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Chapter 5 explores the criminological thought of James Q. Wilson, the foremost neoconservative authority on crime. It studies Wilson’s response to such events as the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, and the era’s sensationalized court cases such as the O.J. Simpson case and the Menendez brothers case. It suggests that Wilson’s arguments on the proper role of popular retributive moral sentiments within the criminal justice system ought to be seen as an expression of penal populism. Wilson invoked Adam Smith’s vocabulary of “moral sentiments” to illustrate and give credibility to the tough-on-crime views of many late twentieth-century Americans, and to delegitimize and marginalize liberal experts’ seeming tendency to explain rather than to judge criminal behavior. The chapter also shows that although Wilson used Smith’s moral vocabulary in the context of the 1990s crime debates, he distanced himself from Smith’s actual ideas on punishment and an “impartial spectator’s” possible sympathy for the offender. The last part of the chapter argues that the history of neoconservatism lends some support to Michelle Alexander’s much-discussed argument that “colorblindness,” instead of providing the solution, is in fact part of the problem of lingering racial inequality in America.

The introduction lays out the larger argument of the book which includes defining the tropes lovable racists, white messiahs, and magical negroes. The chief argument is that these tropes have long pervaded our society, reinforcing white supremacist notions of self-determination, inclusivity, nationalism, freedom, equality, and fairness. Most profoundly, these tropes encourage even blacks and people of color to not only tolerate blatant racist behavior by whites but, in many cases, to misread such behavior as laudatory. This process of misreading is the result of blacks and people color having set the bar so low for expectations of white humanity; meaning that minimal acts of white civility and decency are experienced as magnanimous or even heroic. Because whites are routinely socially insulated from having to confront their white privilege and power (a phenomenon that is compounded by the unconscious complicity of blacks and people of color), they routinely experience their white oppression and privilege as natural and benign.

The turmoil created by the Great Crash unleashed a series of political insurgencies, the cumulative impact of which caused the neoliberal order to come apart. Some sectors of the white working and middle classes responded to economic precarity by joining the Koch-funded right-wing Tea Party and embracing the ethnonationalist populism of Donald Trump. Many young people on the left were inspired to join Occupy Wall Street, which rehabilitated the subject of inequality within public discourse and cleared the way for socialist Bernie Sanders to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Young black protestors joined the Black Lives Matter movement against police violence, helping to dislodge the political dispensation that had created a system of mass incarceration. The triumph of Trump over Clinton in the 2016 elections was a product of the anger felt by many Americans against the neoliberal order and the elites that had sustained it.