By Will Beaman
Reconstruction is in the air. The 2026 midterms have dramatically reopened the electoral possibilities of the South, where Black voters, candidates, and organizers have demonstrated the political capacities that Democratic Party leadership has long neglected to cultivate. The party’s victories, alongside unexpectedly competitive races that national Democrats largely wrote off in advance, are bringing the consequences of that underinvestment home to roost. Angie Nixon’s account of her underfunded campaign and broader criticism of Democratic underinvestment in minority candidates underscore the stakes of this failure. Meanwhile, the public reckoning with Trump’s immigration enforcement regime confronts liberals with a related contradiction, where the growing willingness to contemplate abolishing ICE sits uneasily alongside the dismissal of prison abolition and demands to defund the police as too radical. Both developments raise questions about the institutions through which political participation is sustained and social exclusion is reproduced. They therefore invite us to consider Reconstruction as a project of transforming those institutions, rather than merely correcting the excesses or failures of an otherwise intact social order.
The recently published The Reconstruction Papers from Liberal Currents offers an ambitious liberal response to this moment. Its contributors contemplate sweeping constitutional and administrative reforms, with Anna Law explicitly calling for the defunding and dismantling of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. Yet the collection contains no comparable engagement with prison abolition or the abolitionist critique of policing. Its fiscal imagination presents a related limitation. While the contributors envision substantial new public investments and more effective institutions, the collection’s most explicit account of fiscal sustainability, Ed Dolan’s “Sustainable Fiscal Policy for America”, remains organized around the stabilization of public debt and the management of expenditures within an inherited monetary architecture. The institutions of public finance themselves are largely spared the reconstructive scrutiny directed elsewhere.
At Money on the Left, we have been developing an approach to monetary politics called Democratic Public Finance (DPF), which we believe necessarily entails an abolitionist politics. DPF challenges the neoliberal conception of public expenditure as a discrete cost incurred on behalf of an identifiable beneficiary, whose claims must be weighed against those of competing constituencies. This understanding presupposes that individuals and groups possess independently constituted interests and capacities, which public institutions subsequently intervene to support or redistribute. The expenditure is thereby isolated from the ongoing institutional activity through which those interests and capacities are constituted in the first place. Carceral governance performs a comparable operation by locating social problems within identifiable offenders or populations, whose confinement or removal is supposed to correct a deficiency without implicating the surrounding social order. In both cases, the intervention is made to appear bounded and exceptional, while the institutional relations that produce the conditions requiring intervention recede into an apparently neutral background. The discretization of social subjects thus makes possible a corresponding containment of institutional responsibility.
We propose bringing DPF into dialogue with abolitionist critiques of carcerality to illuminate this shared logic of institutional exculpation and develop a more expansive conception of Reconstruction. From this perspective, abolitionist politics and democratic public finance converge on a reconstructive understanding of public responsibility that treats institutional provision as constitutive of shared social capacities, and seeks to democratically expand the relations through which those capacities are sustained. Our aim is to explore how public finance might support that project by making public credit an enduring, responsive infrastructure for collective life.
This encounter invites a return to the Reconstruction Amendments themselves. Ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments transformed the constitutional organization of American citizenship and political participation. Yet their significance has always depended on the contested meaning of enforcement. Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment grants Congress the power to enforce voting rights through appropriate legislation. As Jamelle Bouie has observed, the amendment emerged from debates over more expansive possibilities for guaranteeing suffrage, even as its final language preserved important limitations. The question of how rights become effective was therefore present from the beginning.
Yet enforcement carries a carceral connotation, suggesting the identification of discrete violations and the imposition of corresponding corrections. What if we understood enforcement instead as provisioning? The underlying constitutional insight, after all, is that rights do not reproduce themselves. Their exercise depends on the continuous institutional provisioning of the capacities through which rights become effective. Reconstruction, in this sense, concerns more than the correction of violations against an otherwise settled political order. It concerns the ongoing constitution of the institutional conditions through which democratic life becomes possible.
This distinction illuminates a broader carceral logic. Consider how the carceral imagination organizes the relationship between wrongdoing and institutional intervention. By attributing a violation to an identifiable offender, the carceral imagination isolates wrongdoing from its conditions of emergence and makes a correspondingly localized sanction appear sufficient. The intervention is supposed to correct the deviation without implicating the institutional order within which it occurred. Indeed, its apparent legitimacy depends partly on this containment, where punishment is presented as a limited response to a particular transgression rather than an occasion for reconsidering the social relations that produce it. The carceral logic thus localizes problems and remedies so that interventions appear as bounded corrections without broader institutional implications. Disenfranchisement becomes the misconduct of a particular official; poverty becomes the deficiency of a particular household. In each case, the intervention presupposes an otherwise intact social order against which the problem appears as a deviation.
But this supposedly neutral background is itself an institutional accomplishment. The localization of intervention actively reproduces its apparent innocence, obscuring the ongoing institutional reproduction of the conditions that interventions purport to correct. Carcerality thus operates through a more general logic of institutional exculpation, the fiction that institutions can intervene in problems without recognizing their participation in the reproduction of those problems.
