"The United States government—whether controlled by Democrats, with their love of too-complicated-by-half, means-tested policy solutions; or Republicans, with their love of paperwork-as-punishment; or both, with their collective neglect of the implementation and maintenance of government programs—has not just given up on making benefits easy to understand and easy to receive. It has in many cases purposefully made the system difficult, shifting the burden of public administration onto individuals and discouraging millions of Americans from seeking aid."
The desire, on the one hand, to not be "stingy", and, on the other, to limit benefits to the "deserving", encourages "generous" benefits to come with a process so Kafkaesque as to be inaccessible to the neediest. Now, there are costs, financial and moral, to making aid "too easy". *Something* will ration public aid, whether it's modesty of benefits making aid unappealing to all but the most needy, stringency of qualification requirements, some combo, etc, etc. But the "time tax" is insane.
My husband, an economist, once did a study on SSDI approval. He found that the wealth of the one applying for disability was the strongest predictor of having disability benefits approved. After that, older age, maleness, and whiteness predicted increased odds of approval. *Some* of that may be that the poor and desperate have more incentive to declare a disability than the rich, but a lot of it simply seems to be the perversity of the process.
It was striking to me, as someone who has filled out multiple government aid applications, how much easier the student loan forgiveness application was. My husband just had to submit name, SSN, and affirm we meet the income requirements. Such a radically different experience than Medicaid, and one that honestly left me feeling kind of angry - so college attendees get an easy form and low income mothers trying to get childcare have to list all the activities of every adult in the household? I wish medicaid was as easy as the loan forgiveness application.
I spent over a year going back and forth with the state unemployment office trying to collect my benefits from the original COVID shutdown in March 2020 (the confusions were partly my fault and partly theirs, to be fair). The whole thing just drove home how utterly the system would have failed me if I'd actually really needed that money and didn't have family as a backup. So your answer definitely resonates!
Thank you for the link. I didn't know this had been written about.
I have often said that dealing with the medical system is my part-time job. With two chronically ill children, the amount of time I've spent on the phone, making appeals, documenting, visiting pharmacies who don't answer the phone, and coordinating doctors has taken a not-insignificant portion of my 21 years of parenting. It's insane. I think often of people with lesser means or less available time, and how they are often just out of luck when attempting to get care for themselves or their children.
I see it in our “welfare” state, especially the attempts at direct cash transfers. Take the EITC for example - most of the US is, generally, uncomfortable with the idea of people being poor. But we’re also uncomfortable with the idea of helping the “undeserving” poor, so we throw up roadblocks and audits and phase-ins, even when it leads to fewer benefits and more poor people (especially poor children). I see it playing out now with family benefits - a childcare benefit with an activity requirement, paid leave but only at a percentage and after a work minimum and not for all workers. It seems that what we really want, in the aggregate, is benefits for families that meet our preferences of income, education, work tenure, and paid work/caregiving allocation before they form a family. Ultimately what this results in is disproportionate benefits to the rich and upper middle class, some benefits for the rest of the middle class, and a confusing system that occasionally dispenses benefits to the poor.
I think the death penalty is an interesting case study for your call to persuasion, because unlike abortion where there's a clear, identifiable movement on both sides, there isn't a pro-capital punishment lobby or movement. The death penalty doesn't come up in debates with candidates for office. If I called my state representative and encouraged them to take the death penalty off the books in my state (PA), I imagine he'd tell me that Pennsylvania doesn't actually execute anyone anymore (true!). Maybe the thing to do would be to campaign for a ballot measure, or do something else that would actually force people to make the case *for* the death penalty in the public square. Unlike abortion, I never really see that happen.
I wonder if another thing that's going on is a dwindling sense of the law as teacher--if PA permits executions but doesn't actually do them, the law should be taken off the books to (1) make it harder to re-instate in the future, and (2) because the law has some function in teaching us how to be good. If you don't believe in the second one, it's all about how likely you believe the first is.
I strongly agree with your point about the law as teacher and why that means we should work to take off laws we disapprove of, rather than ignore them.
I *do* know people making an affirmative case for the death penalty—including how very differently they think it should be applied (eg much closer to sentencing).
I think the very, very hardest cases for the death penalty are those few where you can make an argument that the public cannot be safe from a person even if they are imprisoned. E.g. Ted Bundy was imprisoned for his murders then escaped and committed more murders. Is it cases like these that are the focus of those efforts? Or is it closer to an "eye for an eye"?
