> They also receive the clear message that these values are elite values.
How do they receive that message, exactly?
I agree there is doublespeak about values among some elites, but I disagree that is the major source of single parent families.
It's hardly an attitude that's dripping with privilege.
The backlash, on the other hand...
Actual members of impoverished and minority communities never supported it, they wanted more policing to keep their neighborhoods safe. The base of support was privileged members outside of those communities.
When polled, poor black people want more policing, despite also agreeing with much of the defunder critique.
Knowing both options, they prefer flawed policing to being ruled by criminal gangs.
Wanting more policing and wanting to defund the current system are not oppositional. I want more cops doing shit that matters and less of the current police department.
Pulling over more people for expired tags and other pretext stops is hardly what we needed more of. I once had an officer decline to take a copy of video of my vehicle being stolen since he said it wasn’t going to be investigated anyway. How does a department like that still have time to hand out turn signal tickets, and pop people for going 10 over at the bottom of a hill?
In places where it has been dialed down are crime rates that different when looked at over a long time period?
There is quite a lot of fuss about a crime wave right now, but we are at historical lows in a lot of places. In SF shoplifting actually peaked in 2014. In SF the murder rate has risen since the pandemic… to 2017 levels. There were some high profile smash and grabs on the national news, but having your car broken into in San Francisco is something that has been a thing for a LONG time. There’s nothing new about the tenderloin being a shithole.
I think that to call the current conditions a “crime wave” is a bit too non specific considering the massive societal upheaval we experienced since 2020. What specific numbers, or measurable trends concern you?
> There is quite a lot of fuss about a crime wave right now, but we are at historical lows in a lot of places. In SF shoplifting actually peaked in 2014. In SF the murder rate has risen since the pandemic… to 2017 levels. There were some high profile smash and grabs on the national news, but having your car broken into in San Francisco is something that has been a thing for a LONG time. There’s nothing new about the tenderloin being a shithole. I think that to call the current conditions a “crime wave” is a bit too non specific considering the massive societal upheaval we experienced since 2020. What specific numbers, or measurable trends concern you?
The crime wave has affected the entire country, not just SF. It’s also a violent crime wave—the number of homicides in absolute terms and as a percentage of the population had been declining for many decades and we reversed much of that in a few years time. So we aren’t just talking about a bit of shoplifting (though what’s going on in San Fran is absolutely novel). It also begins around 2014-2015, not merely since 2020. This violence also disproportionately harms communities of color, which should concern people who were vehemently impassioned in 2020 that “black lives matter” considering how many more black lives have been claimed in a single year by this crime surge than have been taken by police in the last 30+ years.
But this is not a practical real world option. In the present, you fight crime with the police system you have.
The Americans I do know who really hate defund are the very definition of latte swilling liberals complaining about crime going up in their nice suburbs in SF, Portland and Seattle while... complaining bitterly about rich white liberals.
The one supporter I do know lives a few blocks from George Floyd although the slogan seems to mean something different to her (transfer funds and responsibilities for mental health to social service departments).
If you have to keep explaining "when I say X, I really mean Y", you should maybe stop saying X.
Defund the police is popular with nobody except rich liberals living in privilege bubbles. People in crime ridden areas especially don’t want it.
Like many short and pithy slogans, it may not be communicating that message effectively at all.
It's not like police forces are an eternal attribute of all civilizations. Modern policing is actually pretty young.
Contrast that to “Black Lives Matter” or “We are the 99%” which are also short slogans that encapsulate the broad and varied beliefs of the respective movements without being off putting to even the people who agree.
Err, the former had people shitting themselves over it online for years.
Contrast that with “Defund the police” where even where there is broad support for alternative policing initiatives, you don’t see support for the slogan.
There are two separate things here, to be analyzed separately: slogan/demand vs . an actual proposed policy. I think it's a huge mistake to confuse the two.
So I dunno, I don't walk around saying "that's the wrong demand", or "say something else, you don't want that." I'd rather understand where it's coming from and who is saying it, see?
Slogans are tactical, part of a movement, and the activists involved do not have state power, they pretty much never will given the structure of the US state, and as I see it the purpose of the demand is to primarily to point out the injustices, contradictions, and limits of the existing system.