Abolitionist theorists such as Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have long challenged this logic of institutional nonimplication. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis questions the familiar demand to identify what would replace prisons, arguing that the search for a single institutional substitute already presupposes that imprisonment performs a discrete social function requiring an equivalent replacement. She proposes instead a constellation of alternative institutions and practices capable of transforming the social relations that sustain incarceration. Gilmore’s understanding of abolition as a project of institutional presence, which she connects to the unfinished reconstructive work explored in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, likewise emphasizes the creation of life-sustaining capacities alongside the dismantling of institutions organized around abandonment and confinement. The alternative to prison is thus an expansive and elaborative conception of public responsibility, whose realization necessarily exceeds any single institution or intervention. The demand for a discrete replacement reproduces the very logic of containment that abolition seeks to overcome. This raises a corresponding question for public finance: why should the provision of shared social capacities be organized as a succession of discrete expenditures, with each justified only in reference to a discrete beneficiary or return?
This provides an anti-carceral foundation for democratic public finance’s critique of the discretization of public expenditure. Conventional fiscal reasoning treats expenditures as separable interventions into an otherwise self-sufficient economy. Each expenditure is assigned to an identifiable beneficiary, whose supposed dependence on public resources becomes the basis for calculating its cost and demanding a corresponding return. The public institution appears to surrender resources from a preexisting stock to correct some external deficiency.
Yet endogenous credit unsettles this sacrificial understanding of expenditure. Monetary capacity is generated through institutionally authorized operations of credit creation, rather than merely transferred from previously accumulated holdings. And monetary payments are institutionally mediated operations through which financial claims are created and reconfigured. Expenditure is therefore evidence of institutional presence, rather than absence. Whether a particular expenditure entails material constraints or foregone capacities is a further question requiring investigation rather than an inference from its nominal size.
The carceral fiscal imagination reproduces its logic of localization by discretizing both public expenditures and the social relations they sustain. Just as carceral enforcement isolates a violation within an identifiable offender or population, conventional fiscal reasoning isolates expenditure as a transfer to an identifiable beneficiary, abstracted from the wider institutional relations through which social life is reproduced. Society consequently appears as an aggregation of competing individuals and stakeholder groups, each making claims upon a limited stock of public resources. Expenditure is understood primarily as a cost incurred on behalf of one constituency, rather than as an expression of institutional presence that may constitute capacities shared across the social fabric. The apparent separability of beneficiaries reinforces the apparent separability of expenditures, and vice versa. What disappears is the additive character of public provision, where the provision of one set of capacities can enlarge the possibilities for collective activity elsewhere. The carceral logic thus renders collective life as a succession of localized deficiencies and competing claims, obscuring the ongoing institutional participation through which society is constituted.
Democratic public finance treats accounting distinctions as instruments for coordinating institutional activity, rather than as boundaries that delimit the social significance of expenditure. Additivity begins from the constitutive mediation of social relations. Public provision enlarges collective capacities through institutional connections that precede and exceed the identification of particular beneficiaries. Its effects are therefore understood through the development of these relations, rather than as incidental benefits accruing to otherwise independent individuals. Public expenditure is among the practices through which social and constitutional life are continuously reproduced.
From this perspective, enforcement understood as provisioning makes public responsibility reconstructive, where constitutional rights become effective through the ongoing institutional creation and reproduction of the capacities required to exercise them. The political question becomes how we democratically constitute the institutional presence through which collective life becomes possible.
What would it mean for public spending not to discretize social life in this way? Non-discretizing fiscal policy would involve using administrative differentiation to coordinate an institutionally interdependent social world. It would recognize expenditures as moments in the ongoing reproduction of shared capacities, rather than as isolated concessions to competing claimants. Such institutions could establish enduring rights and crediting capacities responsive to changing social needs. A public right to employment, for example, could enfranchise community organizations to create socially necessary jobs as needs emerge, drawing upon a standing public credit commitment whose monetary capacity adjusts to the work that communities democratically undertake. Political contestation over public priorities would thereby take place within the democratic organization of collective capacities, rather than presupposing their scarcity.
Money on the Left proposals such as the Seattle Loop and public grantmaking banks illustrate how monetary obligations can become instruments of continuing public coordination rather than demands for external repayment. The Seattle Loop’s implications for additive coalition-building further illustrate how public commitments can reinforce one another across institutional boundaries. More broadly, democratic public finance seeks to distribute the authority to create credit across institutions so that their differentiated activities can mutually expand the possibilities of collective provision. Public credit conceived as a malleable and responsive standing infrastructure is better suited to the texture and specificity of social life than a fiscal architecture organized around selective, discrete investments. Rather than requiring local needs to be abstracted into competing budgetary claims, such an infrastructure could sustain their changing and heterogeneous expressions in ongoing coordination with wider scales of public authority. Local specificity and encompassing public responsibility would become mutually constitutive. The authority to create credit would make room for distributed forms of initiative, while those initiatives would continually inform and transform the purposes of public finance. The distinction, ultimately, is between a fiscal imagination organized around the containment of institutional responsibility and one organized around its democratic expansion.
Featured Image: jackie sumell, The Solitary Gardens. This participatory public sculpture project replicates the 6×9 foot blueprint of a standard US solitary confinement cell. Instead of a cage, the walls are constructed from biodegradable materials—such as sugarcane and limestone—and the interior is filled with a garden designed through letters exchanged with individuals currently held in solitary confinement.
Published by