I appreciate Orin’s post about Kerry’s experience as a lawyer fighting organized crime; and it might indeed shed light on why Kerry used the odd analogy that I discussed in this post.
Nonetheless, even if Kerry was hearkening back to his experience prosecuting organized crime — including organized crime that ran illegal gambling, and perhaps even (by analogy) organized crime that ran prostitution — I’m still puzzled why he’d use prostitution and illegal gambling as an analogy, rather than murder, arson, extortion enforced by violence, and so on.
After all, when prosecutors crack down on a crime organization that controls prostitution, it’s not just that they won’t eliminate prostitution altogether: They’re highly unlikely to even substantially diminish it. They may destroy the organized crime-run prostitution rings, but this will still leave a vast amount of prostitution out there, perhaps even involving the very same prostitutes.
In fact, cracking down on the crime organization might even sometimes increase the amount of prostitution, if for instance the organization was violently blocking new competition. In any case, while organized crime control of prostitution might be largely though not completely supressible (perhaps most effectively by legalizing prostitution), prostitution itself does not seem to be even largely suppressible, given current, past, and likely future political realities. Certainly law enforcement doesn’t treat it as something that can be vastly reduced, or that is even worth vastly reducing.
I don’t know to what extent this is true of illegal gambling, but I suspect that something similar operates there as well. One can certainly fight, with considerable success, organized crime control of gambling. But I suspect that most prosecutors’ offices don’t expect that they can vastly reduce the amount of illegal gambling as such, and don’t try very hard to do it. And again, the main strategy for reducing illegal gambling seems to be broadening legal gambling.
So I continue to be troubled by Kerry’s choice of analogies in his quote, which as you recall is this:
When . . . Kerry [was asked] what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” Kerry said. “As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”
It seems to me that our attitudes towards what is a not deeply threatening level of terrorism (which, I agree, is more than zero) should be vastly different from our attitudes towards what would be a tolerable level of prostitution or illegal gambling. And the difference is so great that I wonder whether the person who makes such an analogy is missing something big.
And more broadly, my thought experiment challenge in the Analogy about Analogies post still stands:
Let’s say that in response to a sharp increase in the number of rapes, or of racist anti-black violence, or anti-Semitic violence, a President John Kerry had declared War on Rape / War on Racism / War on Anti-Semitism (a somewhat more metaphorical war than the War on Terrorism, but still close enough).
Let’s also say that Governor George W. Bush, who was challenging President Kerry in the presidential election wanted to argue that this is a different sort of war, one in which we can’t expect total victory. He certainly wasn’t arguing that nothing should be done about racism, anti-black violence, or anti-Semitic violence. He had his own proposals, though ones that Kerry’s supporters thought weren’t tough enough, and were otherwise misguided. But he wanted to point out that we should be realistic about this: We shouldn’t talk the rhetoric of total victory, where we had to realize that some background level of rape, anti-black violence, or anti-Semitic violence was inevitable. And let’s say that this is how he made this point:
We have to get back to the place we were, where [rapists / Klansmen / anti-Semitic attackers] are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.
The letter of this argument is quite correct: Indeed, even the best strategy could at best just reduce the incidence of rape, anti-black violence, and anti-Semitic violence to a level that, while regrettable, is in some sense tolerable.
But would we be happy with Governor Bush’s use of the analogy to prostitution or illegal gambling (for more details, see below)? Or would we think that, though the letter is accurate, the use of such an analogy seems inconsistent with the spirit that we’re looking for in someone who can effectively fight the very serious evils that need to be fought?
Let’s even stipulate that Governor Bush had earlier been a prosecutor who fought crime organizations that had controlled illegal gambling and, let’s say, prostitution. Would that really challenge our likely reaction to his statement?
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