Also, in that same vein, one compromise I *would* accept on the death penalty would be something like, we outlaw the death penalty with only the exception of cases where a person escapes from prison and kills someone.
"When is simply gumming up the works the best approach?"
This reminds me of a WWII handbook, for spies (I think? it's been a while) in enemy country, where obvious acts would immediately destroy their cover: instead they were advised to plug toilets, jam typewriters, and stuff like that, on the argument that when you can't simply pull out your gun and shoot the enemy in front of you, you sure can slow him down in anything he tries to do, because every army needs functioning toilets (for example) to get anywhere in their day. I'm not sure where the correlation to working toward one's ideals a supposedly civilized society is, but I was thinking of that throughout this piece.
"Any veterinarian can put an injured dog to sleep, and several states have authorized doctor-assisted suicide that is intended to provide a predictable, painless death."
That's what I've wondered about ever since first reading one of Elizabeth Breunig's pieces. Why *don't* states just use assisted-suicide or even veterinary euthanasia drugs? Is there some roadblock to that?
I love your focus on doing “work that doesn’t do long-term harm to our polity while addressing short term harms.” So relevant to so many polarizing issues these days!
I think your second question is a particularly excellent one - what activism opens a dialogue?
I think especially about restorative justice work on the death penalty side, that focuses on recognizing victims pain and helping them heal. This work doesn’t shy away from the real hurt and anguish at the heart of support for the death penalty. And I’m so glad to see these ideas becoming (slowly) mainstream.
For abortion, I think of the longtime work of reproductive justice advocates and Black feminists, who recognize that way too many abortions are the result of economic coercion and domestic violence, and seek to create a truly just society where that is not a factor (or much less of one). Instead of a nowhere-debate about when life begins, the discussion starts from how do we create a life affirming society where families can thrive.
The abortion messaging in Kansas a few months ago is another example of starting the conversation from a place where it can begin and grow, rather that a ships-passing exercise. The focus was on expanding state power and surveillance which many many folks are rightly wary of.
I think one of the great long term harms to our polity is (re)shrinking the definition of “American”. There has been a ton of fantastic activism that is about presence - starting a dialogue of “I’m here too”. I’m thinking of the fantastic work of ActUp all the way through Drag story hour - plus long “deep canvass” conversations around marriage equality. Similarly much public activism by Dreamers and low wage workers says, “we exist, we’re your neighbors”. Sometimes healthy dialogue is forcing the question - “Do you think we shouldn’t exist here?” “Do you think I shouldn’t be able to afford food and rent?”
"Where do you see a broken policies as the result of compromises between different moral visions?"
US Support for Ukraine in the Face of Russian Invasion and Crimes Against Humanity
We see evidence of horrific torture, death, and destruction. Grandmothers are cooking on outdoor fires, with no access to shelter, running water, or electricity due to the deliberate attack upon civilians. We know that Russia's grab for Ukrainian land brings with it dictatorial rule and loss of basic civic freedoms, indeed threatens a world order based upon rule of law instead of rule of might.
We want to aid Ukraine, but fear Putin's threats, but perhaps more so, fear the costs and inconveniences imposed by taxes & inflation that result from large expenditures to help the Ukrainians to defend themselves.
So we spend great sums to send them weapons, but not the weapons that could turn the tide relatively quickly...not the ones that would provide vital air cover...not the best ones to protect against Iranian drones that destroy civilian targets. Instead we send aid that helps them to some extent, but that allows us to avoid any small element of sacrifice while the Ukrainian people are asked to suffer greatly for a protracted struggle with no end in sight.
It seems to me that gumming up the system is a good approach when serious disaster is imminent, and moral debate is a better approach for long-term problems. And a lot of these issues are both, and some people seem drawn more to one approach or the other. If you knew someone was about to expose someone else's private information or nude photos online, wouldn't you feel right about cutting their internet cables or changing their password or calling Comcast with some bogus reason to get their internet shut off? I would. I do think that person needs longer term moral reformation, but the gumming up work can prevent something horrible from happening and it's valuable for that reason.
But I do think some gumming work is done more out of a belief that we can't have a moral debate. I don't have to rehash all the reasons why people feel we can't have a moral debate - we're fall familiar with them.
My point is I don't think it has to be either/or. Why not both? Gum up the system to save the lives that are in immediate danger and also work for a longer term moral debate. Maybe you feel more drawn to one than the other, and that's fine as long as you also honor the work that others are doing that you don't feel personally drawn to.
I think that gumming up the system has a particular danger that moral debate doesn't, which is that when you spend all of your time and effort on something that *isn't* your direct moral objective, this can creep into your identity in dangerous ways.
