America, the intolerant moralist's carceral empire

Comment published on New York Times blog, in response to opinion article by Colleen P. Eren, “Let Bernie Madoff, and many others, out of prison,” February 17, 2020:

American culture is punitive because it is moralistic. Intolerance is arguably the most defining trait of the "ugly American" personality. It is just given different objects by the dominant sensibilities in both political parties. The left is intolerant of prejudices against the "oppressed," while the right opposes both crime and deviance, often narrowly writ.

This moralism dates from the 17th century Puritans. Our Protestant culture rewards toughness, not kindness, and so encourages great barbarism even when it would also punish those who express it. The original colonists escaping religious oppression, liberty became our great national mythic value. What really happened was only that American society developed its own forms and styles of oppression and intolerance.

(America also is a society where a remarkable authoritarianism, often not noticed, because those wielding it affirm their own assertiveness or professional privilege together with a sense of themselves being actual or potential victims of an oppression they vehemently refuse, coexists with perhaps the world’s most extreme notions of liberty. This is a legacy both of the experience of early colonists and of slavery. The contradiction between equally extreme forms of authority and liberty, which slavery itself incarnated in opposing social groups and classes, is substantially defining of American society and some of its social and political impasses. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that liberty in America tends to be thought of not, like democracy, as a form of political and social power but as outside it, in ways that may have no coherent formulation outside of neoliberalism (and classically liberal ideologies like that of the war of all against all) or perhaps some notion of art.)

Most Americans in fact like cruelty and violence when used on their behalf or, if they are "oppressed," with themselves in on the act. Our legal system rewards those who merely blame others, and the most prominent religious authorities believe only in upholding exclusive standards of propriety and obedience.

The Christian idea that justice and love are opposites warrants sentimental executioners. It is justice itself we must rethink.

Americans less need more empathy than other ways of problem-solving than blame and punishment. Imprisonment should be reserved for the manifestly violent. Other things can be done with lesser malefactors.

We could also teach good more than punishing evil.