In that respect "defund the police" is probably somewhat successful from the POV of the people who propagated it, who are mostly, from what I can deduce, anarchist movement types. (And yes, they probably actually do believe it. But I'm not an anarchist, so) They've made a broad swathe of the public see something that is frankly true from my POV and others: policing as we have it now has an awful history, and frankly its primary purpose in our western society is the routine maintenance of existing power structures and inequities, and in the US especially this takes a fundamentally racist form. It's getting increasingly hard to deny that, even for mainstream liberals and some conservatives.
Is it universally true? No. No phenomenon in society works that way. But on the whole there's a structural aspect of policing that may not be reformable in our current society. I saw a poll the other day that a very large % of black Canadians (my country) trust the government, but do not trust the police. I think that's an interesting and powerful distinction: Especially in light of how police have behaved here at e.g. various anti-vaccine/anti-COVID measure protests vs how they have behaved at other protests (BLM, etc.) in the past.
I think "defund the police" is a "transitional slogan" which might boil out into something better in terms of a more concrete demand if the movement it floats along in grows.
That's my take.
There are people who absolutely Believe that any police force is a slave enforcement force (or derived from one) and a tool of white tool to subjugate others. To them it must be eradicated.
I recall an interview on KQED with an activist who absolutely was proposing to get rid of the entire police and carceral system. When asked how they would deal with, say, a murderer, their response was a) there'd be fewer murderers and b) there would be meditation between the murderer and the victim's family. I really wish the interviewer had asked, what happens if the victim doesn't have a family? Does this mean that rich murderers can pay their way out of any crime? Presumably it would!
It was fascinating, partly because what was being described is a premodern world, in which crime is a purely personal matter and not the business of the state. It's a world of vendettas, in which the powerful operate with true impunity. I don't think the partisans of _really_ defunding the police appreciate this.
(Note, I have a lot of sympathy with the idea that the police are doing too much, especially around mental health crises, and some funding could usefully be diverted, etc etc.)
That’s actually a good take though and probably would have highlighted some of the issues with him better instead of boring “orange man bad” jokes and other things that got boring after two times.
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/542108-poll-finds-only-18-...
It isnt a very popular slogan in general these days (even among blacks) but the rich, privileged and white people loathe it most of all.
I think your representation of blacks and the police is woefully misinformed and is a figment of liberal imagination
If this hypothesis is right, then the problems of these communities are more tractable.
It's so easy to make cheap digs about that handful of people instead of actually tackle the issues that this misnamed movement was/is really about.
If it had actually been called "Redirect substantive parts of the funding currently going to the police to provide alternate mechanisms to address a variety of situations and crises", would you still find it appropriate to make jabs about the situation of some of those who supported it?
There's plenty of better slogans out there. I'd support "end police violence" or "stop killer cops" or something.
Thats certainly much more catchy than the full slogan right now, which seems to be "Defund the police, but we don't really want to do that, even though some people in our movement actually do want that, but they're a minority - we swear. But we want political power anyway and it'll be fine - you can trust us".
You can tell its a bad slogan because of how much oxygen gets spent explaining it. (Eg, right here)
By contrast "Defund the Police" definitely generated a "say what?" response from just about everyone, whether you agreed with it or not.
As for the political power thing ... given the difficulty that existing politicians and political bodies have in exerting control over police authority, the idea that any new group would somehow be able to actually accomplish anything remotely close to abolition is crazy. Look at what happened in Minneapolis as an illustrative example: probably the closest to "actual abolition", and it just fizzled out completely.
“Think different”, “Think outside the bun”, “Just Do It” are good “say what?” examples. I don’t think “Defund the Police” accomplished the goal to make curious and enlist fence-sitters to the cause and instead likely pushed more people towards supporting their police departments.
It might be an ASD trait, but I really like to take people at their word. Please speak what you actually think. I have a hard time trusting people who say one thing while they believe the opposite. Especially in politics.
Where do these slogans come from? Are they designed by conservatives to make liberals look bad?
“Defund the police” is much worse because it’s explicitly naming and promoting a policy idea which activists promise they don’t actually want.
Why lie about what you want?