I'm thinking right now of ways we discuss the Supreme Court. A lot of people are invested in making the court look a particular way, getting justices appointed, and ascribing to particular judicial philosophies (originalism or not, etc.) when what they really wanted was a particular outcome in the Dobbs case, and they would happily have chosen the opposite philosophy or administrative position in service of that cause. I think in particular of the alliance the pro-life movement made with the Republican party--that they would accept this weird coalition between fiscal conservatism and this very philosophical, moral issue--and now the way that various Republican positions have crept into the pro-life movement when on their face they have no business being there. There, I see that the means, or the way of gumming up the works, has crept from a tactic to an identity.
I agree that a gumming-up-the-system approach does have this danger. But I think a moral-debate approach has a danger of not having a deadline and just kind of dragging on forever without ever changing anything, and not taking seriously the lives that are in imminent danger. A moral-debate approach also has the danger of permitting cowardice, hiding in respectability, maintaining endless dialogue instead of doing a potentially controversial action. But the gumming-up approach has exactly the danger you describe, and others. Is it really for the moral cause or is it for the thrill of being a rebel? Is it really morally motivated or is it about being better, stronger, smarter, etc. than the other side?
That's why I think it's important to have both. I think both sides should be aware of the dangers of their approach, and should make efforts to be aware of the value of the other approach. And it's probably good for individuals who are drawn to one approach to put in some real effort into the opposite approach to help counter the dangers of their own approach.
Where do you see a broken policies as the result of compromises between different moral visions?
I can't think of any.
What kind of activism opens up the possibility of dialogue with those on the other side?
Legislative activism not relying upon the courts.
When is simply gumming up the works the best approach?
It isn't always the best approach, but activists believe it is, fighting eviction actions in pro-tenant jurisdictions by clogging up the courts with any kind of claim the tenant can think of to prevent an eviction. The claim might be false, but they believe it buys time. Why not focus on policies that give people the help they need?
"Where do you see a broken policies as the result of compromises between different moral visions?"
The "time tax":
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/07/how-government-learned-waste-your-time-tax/619568/
"The United States government—whether controlled by Democrats, with their love of too-complicated-by-half, means-tested policy solutions; or Republicans, with their love of paperwork-as-punishment; or both, with their collective neglect of the implementation and maintenance of government programs—has not just given up on making benefits easy to understand and easy to receive. It has in many cases purposefully made the system difficult, shifting the burden of public administration onto individuals and discouraging millions of Americans from seeking aid."
The desire, on the one hand, to not be "stingy", and, on the other, to limit benefits to the "deserving", encourages "generous" benefits to come with a process so Kafkaesque as to be inaccessible to the neediest. Now, there are costs, financial and moral, to making aid "too easy". *Something* will ration public aid, whether it's modesty of benefits making aid unappealing to all but the most needy, stringency of qualification requirements, some combo, etc, etc. But the "time tax" is insane.
My husband, an economist, once did a study on SSDI approval. He found that the wealth of the one applying for disability was the strongest predictor of having disability benefits approved. After that, older age, maleness, and whiteness predicted increased odds of approval. *Some* of that may be that the poor and desperate have more incentive to declare a disability than the rich, but a lot of it simply seems to be the perversity of the process.
It was striking to me, as someone who has filled out multiple government aid applications, how much easier the student loan forgiveness application was. My husband just had to submit name, SSN, and affirm we meet the income requirements. Such a radically different experience than Medicaid, and one that honestly left me feeling kind of angry - so college attendees get an easy form and low income mothers trying to get childcare have to list all the activities of every adult in the household? I wish medicaid was as easy as the loan forgiveness application.
I spent over a year going back and forth with the state unemployment office trying to collect my benefits from the original COVID shutdown in March 2020 (the confusions were partly my fault and partly theirs, to be fair). The whole thing just drove home how utterly the system would have failed me if I'd actually really needed that money and didn't have family as a backup. So your answer definitely resonates!
Thank you for the link. I didn't know this had been written about.
I have often said that dealing with the medical system is my part-time job. With two chronically ill children, the amount of time I've spent on the phone, making appeals, documenting, visiting pharmacies who don't answer the phone, and coordinating doctors has taken a not-insignificant portion of my 21 years of parenting. It's insane. I think often of people with lesser means or less available time, and how they are often just out of luck when attempting to get care for themselves or their children.
