Outsiders Trump, Sanders Take New Hampshire
“Justice, justice shall you pursue.”
–Deuteronomy 16:20.
One of my favorite classes in college was “Criminal Justice,” taught by Stanford Law School Professor John Kaplan (no relation).
Kaplan asserted that there were only ever four reasons to imprison lawbreakers: 1) punishment, i.e., to hold them morally accountable; 2) isolation, to prevent them from harming anyone else; 3) deterrence, i.e., make an example of the lawbreakers, to dissuade others from committing crimes; and 4) rehabilitation — transform the lawbreakers into better people, who can then rejoin (and contribute to) society.
With the possible exception of rehabilitation (largely discredited since Professor Kaplan taught), those arguments still apply.
But, historically, there’s also been a fifth reason to punish lawbreakers: society’s need to label, locate and punish wrongdoing in order to exonerate everyone else . . . and move on.
That was a key impetus of the Nuremberg trials following World War II.
That’s what happened in this country after the S&L bust more than 25 years ago, when more than 1,000 banking executives were sent to prison.
And that’s what patently didn’t happen following the 2008 crash, a debacle over 1,000 times more damaging than the earlier S&L bust.
The rise of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump — culminating with their smashing wins in New Hampshire yesterday — is an unmistakable signal from the body politic that there’s still unfinished business from the 2008 crash, and an expression of profound dissatisfaction with the status quo generally.
“Justice Delayed”: No Accountability, No Catharsis
Of course, unpunished Wall Street misdeeds aren’t the only issue on voters’ minds, or the only legacy of the 2008 crash.
There’s also anemic (non-existent?) wage growth, at least for non-CEO’s; the sluggish U.S. and global economy; a rocky stock market, especially since Jan. 1; and central bank intervention run amok.
When justice isn’t done, there’s a tendency to scapegoat (“demonize”) entire classes of innocent people.
Like the vast majority of people who work on Wall Street, and had nothing to do with its leaders’ nefarious behavior.
The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Stephens rightly complains:
“Some six million people work in financial services in America, according to Commerce Department figures. Take only the securities and investment end of the business, and you’re still talking about 900,000 people, a population that considerably exceeds Vermont’s 626,000. Is Bernie Sanders suggesting that some large proportion of those 900,000 is in on the fraud; that every man among them is a Madoff? And if they are the criminals he alleges, does he mean to put a few thousand of them behind bars?”
–Brett Stephens, “Bernie’s Wall Street Slander“; The Wall Street Journal (2/9/2016).
Bitter Fruit
Such generalizing by an angry electorate is extremely unfortunate — and entirely foreseeable.
As I wrote in 2014:
“Not identifying and punishing the culpable few leaves a taint on everyone else. Which is perhaps the most pernicious side effect of failing to punish especially brazen financial criminals: if no one’s guilty, no one’s really innocent, either. The result is a morally confused society, with tarnished institutions, discredited business and political leaders ” and a cynical, jaded citizenry.”
–Ross Kaplan, “How Fining Banks Instead of Jailing Rogue Bankers Disserves Society” (7/14/2014).
The solution now as then is to seek justice, economic and otherwise.
Voters in 2016 are understandably flocking to the candidate(s) they believe share that agenda.
See also, “Wall Street Fox Plunders Henhouse, Blames Chickens“; “The Wall Street Journal Whiffs on Warren“; and “Goldman Sachs: ‘It’s Not My Dog.'”
