Look, I get it, you're very committed to this amorphous concept of "majoritarian consensus", but you shouldn't expect everyone else to be on board. Right here, we've learned majoritarian consensus implies acts that were legal for the first 150 years of the USA and will also be legal tomorrow, just happen to mean long prison terms today. Oh well, sucks to be us! That is indefensible, yet it is what your theory commits you to defend.
Indeed, the essence of "majoritarian" thought seems to be caprice. Why did the prohibition of substances other than alcohol not require an analogue to the 18th Amendment? Again, sucks to be us! Oh well!
> implies acts that were legal for the first 150 years of the USA and will also be legal tomorrow, just happen to mean long prison terms today.
It was legal for a long time for private parties to discriminate against racial minorities as well, but majoritarian consensus eventually made that illegal. Adulterating food products wasn't illegal but now is legs, most financial crimes didn't exist, etc. Society's views evolve over time and the structure of the law should keep pace.
> That is indefensible, yet it is what your theory commits you to defend.
What's indefensible about it? Why shouldn't people be allowed to structure their society the way they want? What makes you think that the structure people want won't change over time?
The alternative is to bind people to fixed rules that they can't change, as if they're handed down from God.
What's the alternative process? You, me, and Rayiner probably don't have a lot of macro-level public policy differences, but we differ from the current state of consensus in the US. Should the US instead impanel us as Philosopher-Kings?
Of course any society has made and will make mistakes; that is the human condition. The USA seems to have a particular myth associated with its mistakes: that we're always getting better, that our system ensures problems get solved. Yet, there are more black men incarcerated right now than had been enslaved at any moment in our history. (Drug prohibition is a pillar of that edifice of injustice.) We stage elaborate, deadly pantomimes of "war" for no other purpose than the transfer of funds to defense contractors and thence to PACs. We give foolish, short-sighted bureaucrats carte blanche to search innocent citizens, their records, and their communications. What's the reason? Young people don't vote??!? Can we be serious? "Inverted totalitarianism" may be inaccurate or even silly, but at least someone is actually trying to figure out what the problem is.
A Panglossian defender of the status quo has ample opportunity to poke fun at us nuts who complain about it, especially if our complaints don't display due deference to the way things are. I don't actually have a "concrete" proposal, other than "all this bullshit? let's have less". I guess what I'd appreciate would be if the defenders were to take a slightly more nuanced, dare I hope critical, look at these institutions and processes that apparently require so much defense.
Drug prohibition is less a factor in American incarceration than domestic violence is.
And, yes: "young people don't vote" is in fact the reason that drug prohibition is the factor that it is. Sorry. How do you rationalize your way past that? Young people are overwhelmingly outcompeted in the US by old people.
That first sentence is difficult for me to parse. Do you mean we should ignore unjust drug incarceration because women and children? Do you mean that the scandalous racial disparity in incarceration is due to a similar disparity in domestic violence rates? Do you mean that the historically- and globally-exceptional incarceration rate in the USA is due to similarly exceptional rates of incidence or punishment of domestic violence? Actually it's not easy to check the "domestic violence" category against the "drug crime" category, since BJS is committed to keeping drug crime statistics separate from other crime statistics.
The fact that young people don't vote is not a contingent circumstance, it is part of the system. However it's pretty far down the list of embarrassing injustices in the USA.
Summary: lots of arrests for pot possession and LEAP says: "more people were arrested for marijuana offenses alone last year than for all violent crimes combined."
Indeed, the essence of "majoritarian" thought seems to be caprice. Why did the prohibition of substances other than alcohol not require an analogue to the 18th Amendment? Again, sucks to be us! Oh well!