I’d probably vote for defund, from the safety of my Larry Hogan +30 suburb. I’m harping about it because it exemplifies the practice of invoking minorities as involuntary political surrogates by calling policies—in that case policing or stopping riots—“racist dog whistles.”

It’s not just the Twitter elite doing that—it’s a lot of folks who don’t necessarily want to defund the police, but just wanted an opportunity to call republicans racist. But the end result is that we went about a year invoking minorities to attack policies that the minorities themselves supported, which is gross. The underlying practice needs to stop.

You'd be wildly out of step with the Democrats in your suburb, because "defund" is unpopular everywhere. It's a fringe idea.

Granted the let's get rid of all police was fringe. But the let's have fewer police officers and more counselors and call that defunding the police was pretty popular. At least among my friend group in Houston, and it was especially popular among the more politically engaged of my friends, the ones more likely to volunteer or vote in a primary.

It's easy to find groups of people online who believe in getting rid of all the police, and even easier to find people in favor of reducing the number of police (before this issue became a political football, reducing police headcount was a bipartisan idea in local politics, as was pushing back on their unions). But where the issue has been put to the test with real voters, it has failed dramatically.

That the primary system elevates fringe candidates is, yes, a problem. But those candidates lose.

Like I said, we have an exceptionally mobilized defund movement in Oak Park, with demonstrations, proposed ordinances, and candidate slates. They got slaughtered. We're a single-party municipality; being outed as in any way sympathetic to Republicans is fatal here. It came to nothing: liberals don't want to defund the police.

More importantly, "defund" is a fringe idea among Black people. This is the important aspect of the point I'm trying to make. Through BLM, progressive activists hijacked the broader call among Black people for police reform to push a fringe idea that Black people themselves didn't support. To do that, they weaponized accusations of racism. The New York Times fired an editor for publishing an Op-Ed by Tom Cotton that advocated doing basically the same thing Larry Hogan did in Baltimore in 2015, which caused his approval rating to skyrocket to over 70% in the majority Black city.

Faced with that, Democrats in 2020 did not treat the idea as "fringe." The put up the BLM signs on their yards and didn't say a word against the activists promoting defund. Aside from Joe Biden, prominent Democrats equivocated when confronted directly: Elizabeth Warren responded to a question about "defund" by saying "it's not the term I would use." That's not how you describe what you think is a "fringe" idea.