The most recent FDL Book Salon features Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.
—FROM THE NEW JIM CROW

Little Alex has text and video transcript of Alexnader's recent appearance on Democracy Now.

In the Salon introduction, Paul Street writes:

Alexander’s argument is deftly developed over six highly readable and richly informed chapters that: review the historical record of racialized social control in North American history from the colonial era through the present (Chapter 1); describe the fundamentally racist structure and operation of the officially “colorblind” contemporary U.S. drug war and mass imprisonment system (Chapters 2 and 3); detail how the new caste system operates on its black victims once they are released (on all too temporary a bases in many cases) from prison (Chapter 4); draw direct historical parallels between the old and the “new” Jim Crow (Chapter 5); and show how and why only a major new social movement (one that among other things “talks [candidly] about race” and “resists the temptation of colorblind advocacy”) can under the new caste order (Chapter 6).

I think Alexander's arguments dovetail with the themes that have been articulated on this blog. Communitarian politics have masked the growth of the new Jim Crow Prison State. Communitarian politics is unable to address the problem. The problem must be addressed by a radical new social movement that redefines the political categories.

Note, if Rand Paul actually was a libertarian, he could have countered the corporate liberal dementia of Rachel Maddow--and her mythology of Federal Power as an instrument of "progressive justice"--with more or less the same argument being made by Alexander, really an argument libertarians have been making for years. Rachel Maddow may be a professed skeptic on th War on Drugs, but she is the one holding contradictory thoughts in her head, existing in her own little la la land, spinning narratives of progressive federal power while refusing to acknowledge that the US Federal criminal Justice System is a thoroughly racist regime. And you can't advocate for ending the war on drugs while holding to the commerce clause as the great instrument of social engineering. You can't address the War on drugs without addressing the applicability of the commerce clause, because it is the legal sanction behind the New Jim crow.

The problem of radical social movements, which the likes of Alexander advocate, is that this is what the National security State is poised to thwart. Radical social movements aren't played out on the talking head squares of cable TV or in the policy rooms of Washington think tanks. They are carried out in the streets. And not politely, I may add. We are all well aware of the extent the federal law enforcement regime tired to infiltrate the social movements in the 60s. Well, now we have an honest to god real national security state apparatus. It is specifically designed to spy and infiltrate "movements," arrest them and parade their arrests on organs of official state media as means to spread fear and to discredit. The likes of Rachel Maddow reveled in promoting the great terrorism and national security threat poised by the "Tea Partiers," even hosted a MSNBC special to hype the threat of violence. Just imagine the terrorist hype that would accompany any radical social movement to protest the War on Drugs. People like Maddow are part of the problem. The National Security State at the service of and as an emergent property of communitarian politics is a thing to be dreaded....