Eric Lotke is a senior research associate at the Institute for America’s Future.
It’s time to burst the bubble. Republicans say they are the party of security and that they are the only ones who can keep us safe. "The United States faces a ruthless enemy—and we need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity that America finds itself in," Karl Rove advised the RNC earlier this year. "President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats."
Nothing could be further from the truth. Republicans are not the party of security. They are the party of fear. From their colorized terrorism alerts to their exaggerated threats of Iraqi WMDs, the Republican party wants us to feel afraid. Their policies are designed to sound tough and transfer funds among friends—not necessarily to keep us safe. If they don’t keep us safe, it’s even better. People will be more scared, pay more money, and vote even redder in the next election. It’s a protection racket.
We saw it first on crime. Conservatives got tough on crime and inaugurated the biggest prison building scheme in world history. Driven by slogans like “three-strikes-you’re-out” and “truth-in-sentencing,” U.S. prison populations have quadrupled since 1980. More than two million Americans wake up behind bars every morning, and one in 15 Americans will spend at least a year in prison during their lifetime. The land of the free and the home of the brave has been opening, on average, three new prisons or jails every month for the past quarter century.
The politics of security are divorced from reality. We build prisons when crime is rising; we build prisons when crime is going down. Crime has been on the decline for the past decade, as the baby boom aged from the crime-prone teens and twenties towards the more sedate forties and fifties—but still we build. Between 1993 and 2002, the collection of states typically labeled Republican increased their rates of incarceration twice as fast as the collection labeled Democratic. But Democratic states showed twice the decline in FBI Index crimes. Something has gone wrong.
The American people know it, too. Drug treatment polls better than mandatory minimums, and “Treatment not Jail” ballot initiatives usually pass with 60 percent of the vote. Ordinary people succeed at cutting back on cigarettes or losing weight, and research by the RAND Corporation shows that every dollar spent on drug treatment saves $7 in later social costs.
But conservatives tell us nothing works. They want us to feel helplessly dependent on them for protection, and to open our wallets for safety. Law enforcement has been the fastest rising expenditure in most state budgets over the past 20 years, and the spending follows political tracks. The private prison giant Corrections Corporation of America gives 87 percent of its political contributions to Republicans. In California, the prison guards union is the single largest political donor. Woe to any politician who dares suggest cutting back on prisons, let alone diverting money towards drug treatment or after-school programs for wayward teens. They’ll be called soft and pummeled by well-funded victim advocates until they, too, vote for more guards and stronger locks.
In the 2004 election cycle, the fearful falsehoods focused on Three-Strikes-You’re-Out in California. Two-thirds of the people incarcerated under the law committed nonviolent offenses, so citizens introduced an initiative to shift enforcement towards serious or violent crime. The new Republican governor and the crime control industry opposed it in force. They flooded the airwaves with warnings that "Murderers, rapists and child molesters—26,000 dangerous criminals will be released” if the reform passed. A state judge concluded that the claims were “mathematically impossible” and “patently false,” and struck them from the official ballot description at the polls. But the judge could do nothing about high volume television ads. Outspent on the air, the reformers lost.
The old tune is playing in Congress now. “Gangs have declared war on our nation,” warns Republican Rep. Randy Forbes of Virginia, leading a new round of exaggerated fear-mongering. “They are ravaging our communities like cancer—urban, rural, rich and poor—and they are metastasizing from one community to the next as they grow.” The warnings hide the fact that violent crime rates in Virginia are lower than they were in 1968.
After mythologizing the problem, the Republicans mythologize the solution. The new federal “Gangbuster” bill aims to transfer more juveniles to adult court, a well-established failure. Youth transferred to adult court commit more crimes upon release than matched kids who stay in juvenile court. The crimes are more violent too, but those facts don’t seem to matter. What matters is that people get scared enough to jump into daddy’s lap.
The party that brought us the War on Drugs and the War on Crime had now adapted the tune for the War on Terror. Cowboy-booted conservatives constantly tell us how much danger we’re in and how much we need them to keep us safe. Meanwhile, they ignore real risks, distort facts, alienate our friends and stir up hornets nests all over the world.
Iraq has now become a breeding ground for terrorists. The U.S. has never been so despised and terrorist incidents are up worldwide. But that’s okay; or at least it’s good for Republicans. They run the protection racket. They have mastered the art of scaring people into spending money. It worked for crime. The question is how much damage will be done before we call their bluff.