No, because that's a rational and reasonable statement, where "defund the police" grabs attention, but is ultimately divisive and alienating. Like so many popular talking points, it's a complete failure of marketing and communication, and everybody who says it ends up having to redefine or explain it on a constant basis because on the surface it sounds completely irrational.
Maybe it could have been more successful if the name actually reflected the goal. As-is, the supporters either actually believe in abolishing the police (which was also called for), or they are saying something they don't actually mean in a literal sense because it grabs more attention. The detractors in turn are only arguing with what a minority of the supporters actually even want, because we've grown so unconcerned as a society with actually conveying our points and getting people on our side, and more concerned with simply being noticed.
edit: There's something correct here, because if you want to look for people who supported defund, they were probably working in food service, making you coffee.
The left doesn't thing of privilege as even primarily racial or gender privilege. (The people that do are centrists; the actual left centers class privilege, though there are leftists who see race/gender issues as important secondary/connected issues to class issues.)
I certainly agree that historically leftists were very concerned about class, but that hasn’t been the popular analysis among American leftists for a decade.
Maybe ironically, as one of them I wouldn't say "centrists" center anything. We tend to see the whole thing as a milieu. Not that economic issues aren't super important, but there's no serious way to analyze the US without taking both economic and identity issues into account.
> Clinton and Obama might’ve capitalized on their identities in pandering to the progressive wing
If you look at where Hillary Clinton’s support was vs. Bernie’s , Bernie’s was on the economic left, Clinton’s was with all the identity-politics factions. (Not just what is predictable by “exploiting her identity” as straigh cisgender heterosexual white woman.)
It can be confusing, because there is also a leftist/progressive identity politics which is highly intersectional and also highly integrated with class politics, but the dominant neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party has long been deeply dependent on the very different bourgeois identity politics which rejects the class struggle, as what distinguishes them from the more moderate fringes of the Republican Right (this was especially true during the period of the neoliberal consensus, less so since Trump replaced corporate capitalism with a side order of culture war social politics to energize the base with White nationalist culture war populism as the center of the Republican Party.)
> Do you think Warren, AOC, Omar, etc are really “moderate Democrats” or do you disagree that they are committed identitarians?
I think all of them (even Warren, who remains overtly pro-capitalist and is more centrist than the others) center economic/class issues more than identity politics, and all but Warren do so fairly explicitly because the kind of identity politics they engage in are precisely the progressive/left kind, not the bourgeios kind.
The right-wing propaganda machine is very hard on ambitious women (as a former Hillary staffer I can attest to this), and it's definitely part of the plan to smear these folks in particular. I think we should be asking why there's a concerted, well-funded messaging effort against these women and not against people saying similar things like Hakeem Jeffries or Bernie Sanders. My personal view is that it's raw misogyny. And, frankly, I think you're repeating a lot of it here. In particular your use of the word "cheerleaded" is a pretty gendered criticism.
We're all misogynists, we're all racists, we're all homophobes, because of the culture we grew up in. But by introspecting on this, we're able to fight against it and create a fairer society.
It feels like you missed Sanders' entire campaign then [0] [1] [2].
The main differences between Warren and Sanders is that Warren's policies are better, and Sanders is a Jewish man (I feel like potentially being our first Jewish president didn't get enough play, but it would have been a powerful moment for the US and humanity as a whole).
> it seems pretty sexist to imply that men oughtn’t be cheerleaders
If you use phrases structured as "[stereotype] [people the stereotype is used against]", that's a stereotype. If your excuse is that the stereotype isn't absolute, it's a tacit admission that you used a stereotype against people. Own it or don't, up to you.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3mvbxeA1UA
[1]: https://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-racial-justice/
[2]: https://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-womens-rights/
Anecdotally, I've known these kinds of folks for a while through FOSS and IRC. I'm also dating an actual leftist.
Liberal doesn't have any consistent meaning in the US. (Like, nearly every point on the spectrum uses it differently
> Similarly, “leftist” means something different in an American context than it does in your “global” context
Not particularly. Except in the propaganda of the American Right, where it is one of a pile of indistinct labels like Marxist, liberal, Communist, woke, critical race theory, etc., applied indiscriminately to everything they disagree with.
