Though the final episode of The Wire aired Sunday,
anyone invested in the debate about how to fix American cities will
operate in its shadow for the foreseeable future. Its audience is
small. Its portrait of Baltimore is fictionalized. But it inspired
a public conversation about ghetto-life that lasted five seasons.
That’s remarkable considering that real ghetto murder victims and
drug gangs seldom make national headlines at all.
Creator David Simon used The Wire to render his native
city through its drug trade, its police department, its municipal
bureaucracy, its blue collar workers, its politicians, its schools
and its newspaper. All aspects are ailing, decay that Mr. Simon
attributes in interviews to a familiar villain on the left.
“Thematically, it’s about the very simple idea that, in this
post-modern world of ours, human beings — all of us — are worth
less,” he says. “We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that
some of us are achieving more and more… It’s the triumph of
capitalism.”
If you’ve never seen the show, and that sounds a bit tired and
Marxist, don’t cut it from your Netflix cue. Just as All in the
Family rings true to life whatever you think of Norman Lear,
and The Cosby Show is still considered great by liberals
who object to its namesake’s controversial quasi-conservatism,
The Wire is a show that one can throw on after a
politically mixed party, confident that Republicans, Democrats, and
libertarians nursing nightcaps will all find scenes that seem to
them to confirm their worldviews; art that expertly mirrors society
reflects its disagreements too.
What’s bizarre, as the show comes to a close, is the
preponderance of commentators who agree that The Wire is a
searing attack on capitalism, for that analysis — echoed in
Slate, the New Yorker and the Atlantic,
among many other places — is plainly wrong. The Wire is
brutal in its critiques, as any viewer knows. Its most thorough
dissections, however, concern the least capitalistic institutions
in Baltimore.
THIS IS IMPORTANT, for the public conversation about how to fix
America’s cities is tied to The Wire more closely than any
other cultural phenomenon. If consensus opinion solidifies around
the wrong lessons, time and effort will be spent on the wrong
reforms.
So let me briefly make the case that, insofar as the show
reflects larger truths, its lessons are that urban institutions are
broken for reasons other than capitalism; that politicians and
bureaucracies are intrinsically flawed; and that redemption is most
likely to come through nurturing self-reliance, and sometimes even
free markets. In short, it isn’t that David Simon attempted to
critique capitalism and failed — it’s that he hardly critiqued
capitalism at all.
Season one introduces two main plot lines: the Barksdale drug
gang and the Baltimore detectives trying to stop them. Dysfunction
is the rule on the street and among police — the parallelism is
much remarked upon by critics; neither plot line describes a
capitalistic world. The Barksdale gang kills anyone who tries to
compete on their corners, violence that tends to constrain the free
market. Police Commissioner Irv Burrell and his deputy, William
Rawls, run a department where productivity is punished. Only
politicking brings promotion.
Season two’s stevedores are the closest the show comes to
commenting on the global economy. The dockworkers are economic
losers in a niche where technology is replacing their jobs. Simon
effectively conveys society’s indifference to their plight — a
congressman trying to build support for job retraining programs
could do worse than showing those 12 episodes to doubters. It’s
worth noting, however, that Union Boss Frank Sobotka doesn’t start
smuggling contraband to make his mortgage payment — he’s raising
bribes since cash is the only way state senators like the corrupt
Clay Davis will back plans to dredge the harbor. Sobotka’s son and
nephew are underemployed partly due to the dearth of ship traffic,
but also because union rules allocate all available work based on
seniority rather than talent or ambition.
Season three concerns a mayoral race for City Hall, though the
plot line more relevant to this discussion centers on Bunny Colvin
— a precinct commander, he initiates the show’s great free-market
experiment, a zone where drugs are effectively legalized. The
results aren’t pretty. Corner boys, hoppers, and addicts are all
concentrated in one place. Overall, though, it’s an improvement:
the murder rate falls, violent crime plummets citywide and public
health workers are able to reach people with AIDS and heroin
addicts. Around the same time Stringer Bell, who runs the Barksdale
gang, is attempting to become a businessman — the drug trade would
be better if it were more like regular businesses, without all the
violence, he concludes.
