Joseph Lowndes questions whether the independent truckers I write about were “central to the rise of the Right.” He suggests that truckers were mere dupes of “the architects of the modern Right,” who “selectively appropriated various forms of discontent in the land and turned it to their own purposes.” I disagree for at least three reasons.

Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is not the best indicator of a nation's well-being. A nation can be relatively wealthy, but many of its people may be living under circumstances of misery and deprivation. Some people may be unable to transform their own wealth into things that really matter to them (think of those with severe disabilities or ill health); background social arrangements may have significant causal effects on individual well-being (think of physical security); and some of the most important components of a person's well-being may be nonmonetary (think of the importance of family and friends). A nation's GDP tells us nothing about how its wealth is distributed for different public purposes. (Recall the criticism by Martin Luther King, Jr., of America's priorities in 1967: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”) Nor does GDP reveal how wealth is distributed among a nation's people. It may, therefore, tell us little about how the nation's very poorest members are faring.

Amid swirling talk of a “postracial” politics in the wake of Barack Obama's election as the forty-fourth president of the United States, Joseph Lowndes offers a needed reminder of the central role played by race in American political culture. Nowhere is the discourse of race more apparent, according to Lowndes, than in the supposedly “color-blind” politics of modern U.S. conservatism. Using language that fashioned New Deal liberalism as a “racial synecdoche” (p. 158) for all that conservatives reviled in the four decades following World War II, conservative strategists forged a triumphant pro-business Republican platform that could simultaneously claim to be postracial while serving as the key vote getter of closet racists throughout the nation.

Sixteen avuncular men stare at the camera in the book's epilogue. One clutches a Bible, two smile, 11 are black or Hispanic, and all are among the 127 men and women released from death row after reformers uncovered evidence of their innocence. Frank Baumgartner, Suzanna De Boef, and Amber Boydstun will be speaking for many readers when they start their book by writing simply, “It has been shocking” (p. xiii). The phenomenon is also a stunning public policy mystery.

This is one of the most interesting books I have read on the mass media, public opinion, and policymaking. Capital punishment is an important and compelling issue in its own right, which makes the first part of the book a great read, devoid of technical detail and filled with stunning descriptions of specific cases. Moreover, the rise and staying power of the idea of innocence—that innocent people sit on death row and may be executed—is clear. There continues to be a stream of news stories and commentaries about convicted murderers making plausible appeals for DNA tests that may set them free. While the overturning of murder convictions based in new evidence or faulty defenses preceded the use of DNA testing, this testing became important since it could confirm guilt or prove innocence.

Let me first thank Jeffrey Isaac for choosing our books for this exchange, and Shane Hamilton for his review. I would like to draw on Hamilton's main criticisms to consider political change in two ways: first, as it relates to political actors; and second, to political orders.

World government is once again being taken seriously. For decades the target of ridicule, some form of institutionalized global decision making may be inevitable. As the proposition wins broader acceptance, scholars are coming to more closely explore the modalities of world government and the place of democracy within it. The enhanced profile of new actors in globalization's wake has magnified the challenge. Amid conditions of deep instability, isolating elements of a new decision-making architecture is a formidable theoretical task.

The death penalty is declining in the United States. The number of people executed each year has fallen by about half since the late 1990s. Opinion polls show support for capital punishment is waning. It now stands at about two-thirds, down from a high point of 86% in 1995, according to Gallup polls (p. 173).

Public goods, as economists use the term, are “nonrival” (one person's consumption does not make it unavailable for others) and, typically, “nonexcludable” (if the good is provided to one person, others cannot be prevented from enjoying it as well). The classic example is the lighthouse, whose warning light goes out to and benefits all ships. Economists devote special attention to public goods because markets do not deliver them efficiently. Rational, self-interested actors realize that if anyone else provides this good, they can have it without paying for it. The incentives favor “free riding.” Others, however, see the same opportunity and so public goods go underprovided. There is thus a strong case for collective action to furnish public goods. Where collective benefits outweigh the costs of provision, government action can make society as a whole better-off.

I am grateful to Kerry Whiteside for reviewing my book, and wanted to respond to his two mildly critical comments.

Peter Spiro's portrayal of my book Beyond Citizenship illustrates the very problem we have in confronting the underlying causes of global crises and envisioning alternatives to existing models of governance. Legal scholar and activist Boaventura de Sousa Santos argued quite cogently in 2007 that the struggle for global social justice is also a struggle for global cognitive justice (“Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges,” Eurozine, at http://eurozine.com/pdf/2007-06-29-santos-en.pdf). In order to succeed, this struggle requires a new kind of thinking. Such new thinking is apparent in many contemporary social movements, but academic training and practice inhibits our ability to appreciate the wisdom of those deemed less worthy to speak to the grand questions of our day.

What seemed unimaginable a decade ago, namely, the abolition of the death penalty in the United States, today seems well within the horizon of possibility. Indeed, supporters of capital punishment now seem to be very much on the defensive. To take but one example, in April 2005, then Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney filed a long-awaited bill to reinstate the death penalty in his state. The bill, which Romney called “a model for the nation” and the “gold standard” for capital punishment legislation, was remarkable for its hesitations and qualifications. Thus, it limited death eligibility to a narrow set of crimes, including deadly acts of terrorism, killing sprees, murders involving torture, and the killing of law enforcement authorities. It excluded entire categories of crimes that many believe also warrant the death penalty, including the murders of children and the rape-murders of women. It also laid out a set of hurdles for meting out capital punishment sentences, in an effort to neutralize the kind of problems that have led to dozens of death row exonerations across the nation in recent years. The measure called for verifiable scientific evidence, such as DNA, to be required before a defendant can be sentenced to death, and a tougher standard of “no doubt” of guilt (rather than the typical “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” standard) for juries to sentence defendants to death. The limited nature of Romney's bill, which nonetheless ultimately was defeated in the Massachusetts legislature, provides one vivid sign that the tide has turned in the national conversation about capital punishment.