I see it in our “welfare” state, especially the attempts at direct cash transfers. Take the EITC for example - most of the US is, generally, uncomfortable with the idea of people being poor. But we’re also uncomfortable with the idea of helping the “undeserving” poor, so we throw up roadblocks and audits and phase-ins, even when it leads to fewer benefits and more poor people (especially poor children). I see it playing out now with family benefits - a childcare benefit with an activity requirement, paid leave but only at a percentage and after a work minimum and not for all workers. It seems that what we really want, in the aggregate, is benefits for families that meet our preferences of income, education, work tenure, and paid work/caregiving allocation before they form a family. Ultimately what this results in is disproportionate benefits to the rich and upper middle class, some benefits for the rest of the middle class, and a confusing system that occasionally dispenses benefits to the poor.
I think the death penalty is an interesting case study for your call to persuasion, because unlike abortion where there's a clear, identifiable movement on both sides, there isn't a pro-capital punishment lobby or movement. The death penalty doesn't come up in debates with candidates for office. If I called my state representative and encouraged them to take the death penalty off the books in my state (PA), I imagine he'd tell me that Pennsylvania doesn't actually execute anyone anymore (true!). Maybe the thing to do would be to campaign for a ballot measure, or do something else that would actually force people to make the case *for* the death penalty in the public square. Unlike abortion, I never really see that happen.
I wonder if another thing that's going on is a dwindling sense of the law as teacher--if PA permits executions but doesn't actually do them, the law should be taken off the books to (1) make it harder to re-instate in the future, and (2) because the law has some function in teaching us how to be good. If you don't believe in the second one, it's all about how likely you believe the first is.
I strongly agree with your point about the law as teacher and why that means we should work to take off laws we disapprove of, rather than ignore them.
I *do* know people making an affirmative case for the death penalty—including how very differently they think it should be applied (eg much closer to sentencing).
Interesting, where do you see that happening?
I think the very, very hardest cases for the death penalty are those few where you can make an argument that the public cannot be safe from a person even if they are imprisoned. E.g. Ted Bundy was imprisoned for his murders then escaped and committed more murders. Is it cases like these that are the focus of those efforts? Or is it closer to an "eye for an eye"?
Also, in that same vein, one compromise I *would* accept on the death penalty would be something like, we outlaw the death penalty with only the exception of cases where a person escapes from prison and kills someone.
Here’s a pro-death penalty case (that isn’t about deterrence) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/opinion/parkland-death-penalty-justice.html
"When is simply gumming up the works the best approach?"
This reminds me of a WWII handbook, for spies (I think? it's been a while) in enemy country, where obvious acts would immediately destroy their cover: instead they were advised to plug toilets, jam typewriters, and stuff like that, on the argument that when you can't simply pull out your gun and shoot the enemy in front of you, you sure can slow him down in anything he tries to do, because every army needs functioning toilets (for example) to get anywhere in their day. I'm not sure where the correlation to working toward one's ideals a supposedly civilized society is, but I was thinking of that throughout this piece.
The Simple Sabotage Field Manual! (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184) A lot of its tips remind me of the union tactic of “work to rule.”
One of the sabotage techniques is simply “refer things to committee and make sure the committees are large.”
"Any veterinarian can put an injured dog to sleep, and several states have authorized doctor-assisted suicide that is intended to provide a predictable, painless death."
That's what I've wondered about ever since first reading one of Elizabeth Breunig's pieces. Why *don't* states just use assisted-suicide or even veterinary euthanasia drugs? Is there some roadblock to that?
I love your focus on doing “work that doesn’t do long-term harm to our polity while addressing short term harms.” So relevant to so many polarizing issues these days!
I think your second question is a particularly excellent one - what activism opens a dialogue?
I think especially about restorative justice work on the death penalty side, that focuses on recognizing victims pain and helping them heal. This work doesn’t shy away from the real hurt and anguish at the heart of support for the death penalty. And I’m so glad to see these ideas becoming (slowly) mainstream.
For abortion, I think of the longtime work of reproductive justice advocates and Black feminists, who recognize that way too many abortions are the result of economic coercion and domestic violence, and seek to create a truly just society where that is not a factor (or much less of one). Instead of a nowhere-debate about when life begins, the discussion starts from how do we create a life affirming society where families can thrive.
The abortion messaging in Kansas a few months ago is another example of starting the conversation from a place where it can begin and grow, rather that a ships-passing exercise. The focus was on expanding state power and surveillance which many many folks are rightly wary of.
