American Dream and Carnage: An Analysis of Change in Public Attitudes Regarding Criminological Phenomena

• In Event: Alternative Facts and Alt-Media

Abstract

Criminologists traditionally make a distinction between two kinds of distortion of their topics: that which is produced by fringe elements of society, for example hate group propaganda and tabloid journalism, and that which circulates in the established news media and political discourse. The subversion of that distinction is evidenced by the flood of ‘fake’ news, and by virtue of the fact that the Trump administration has embraced a paranoid logic and mode of imputation, whereby myriad social problems are transformed into instances of ‘carnage’. The carnage argument invites identification of the interlocutor not with an informed public; not even with the traditional fictive community, whose members play by the rules in pursuit of the American Dream; but instead with people for whom the Dream is felt lost; who feel cheated, menaced, and ultimately humiliated. The following presentation examines (1) the development of the carnage argument in public statements by President Trump, policy advisors, and legislators, (2) the evolution of public response to the argument, including what is manifest in public opinion surveys, and (3) the prospects of reconstitution of the relation between center and fringe ideas, beliefs and arguments about social problems in general and criminological phenomena in particular.

Author

• Louis Kontos, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY