The Two Rings

Two days. Three days tops.

I’d say that’s about how long we will be able to have a substantive discussion about the gruesome, entirely preventable murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte last month.

It’s a discussion we need to have, too. Policies and laws drafted in the name of social justice – largely promulgated by Democrats – have gutted the capacity for American cities to grapple with the recidivist nature of many kinds of criminality. Multiple blue states, including the one I live in, have successfully rolled back or resisted sentence enhancements for repeat offenses. Others have pushed back on “three strikes” laws by eliminating them, requiring much higher standards for qualifying offenses, or providing expanded capacity for similarly social justice-minded judges to exercise judicial discretion in reducing sentences. The GOP doesn’t get off the hook here, either. Republican lawmakers in several states have reached across the aisle to gut sentences and repeat offender laws in response to overcrowded and expensive prisons that placed strain on already stretched state and local budgets.

How we grapple with the intersection of mental illness and criminality is very much a part of the same issue, even if the alliances are a bit different. Democrats and civil libertarians have pushed back for decades on the involuntary commitment of those whose mental illness poses obvious threats to themselves and others. Republicans talk a bigger game on the importance of addressing the role of mental illness in criminality more broadly, but in practice that passion rarely extends very far into budget deliberations. There’s a reason “mental illness” is a sort of throwaway issue for those of us in the 2A camp. It is inconvenient, but very obviously true, that the inalienable right to bear arms that makes our republic safer from oppression also makes it less safe from criminals. Mental illness is a useful tool for deflection from these rhetorical soft spots in our politics, and when it comes down to it, most of us aren’t really willing to do anything about the actual problem. Doing something either makes us feel icky and oppressive toward less privileged groups (Democrats) or well, darn, we looked at it and it just seems so expensive (Republicans).

The bigger reason it has been impossible to do anything about the concentration of criminality in recidivist or mentally ill populations in recent years, however, is that the real-world questions simply got co-opted into a much larger symbol. It’s a process we have previously analogized to Tolkienesque rings of power – seductive, powerful tools we think will allow us to achieve our well-intended ends but which inevitably lead us to serve the very different ends of someone else entirely.

There are magic rings in our world, too. Yet they are fashioned not from gold and sorcery but from symbols.

With one hand, these symbols guide us to perceive them as the product of our own reason, yet with the other they supplant that reason with meanings determined in the minds of other men.

They bind our will not to the reason which first led us to our beliefs, but to the symbol with which we now identify them. Once the symbol becomes our point of attachment, we no longer have to be convinced to follow those who determine the meaning of the symbol to some new end. They need only tell us the new meaning of the symbol.

If we are not careful these rings will make wraiths of us all.

I, Nazgul (Epsilon Theory, November 2024)

The Ring of Social Justice, as you might call it, didn’t cause people to believe in the persistent existence of systemic sources of injustice embedded in our policing, legal, and justice systems. The fact that those things actually, really do exist did that. What the Ring did, as a symbol, was permit the evidence-free ascription of any social ill to these systemic sources. It permitted the a priori presumption that any claim of systemic causality was true. It permitted an entire political and social class to redefine racism from a personal act of discriminatory animus against another on the basis of an immutable property to any act of disagreement with any public policy proposal that would ‘dismantle’ a social institution deemed by the Ring to be such a source of systemic injustice.

It all seems academic to the people who made a career out of bloviating about this stuff for an associate professorship instead of doing something about the actual problem, but the consequences are anything but. A couple years back, I served on the jury of a murder trial in a small city with a murder, violent crime, and total crime rate that all rank in the top three in New England. It was one of the most open-and-shut cases that I can imagine was ever presented by a prosecutor in the state, and yet we deliberated for nearly a week, only escaping a hung jury after two pleas from the presiding judge to continue our deliberations. One of the jurors, despite being an otherwise lovely young woman who I think was earnestly trying to do the right thing, was effectively unwilling to consider any evidence or testimony presented as untainted by these systemic forces. Not just the testimony of law enforcement officers, but the testimony of corporate employees and technicians and the raw data retrieved from GPS systems, cell towers, mobile phones, cameras, and forensic investigators.

It will take years to draw the poison this Ring injected into the veins of our education system.

It will take even longer to draw it from our political system.

The Ring made it impossible for anyone left-of-center to survive within the Democratic Party if they proposed anything which seemed remotely amenable to sequestering convicted criminals from the general population as a legitimate policy aim. It demanded instead that they accept at face value that actually the more important thing is the systemic inequities at play here and we should really be looking at root causes that repeat offender laws actually exacerbate and haven’t you seen how our incarceration rates compare with Norway’s, etc. ad nauseam.

We talked about George Floyd for a long time. But we only had substantive discussions for a few days. We could have been talking substantively about police training budgets and timelines, increased emphasis on de-escalation, and mental/drug crisis management. Instead, after a day or two, the Ring started whispering about Defunding the Police and how its bearers should go full revolutionary LARPer by breaking the windows at the local Starbucks. And they did it.

Because that’s what the Ring of Social Justice demanded.

Republicans correctly hated this lawlessness every bit as much as they loved that it meant they didn’t really have to consider any of the real-world questions about how we could be doing policing better.

What’s about to happen is going to look a lot like that.

We need to have an ongoing conversation about recidivism. We need to have an ongoing conversation about creating clearer avenues to the commitment of dangerously mentally ill people, and yes, funding those efforts. We need to give lawmakers and leaders in cities and states that went wild in service to the Ring of Social Justice the political cover to fix the laws.

Instead, we’re going to get 2021-style LARPing from the White Nationalists and vindictive torture porn from the Christian Nationalists. We’re going to get Elon Musk-funded murals across the country born not out of grief for the actual human victim of a senseless crime but because of his concerns about the erasing of whiteness by cultural institutions – and because he gets culture war lulz from turning the BLM playbook against them. We’re going to get broader support for National Guard occupation of American cities to temporarily suppress crime for short-term political gain (despite overall crime rates that are much lower than most of modern American history) instead of doing the hard work of addressing a narrower but entirely solvable issue.

Because that’s what the Ring of True Justice will demand.

And just like the Republicans who secretly delighted in the self-destructive LARPing of the left, the Democrats will breathe a sigh of relief that they won’t be held accountable for the insane policy theories scribbled on a napkin at a Columbia Sociology Department cocktail hour that are leading directly to the deaths of innocent people. Instead they will be able to rail against the racism, the fascism, the response to the event.

And they’ll have the full cover of the news media as they do it. You see, Republicans Pounce Mode has already been engaged.

I’m not sure there is much to be done about any of this. In a socially networked, politically bi-modal world, there isn’t really a politics outside of symbolic attachments and associations. As individuals we can try not to become wraiths ourselves, but none of us possesses the craft to unmake these rings. I am hopeful, at least, that in a few cities and states there will be enough residual political will from the visceral response to lead to some change. Maybe the rage so many of us felt when we came across the video can be harnessed into a real response before it gets used for something else.

But if you find yourself a few months from now wondering how the political energy generated by such a horrific event seemed like it was largely diverted into other tangentially related aims of political actors, well, at least you’ll know.