yet what thin hope I held in 2020 that the Democratic candidate might “follow Carter’s deregulatory path” seems even more distant from a party that will have further lost its way even if it defeats Donald Trump’s second bid at re-election. (A September Wall Street Journal opinion headline noted that “Biden and Buttigieg are Reregulating the Airlines.”)

Tom Tomorrow’s cover illustration for Eric Alterman’s Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America found room for philosophical intellectuals like John Stuart Mill and John Dewey to lend support behind Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi. 2024 Democrats are less likely to invoke either John than to ridicule opponents as spineless stooges for white supremacy and fascism (charges considered cheaply contemptible when hurled at the Michael Moore stand-in of An American Carol in 2008) or just plain “weird.” The New York Times can only make one of the most popular taunts against Trump’s running mate JD Vance fit to print by referring to it obliquely as “a vulgar, untrue joke.” President Joe Biden and NYC mayor Eric Adams have fallen out of favor for personal failings rather than stale ideas.

Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 laments the public’s shift away from New Hollywood “moral ambiguity, dark moods, [and] suffusing skepticism toward establishments of every description” to the “Old Hollywood pastiche” of the original Star Wars at the same time they abandoned the Carter who channeled Reinhold Niebuhr’s suspicion of “a too-simple division of the world into lightness and dark” in favor of the star of Knute Rockne All American. A future historian covering the quadrennial since Perlstein’s 2020 publication would find even less room for nuance. If anything, the lightness projected by a party purportedly devoted to “joy” is tempered by the bad vibes of anxiety threatening to overwhelm it (as literally happened onscreen in this summer’s Inside Out 2).

Yet Perlstein’s division of Hollywood into New and revanchist is itself oversimplified. The novelization of Star Wars portrays an emperor who fails to heed “the cries of the people for justice” not out of malice but due to being isolated from popular opinion by “assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office.” In the spinoff novels published during Carter’s term, Alan Dean Foster described a Luke Skywalker who “reflected grimly [that] if there was one thing he was sure of it was that the callow youth he had once been was dead and dry as dust,” while Brian Daley wrote of a young Han Solo whose seemingly “callous exterior” is realized to be a shield “from the derisions of fools and cowards” by an ally who warns that “in trying to preserve [one’s] ideals, one risks losing them.”

Let’s hope that this galaxy’s liberals learn a similar lesson before they divide the White House against liberalism in order to save it from conservatives.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism. He also enjoys the Lando Calrissian Adventures written for Lucasfilm in 1983 by libertarian author L. Neil Smith.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “The Party of Carter Wouldn’t Get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, October 4, 2024
2. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Newton Kansan, October 4, 2024
3. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, October 4, 2024
4. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Williamston, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
5. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
6. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
7. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
8. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], October 7, 2024

If there’s such a thing as rolling in one’s grave, the seismographs around Santa Ana, California’s Fairhaven Memorial Park must be going nuts.  A Tesla motor couldn’t possibly top Raymond C. Hoiles’s revolutions per minute — at least if readership of the Orange County Register, the newspaper he bought in 1935 and gifted one of America’s most libertarian-leaning editorial bents, extends into the afterlife.

“There’s nothing wrong with requiring prisoners to work,” the Register‘s editorial board wrote on September 24, endorsing a “no” vote on Proposition 6.

Proposition 6, per California’s official voter guide, “Amends the California Constitution to remove current provision that allows jails and prisons to impose involuntary servitude to punish crime (i.e., forcing incarcerated persons to work).”

“[W]hat the proponents of Prop. 6 are calling involuntary servitude,” the board writes, “is really far more a matter of this: Not allowing prisoners who have been convicted of felonies that were injurious to real people, say, in effect, that they can’t be bothered to hold down a job while they are behind bars for their crimes.”

The question is not whether a prisoner should be “bothered to hold down a job.”

The question is not whether, as the Register notes, prison work benefits prisoners by equipping them with occupational skills, a work ethic, and some pocket change to buy snacks at the commissary.

The questions are:

First, is involuntary servitude — requiring someone to work on threat of punishment, and denying their right to quit — slavery?

The answer to that question is “yes.”

Second, should slavery be legal in cases where the plantation is a prison and the state is (at least temporarily) the slave owner?

The answer to that question is “no.”

Those answers do not seem like they’d be negotiable to Hoiles, who stood nearly alone among American newspapermen in opposing the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, and who late in life told the New York Times “government should exist only to try to protect the rights of every individual, not to redistribute the property, manipulate the economy, or establish a pattern of society.”

Mandatory prison work is redistribution, to the state, of the prisoner-slaves’ property rights in their labor. It is economically manipulative insofar as wages, if paid, are set by the state rather than by the market. And it’s an attempt to establish a pattern of society which treats people as property of the state.

If the government of California incarcerates people, it is the affirmative responsibility of the government of California to see to their basic material needs, not treat them as chattel.

Unfortunately, it can only do that through its partial enslavement, through taxation, of everyone else in California.

With mercy and charity in our hearts, we should pardon the Register‘s lapse of morality in this instance. But instead of buying into the editorial board’s odious and repugnant endorsement, we should encourage them to do better, and to get to work on the problem of ending the taxpayers’ partial enslavement, rather than supporting prisoners’ total enslavement.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY