Excellent Reads

RE: Nixon

Cash would soon confront Nixon in person, too. In 1972, the president invited him to the White House and asked him to perform a few songs; he wanted to hear Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and a novelty song called “Welfare Cadillac.” The first choice was an ironic one, since Haggard had been one of the prisoners in the audience at San Quentin when Cash played there in 1958. The fact that “Okie” existed was proof of the creative potential of the people right-wing politicians like Nixon wanted to keep locked away. Not only that, but Haggard had been serving a 15-year sentence for burglary, a crime Nixon would soon order to be committed himself. “Welfare Cadillac,” meanwhile, is a mean-spirited song about a scammer who buys a brand-new convertible with his government checks. “I don’t know those songs, but I got a few of my own I can play for you,” Cash reportedly said. It was almost certainly a lie. He knew Haggard personally, and was an obsessive student and archivist of country music, so it’s hard to believe he missed “Cadillac.” But before anyone could stop him, he instead played his classic “Man in Black.” The lyrics stabbed at Nixon twice: first over Vietnam (“I wear the black in mourning for the lives that could have been / Each week we lose a hundred fine young men”), and then over imprisonment (“I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime / But who’s there because he's a victim of the times.”) The White House archives don’t record what Tricky Dick thought of this, but like the governor at Angola, he can’t have been thrilled.

RE: Contemporary Leftists

But even as things get darker, politicians and commentators on the progressive left, who ought to know better, have started to compromise on prisons and policing. In 2020, there was a real opportunity to change things. The U.S. saw one of the biggest popular uprisings in its history after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops, and opposition to incarceration as such entered the political mainstream. But in the six years that followed, there’s been a predictable right-wing backlash, and now people who called to defund the police and prisons in 2020 say the opposite.

In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani once—quite accurately—said that “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist,” and that “What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.” Today, he has apologized for those comments, and says that “I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police.” Similarly, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once criticized people who “cannot fathom what an abolitionist America looks like,” but has now distanced herself from those demands, saying that “rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.” Even Florida’s Angie Nixon, one of the most promising new voices on the left, insists that “I don’t want to defund the police. I want to defund Flock cameras.” Nixon added that she only wants to abolish “for-profit” prisons—which, as Current Affairs editor-at-large Yasmin Nair points out, “hold only about 8% of the entire prison population.” The remaining 92 percent, apparently, are out of luck.

The catch-all slogan for this line of thinking, obnoxiously enough, is “Woke 1 was crazy.” That is, if you think America’s prisons as they currently exist, or policing as it currently stands, are fundamentally unacceptable—well, that’s just wacky woke stuff from back in 2020, similar to linguistic tics like saying “Latinx” or “folx” with an X. You need to grow out of it. Being serious means accepting the status quo on imprisonment, or at least refraining from any active attempt to end it. In a controversial radio interview, labor historian and DSA member Eric Blanc summed up this position:

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Alex Skopic filed 13 October 2026 in Criminal Punishment

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/johnny-cash-prison-abolitionist