It’s no wonder that the American Scene’s Peter Suderman called
The Wire “a libertarian show made by a hardcore social
democrat.” If free markets reducing violence are a critique of
capitalism, one wonders what an endorsement would look like.
ACTUALLY, SEASON FOUR’S portrait of Baltimore city schools is more
of what Suderman had in mind. The district is an ossified monopoly
that lacks sufficient funds, can’t even maintain safety in
classrooms and resists or actively undermines every promising
reform effort, leaving pupils no alternative to a substandard
education.
David Simon’s critique of institutions, whether schools or drug
co-ops or unions or police departments, isn’t a hopeful one. He
doesn’t seem to think that the right technocrat or better social
science data can fix their flaws, as most liberals do. In his
Baltimore, institutions are flawed because the humans that oversee
and staff them, good people like Cedric Daniels and bad people like
Clay Davis and everyone in between, are themselves flawed in
inevitable human ways. Anytime an institution subsumes an
individual — think the Barksdale organization and Dee, the police
department and McNulty, the group home system and Randy — it
corrupts or destroys him.
Surveying these bleak outcomes, American Scenester Reihan Salam
wrote that Simon had “prepared an elaborate, moving brief for
despair and (ultimately) indifference.” Season five suggests that
Simon indeed believes that triumphs and redemption happen rarely,
and almost never thanks to institutions.
But that shouldn’t evoke despair or indifference in
conservatives or libertarians, for we believe that nurturing
self-reliance among troubled city-dwellers is among the most
important antidotes to urban dysfunction, just as it was for Cutty
when he committed to trimming lawns, for Jimmy when he quit
drinking and womanizing, and for Bubbles when he assumed
responsibility for his past.
It is notable that a clergyman, a quasi-wife, and a support
group sponsor afforded these characters the helping hands they
needed. Were it not for Simon’s rhetoric one might suspect him of
being a social conservative in addition to a keen and truthful
reporter.
In fact, Simon insists that he is a liberal, that the rise of
sociopath Marlow Stanfield reflects the logical progression of
capitalism and that the Greek, the ruthless crimes boss who imports
Baltimore’s drugs and kills without remorse, embodies pure
capitalism. Here one begins to suspect that Simon doesn’t quite
understand what that word — capitalism — means. By definition it
refers to voluntary exchanges in a free market of competing
non-monopolies, largely unencumbered by government regulations that
limit supply or trigger black markets.
The Greek deals in coercive exchanges in a black market on which
he has a near-monopoly that is enforced through violence. One could
easily create a caricatured capitalist to stand in for the free
market’s worst tendencies; but the Greek isn’t that character.
TO BE FAIR, Simon might argue that textbook capitalism, where
everyone is free from coercion, is fantasy in the real world, where
players are always jockeying for position and power, wielding it
over adversaries when they can. The Wire exists within a
capitalistic America, he might say, and just look at all the
problems that plague our cities!
That problems exist in our country hardly proves, absent other
arguments, that capitalism is their root cause. Elsewhere in
interviews Simon is known to say, not unreasonably, that his show
resembles a Greek tragedy in many ways, which makes it all the more
perplexing that he imagines power-seeking, selfishness, corruption
and exploitation as capitalistic vices. These human flaws have been
with us since the Greeks, indeed before them, and long before the
rise of global capitalism. No country is without ruthless players,
corrupt officials and unfair outcomes, even today.
We should be grateful to Simon for his creation, whatever our
disagreements. He has tried his hardest to render reality, and has
succeeded in convincing us his Baltimore is real, even though we
may disagree deeply about how to make sense of it. As this
conversation continues, spurred over time by Americans who discover
The Wire on DVD, conservatives and libertarians ought to
continue insisting that capitalism isn’t the root of Baltimore’s
problems, in fact or in David Simon’s fiction.
