I sincerely thank Anthony Grasso. The generous engagement and constructive criticism mean a lot from such an excellent scholar.

Grasso is on point in asking for more consideration of the contingencies within the liberal settlement I describe in my book. I could have said more about law-and-order alternatives outside of what became the New Deal war-on-crime consensus. Perhaps I should explore Huey Long and Thomas Walsh more in future work. I could also have highlighted more anti-New Dealers beyond the American Bar Association lawyers. We could learn from the so-called Old Right and self-proclaimed champions of older liberalism, especially which carceral policies they supported and opposed. Such exploration could moreover intervene in the literature on conservatism; Kim Phillips-Fein’s 2010 book, Invisible Hands, for example, discusses the politics of crime in the 1960s and 1970s rather than the 1930s. (I could also elaborate on Herbert Hoover’s war on crime as another foil to Roosevelt’s.)

Grasso appreciates my historical case for the synthesis of welfare and punitiveness but wonders if I could give more “room for disentangling these two approaches.” This depends partly on whether we wonder if punitive goals could be disentangled from New Deal political economy or we ask if welfare liberalism could be implemented without punitive consequences. Grasso himself shows that even shorn of eugenic ideas, rehabilitative ideology carries eugenics’ regressive legacies. My response also depends on whether we emphasize counterfactual twentieth-century history or theoretical future policymaking. I mostly aim to show how the liberal state arose, uncertain of whether it necessarily had to arise as it did. Analogously, historians grapple with capitalism’s connections to war, settler colonialism, and slavery, but offer little consensus on whether capitalism could have arisen less tainted. I hold that law and order’s repressive and emancipatory dimensions were both foundational to building modern state liberalism. Perhaps eventually most if not all repressive elements could wither away.

When it comes to positing postwar counterfactuals, my criminology chapter questions the historiographical tendency to draw a bright line between two paths not taken. Some New Deal idealists had repressive ambitions beyond the policy trajectory. But I agree that the 1967 Poor People’s Campaign reveals a breach in both the liberal ideology and coalitions that arose in FDR’s shadow. I acknowledge Grasso’s point that the New Deal’s postwar national security and law-enforcement legacies seem more intimately entangled than welfare is with punishment, but historians also stress the Cold War’s centrality to Civil Rights and Great Society liberalism—as well as the uneasy but stubborn ties between the latter and the 1960s war on crime. Grasso is then correct: I am reluctant to say “outright” whether it would be difficult, in principle, to “rescue New Deal welfarism as a non-punitive crime control strategy… without replicating the New Deal’s punitive impulses.” The book could be clearer, but I am ultimately unsure. Given political and institutional dynamics, I suspect separating these approaches would also prove difficult if not impossible in the future. But worthwhile policy changes often are difficult, as Grasso’s work itself suggests.

I still struggle with what modern liberalism really is. I stressed this puzzle in the perhaps overly critical paragraphs in my review of Dual Justice, but my own work is at least as burdened by its challenges. Had I read his wonderful book earlier, it would have influenced mine for the better.