Reagan Didn't Do That

 

One of the main problems with the “Reagan closed the institutions” narrative, besides straight-out historical inaccuracy, is that it erases the decades of efforts of disabled people themselves, as well as allies, to abolish institutionalization. Ronald Reagan does not deserve more credit for deinstitutionalization than disabled activists on the ground. 

 

Politics is the art of the possible, and disability rights advocates were able to have some limited political success appealing to fiscal conservatives like Reagan. Locking up disabled people, after all, is not only cruel and inhumane (not issues Ronald Reagan was known for caring about), but is also wildly expensive and a massive waste of taxpayer money.

 

Of course, Reagan was no particular ally to disabled people, either as governor of California (where he oversaw deinstitutionalization initiative) or as U.S. president, and deinstitutionalization did not result in the complete liberation of all disabled people. For one thing, deinstitutionalization coincided with the rise of for-profit prisons and mass incarceration. Disabled people can be freed from institutionalization, then arrested for ableist and classist crimes like “vagrancy” and locked in for-profit prisons. Deinstitutionalization also coincided with the rise of outpatient chemical restraint as a form of forced “treatment” of Mad/neurodivergent people -- the government can save money if, instead of locking Mad/neurodivergent people in institutions, it can simply require them to submit to forced drugging. (Any attempt to derail this point about forced drugging and chemical restraint to something about voluntary medication will result in instant blocking. “Meds help some people” could not be less relevant to a point about people being forcibly drugged against their will.)

 

For these reasons, in the 21st century, disability rights activists can no longer appeal to fiscal conservatism as an argument against institutionalization. Furthermore, as we’ve seen with the “defund the police” movement, nominal fiscal conservatives are, in fact, all to willing to waste massive amounts of taxpayer money as long it goes towards oppression of marginalized people. 

 

As I’ve said many times before, disability rights are a nonpartisan issue, because every part of the political spectrum hates us. The U.S. is dominated by two major parties who want to see disabled people locked up and controlled, with one party advocating punitive incarceration and the other advocating “therapeutic” incarceration, and the entire rest of the political spectrum, from communists to libertarians, broadly accepting the premise that Mad/neurodivergent people need to be controlled, either “for our own good” or for the “safety” of others. Even anarchists generally make an exception in support of state biopower, as long as the coercion is framed as “trauma-informed” and “relationship-centered.” No political party, large or small, is an ally to disability liberation (especially not neurodivergent/Mad liberation). 

 

Disability liberation won’t happen until we have the complete abolition of all forms of medical control and biopower, from institutionalization to conservatorship to involuntary commitment to mass incarceration, AND the complete reallocation of public resources to ensure that every individual, disabled or otherwise, has access to the resources xe needs and chooses to fully manifest xyr individual self-actualization.