Pacifying the Homeland. Brendan McQuade
deskilled, mechanized, and disaggregated. Increasingly complex supply chains scattered production across the globe. Global capital battered down the remaining “Chinese walls,”65 inaugurating a new era of economic deregulation and empowered markets. With the economic opening of China and India and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the utopia of liberal thinkers—the global market society—became reality. We called it “globalization.”66
For the advanced economies, these epochal shifts in the world-economy were completed and constituted by transformations of the state-form. A reconfigured compact with labor formed the core of this new workfare state. Where the welfare state valued labor as a source of demand within a national economy, the workfare state reduced labor to a cost of production in an increasingly global economy. With work reconceptualized as an individual responsibility and not a social right, full employment dropped off the policy agenda. Politicians and other elites redefined poverty as a burden imposed by the moral failure of irresponsible individuals and groups. They restricted and conditioned social welfare policies. Stripped of the protections won through collective bargaining and related social struggles, the compacts between labor and capital at the heart of the welfare state either learned to flex or broke. Labor became “precarious”: part-time, temporary, continually re-skilled and retrained, and poorly paid. These changes gradually snaked through labor markets. The workfare state subjected education, health, public services, security, and administration to market discipline, whereas these public goods and services had formerly been more insulated by the state. The increasing commodification of knowledge and services effectively proletarianized the middle class. Salaried, pensioned, protected professionals faded away, and “knowledge workers” took over.67
In the United States, capital could not be empowered to such a degree without breaking the structural power of labor, defeating social movements, and transforming the state’s institutional apparatus. This process is the vital linkage between the workfare and carceral state literatures. The “wars” on crime and drugs began, not with Nixon’s law-and-order victory in 1968, but with Johnson and another war of pacification.68 In 1965, the year after signing the Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration launched the “war on crime” with the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, involving the federal government in law enforcement like never before in US history. Two years later, the administration formed the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which, in its thirteen-year life, funded some eighty thousand crime-control initiatives and doled out $10 billion in grant money.69 From the very beginning, the war on crime and the subsequent rise of mass incarceration was a bipartisan project, a state strategy advanced by elites to manage mounting social problems.70
These wars of pacification against crime and poverty were animated by shared assumptions. “Across political and ideological lines,” Hinton explains, “federal policymakers shared a set of assumptions about African Americans, poverty and crime that in time became a causal and consensus-building force in the domestic urban policy following civil rights legislation.” Although “their legislative language never evoked race explicitly, policy-makers interpreted black poverty as pathological . . . distort[ing] the aims of the War on Poverty and . . . also shap[ing] . . . the War on Crime.”71 The new order, “colorblind racism,” was taking shape. Overt racist rhetoric and legal discrimination became taboo, but racialized inequalities endured. Without a structural intervention like an antiracist capstone to the New Deal, the landmark civil rights legislation paradoxically normalized enduring racialized inequalities of material power. With no overtly discriminatory laws, a renewed, post–civil rights faith in liberal meritocracy redefined racial problems as cultural deficiencies of communities, households, and individuals, thereby minimizing the structural bases of racial inequality and erasing the last impact of the herrenvolk-era.72 When coupled with the post–civil rights incorporation of the black elite and middle class—what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor criticizes as “black faces in high places”—colorblind racism became even more difficult for antiracists to address. It also encouraged a reaction among whites, who tended to misrecognize their worsening economic positioned as a direct consequence of the new racial order, which tokenized minority elites. Few directed their attention to the real cause, the imposition of workfare.73
The reaction to the Attica Prison rebellion exemplified these new revanchist politics. It produced a new prose of pacification, a law-and-order rhetoric that mobilized simmering white resentment with changing racial hierarchies and middle-class anxieties about growing economic uncertainty into a popular support for increased policing, expanded incarceration, and the rollback of the welfare state. In 1971, a multiracial group of prisoners seized hold of Attica State Prison in Upstate New York in support of demands consonant with the radical movements of the period. Despite the explicit politics of the rebellion, media figures and political elites cast the revolt as an apolitical, spontaneous riot that was rooted in the “anger,” “hostility” and “alienation” of the largely black participants of the rebellion. In the official discourse, Attica was “analogous,” Camp contends, “to the so-called ghetto disturbances of the 1960s . . . chaotic expression of disorder rather than . . . political expression of a multiracial class struggle.” New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller responded with a violent crackdown: a state police raid that left forty-three dead and an emergency allocation of $4 million increase security at Attica.74
The immediate response to Attica rolled into a wider attack on both the welfare state and social movements. Reversing his previous commitment to rehabilitative measures, the governor gave his name to the Rockefeller Drug Laws, punitive legislation that required mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession. The laws signaled the abandonment of the welfare state’s commitment to managing social reproduction. They mark the shift to an ethos of personal responsibility that animates the workfare state. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann explains:
[The Rockefeller Drug Laws] dramatically revised the subject position of the addict, for not only was their welfare no longer at issue in these policies but they were also being constructed as emphatically outside of “the public.” Since the addict/pusher targeted by these laws was almost universally understood to be a Black or Puerto Rican man, these characterizations had wide political implications at a time when society wrestled over Civil Rights activists’ demands for full, equal citizenship. They positioned addicts as “anti-citizens,” the opposite of right-bearing citizens. In terms of the dominant medical metaphor of addiction, pusher/addicts moved from being considered diseased to being cast as the disease. Politicians constructed them as outside of citizenship, holding addict/pushers responsible not only for their own condition, but also for many of the problems plaguing society, such as crime, deteriorating urban infrastructure, and mass social and economic insecurity. Locating the cause of these problems outside of the nation exonerated American society from culpability and the American state from responsibility to ameliorate these conditions—precisely the opposite arguments advanced by social movement participants who demanded the state redress past and present injustices.75
The new politics inaugurated by Attica and the Rockefeller Drug Laws mobilized lingering racial resentments from the herrenvolk era in the new terms of colorblind racism. Non-white populations, reluctantly admitted to the polity under the pressure of massive mobilization, were excluded again, but on the basis of perceived criminality, not overt racism. This new prose of pacification would sustain the construction of the workfare-carceral state as a bipartisan project. New York’s Rockefeller Laws were a first. By 1994, every state had instituted mandatory minimums.76
This new pacification war empowered police and prosecutors. Signed into law in 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act created secret “special grand juries,” permitted courts to hear evidence obtained illegally, allowed police agencies to seize criminal assets, and created new categories of crimes.77 In practice, the wars on drugs and crime blurred with COINTELPRO, the FBI’s infamous counterintelligence program that sought to “disrupt and discredit” the social movements of the era.78 All the while, LEAA provided millions in grants for police agencies to computerize their records and link their databases of law enforcement, the first steps in the institutionalization of intelligence fusion. During the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations, the LEAA distributed $90 million to state and municipal