I think one of the great long term harms to our polity is (re)shrinking the definition of “American”. There has been a ton of fantastic activism that is about presence - starting a dialogue of “I’m here too”. I’m thinking of the fantastic work of ActUp all the way through Drag story hour - plus long “deep canvass” conversations around marriage equality. Similarly much public activism by Dreamers and low wage workers says, “we exist, we’re your neighbors”. Sometimes healthy dialogue is forcing the question - “Do you think we shouldn’t exist here?” “Do you think I shouldn’t be able to afford food and rent?”
"Where do you see a broken policies as the result of compromises between different moral visions?"
US Support for Ukraine in the Face of Russian Invasion and Crimes Against Humanity
We see evidence of horrific torture, death, and destruction. Grandmothers are cooking on outdoor fires, with no access to shelter, running water, or electricity due to the deliberate attack upon civilians. We know that Russia's grab for Ukrainian land brings with it dictatorial rule and loss of basic civic freedoms, indeed threatens a world order based upon rule of law instead of rule of might.
We want to aid Ukraine, but fear Putin's threats, but perhaps more so, fear the costs and inconveniences imposed by taxes & inflation that result from large expenditures to help the Ukrainians to defend themselves.
So we spend great sums to send them weapons, but not the weapons that could turn the tide relatively quickly...not the ones that would provide vital air cover...not the best ones to protect against Iranian drones that destroy civilian targets. Instead we send aid that helps them to some extent, but that allows us to avoid any small element of sacrifice while the Ukrainian people are asked to suffer greatly for a protracted struggle with no end in sight.
It seems to me that gumming up the system is a good approach when serious disaster is imminent, and moral debate is a better approach for long-term problems. And a lot of these issues are both, and some people seem drawn more to one approach or the other. If you knew someone was about to expose someone else's private information or nude photos online, wouldn't you feel right about cutting their internet cables or changing their password or calling Comcast with some bogus reason to get their internet shut off? I would. I do think that person needs longer term moral reformation, but the gumming up work can prevent something horrible from happening and it's valuable for that reason.
But I do think some gumming work is done more out of a belief that we can't have a moral debate. I don't have to rehash all the reasons why people feel we can't have a moral debate - we're fall familiar with them.
My point is I don't think it has to be either/or. Why not both? Gum up the system to save the lives that are in immediate danger and also work for a longer term moral debate. Maybe you feel more drawn to one than the other, and that's fine as long as you also honor the work that others are doing that you don't feel personally drawn to.
I think that gumming up the system has a particular danger that moral debate doesn't, which is that when you spend all of your time and effort on something that *isn't* your direct moral objective, this can creep into your identity in dangerous ways.
I'm thinking right now of ways we discuss the Supreme Court. A lot of people are invested in making the court look a particular way, getting justices appointed, and ascribing to particular judicial philosophies (originalism or not, etc.) when what they really wanted was a particular outcome in the Dobbs case, and they would happily have chosen the opposite philosophy or administrative position in service of that cause. I think in particular of the alliance the pro-life movement made with the Republican party--that they would accept this weird coalition between fiscal conservatism and this very philosophical, moral issue--and now the way that various Republican positions have crept into the pro-life movement when on their face they have no business being there. There, I see that the means, or the way of gumming up the works, has crept from a tactic to an identity.
I agree that a gumming-up-the-system approach does have this danger. But I think a moral-debate approach has a danger of not having a deadline and just kind of dragging on forever without ever changing anything, and not taking seriously the lives that are in imminent danger. A moral-debate approach also has the danger of permitting cowardice, hiding in respectability, maintaining endless dialogue instead of doing a potentially controversial action. But the gumming-up approach has exactly the danger you describe, and others. Is it really for the moral cause or is it for the thrill of being a rebel? Is it really morally motivated or is it about being better, stronger, smarter, etc. than the other side?
That's why I think it's important to have both. I think both sides should be aware of the dangers of their approach, and should make efforts to be aware of the value of the other approach. And it's probably good for individuals who are drawn to one approach to put in some real effort into the opposite approach to help counter the dangers of their own approach.
Wow -- really strong, thought-provoking piece here. Thank you.
Where do you see a broken policies as the result of compromises between different moral visions?
I can't think of any.
What kind of activism opens up the possibility of dialogue with those on the other side?
Legislative activism not relying upon the courts.
When is simply gumming up the works the best approach?
It isn't always the best approach, but activists believe it is, fighting eviction actions in pro-tenant jurisdictions by clogging up the courts with any kind of claim the tenant can think of to prevent an eviction. The claim might be false, but they believe it buys time. Why not focus on policies that give people the help they need?