This essay from 1997 keeps coming back to me. Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that the left bypass government in part by creating a network of “alternative services” for the poor as the “cultural core” of a new political movement. But she also talks about the dark side of the nation-state:
“But there is another reason we can no longer let progressivism be defined as the defense of government activism, and this is a moral one. While government does less and less for us, it does more and more to us. The right points to the appalling firebombing at Waco; we should be just as noisily indignant about the ongoing police war against low-income Americans of color, not to mention teenagers, immigrants and other designated misfits. If there is any handy measure of a government’s repressiveness, it is the proportion of its citizenry who are incarcerated, and at least by this measure the United States leads the world. Furthermore, prison conditions in this country are steadily worsening: Children are incarcerated with adults; efforts at rehabilitation are being discarded as overly indulgent amenities; arbitrary brutality and systematic deprivation are common. We don’t, in other words, have a soft, cuddly government of the kind that could be derided as a ”nanny state.” We have a huge and heavily armed cop.”
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