The Social Picture

 Of all Trump's fascist excesses in his second term, there are few more nakedly repellant than his latest frolic of declaring federal "sweeps" to "clear out" Washington, D.C.'s homeless population. 

Dwell with me for a moment please upon the optics of this.

Here is a president who has used the power and influence of the office to turn himself into a newly-minted billionaire, through managing a variety of financial pyramid schemes from behind the Resolute desk. 

Here is a president whose primary policy achievement in the office so far—at least in the legislature, which was once the place we thought law was made—has been to cut taxes for the rich and partially pay for it by slashing safety net benefits for the poor. 

We cannot pay for Medicaid and food stamps, the Republicans told us a few months ago. Too expensive. But apparently, we can pay for federal troops to spend their time rounding up homeless people in our nation's capital and threatening them with prison. 

Whatever one thinks of these decisions as policy, one is hard-pressed to believe that they arise out of some sort of fiscal necessity. I am reminded of what Hazlitt once sardonically wrote of the theories of Malthus, upon considering the manifest social inequalities of his era: 

We have not a word to say against all this as exemplifying the spirit of the English Constitution, as a part of the law of the land, or as an artful distribution of light and shade in the social picture; but if any one insists at the same time that 'the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, have doomed the poor and their families to starve,' [...] so that not a mouthful of food is left by the grinding law of necessity for the poor, we beg leave to deny both fact and inference[.]

I guess the "raids" on homeless encampments last night mostly ended up involving members of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. But apparently Trump also tasked the Pentagon with engaging in "area beautification" efforts—code for locking up homeless people? 

Somewhere in the musty law books of this nation, we still have a statute that forbids the U.S. military from engaging in domestic law enforcement. 

But I guess, as with impoundment, for-cause removal restrictions, and the law requiring people to obey court orders—we've decided (without ever litigating the matter to conclusion) that this is the sort of law that just doesn't apply to the Trump administration. 

And who are the people these federal agents are now "clearing out" on Trump's orders? They are people with sympathetic stories and—in some cases—a legal right to stay temporarily in their tents. One woman had the courage to show Trump's goons an order from the city allowing her to stay. 

In an era when universities with multibillion dollar endowments, prominent law firms, and even federal circuit judges appear too intimidated to confront Trump directly—this woman in a tent had the simple bravery it took to insist upon her rights in the face of his threats. 

I thought of Wordsworth's exquisitely empathetic and moving poem about "The Female Vagrant"—written when he was still a young idealist, before his conservative turn. 

Oh for another young Wordsworth today. If anyone could turn the story of this woman in Washington Circle into a "lyrical ballad" now—would our society still find it so easy to evict her from her makeshift home—in the name of "area beautification"?

Or—oh, for another Burns! For Robert Burns too would know what to make of the grotesque contrast (as Hazlitt sarcastically called it, the "artful distribution of light and shade in the social picture") between a billionaire president and the homeless poor he is driving from their tents. 

As Burns wrote in his "A Winter Night":  

"See stern Oppression's iron grip, 

Or mad Ambition's gory hand, 

Sending, like blood-hounds from the slip, 

Woe, Want, and Murder o'er a land! 

Ev'n in the peaceful rural vale, 

Truth, weeping, tells the mournful tale, 

How pamper'd Luxury, Flatt'ry by her side, 

The parasite empoisoning her ear, 

With all the servile wretches in the rear, 

Looks o'er proud Property, extended wide; 

And eyes the simple, rustic hind, 

Whose toil upholds the glitt'ring show

A creature of another kind, 

Some coarser substance, unrefin'd

Plac'd for her lordly use thus far, thus vile, below! 

[...]

"Oh ye! who, sunk in beds of down, 

Feel not a want but what yourselves create, 

Think, for a moment, on his wretched fate, 

Whom friends and fortune quite disown! 

Ill-satisfy'd keen nature's clamorous call, 

Stretch'd on his straw, he lays himself to sleep; 

While through the ragged roof and chinky wall, 

Chill, o'er his slumbers, piles the drifty heap! 

Think on the dungeon's grim confine, 

Where Guilt and poor Misfortune pine! 

Guilt, erring man, relenting view, 

But shall thy legal rage pursue 

The wretch, already crushed low 

By cruel Fortune's undeserved blow? 

Affliction's sons are brothers in distress; 

A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!"