It does seem like there's a split on this thread about
- whether the US progressives relate to global progressives in any way except by name
- how the right views the political spectrum by name of everything to the left of it
Exactly.
> Folks on the US left exhibit similar symptoms when talking about the right.
Yeah, for a good while there, everyone who wasn't a staunch progressive was described as uniformly "far-right".
> I responded initially because I think distinctualizing US progressives and global progressives is important. I don't want to see US progressives, their policy, or their values gain more traction; I am on board for a party that reflects global progressivism, it's policies, and it's values.
I disagree with your politics, but I agree on the importance of this distinction.
> whether the US progressives relate to global progressives in any way except by name
I think US progressives are roughly "global progressives" plus identity stuff. Some US progressives care more about identity than economics, but there aren't any US progressives who flat-out reject left-wing economics even if they don't care as much about it, and there are relatively few US progressives who flat-out reject left-wing identity doctrine even if they don't think it's terribly important (e.g., Sanders).
> how the right views the political spectrum by name of everything to the left of it
The right generally doesn't distinguish between different "bands" (in the sense of a frequency band in a frequency spectrum) on the left of the spectrum any more than the left distinguishes between different "bands" on the right of the spectrum. Some right-wingers use "leftist" for everyone left of center and others use "liberal" for left-of-center, but in both cases they're using a single term for "left-of-center" and thus failing to distinguish. You see the same thing with people on the left referring to the right homogeneously as "conservative" or "right-wing" or "far-right". Few on either side recognize the nuanced beliefs on the other side.
I agree with the last paragraph. Anyone that does not understand the various striations of politics but attempts to speak on broad groups negatively without that understanding does immeasurable damage to discourse.
I think we agree here. Most "progressives" outside of the US are a lot more likely to focus on class distinctions while US progressives are preoccupied by identity.
Yes, it does.
Because of the electoral system’s strong pressure to duopoly, there isn’t a substantial real leftist party in the US, but there is a real leftist ideological group.
> progressives are not that for certain
US progressives overlap with, but are not the same as, the left.
> To the right, however, a leftist is a US progressive.
To the American Right, a leftist is a Democrat, including a center -right neoliberal corporate capitalist democrat.
Moreover, the salient point wasn’t “the left doesn’t believe in wealth privilege” as much as “no one disputes wealth privilege and thus Henderson isn’t being hypocritical here as you imply”.
Or TLDR, yeah sometimes we get carried away on Twitter. But at least we're not roasting the planet.
> Even if it's true, compared with the problems caused by Republican policies (Iraq/Afghanistan wars, gutting of regulatory state and scientific research leading to opioid crisis, deregulation, tax cuts, attacks on unions leading to the total collapse of the middle class, active lobbying against climate science leading to... Armageddon?) it carries no weight.
I have plenty of bad things to say about Republican policies, but the Iraq/Afghan wars were bipartisan and I don't think deregulation is a clear and universal evil nor are unions an unmitigated good. Agreed that climate inaction is prevalent among Republicans, but I consider Democrats' empty words and gestures (as they pertain to climate) to be just another kind of inaction. Democrats will get bragging rights when they rally around a serious climate pricing policy--if you believe (as I do) that the world is really burning, why don't Democrats offer a budget proposal which reflects that? Why don't they rally around any of the annually-proposed carbon pricing bills? Why did they allow themselves to be completely and wholly fixated on an obviously fake crisis of racist police killings for the better part of the last decade? Why do we allocate so much of our national debate bandwidth to pronouns and bathroom policies if we believe we're veering toward mass extinction?
That said, I think it's super destructive to use Republican behavior (or in many cases, a caricature thereof) to excuse every criticism of Democratic behavior. That's a recipe for racing to the bottom IMO. Instead of responding to "Democrats aren't taking climate seriously enough" with "well, Republicans are worse ergo Democrat climate inaction is fine" it would be great if we could focus on ways to improve Democratic climate policy.
---
> identity has become a hugely popular issue on the American left in the last decade
I know we're sparring on this in another thread, but it really gets to me when people dismiss the concerns of Black Americans, LGBTQ Americans, Women, Native Americans, etc. as "identity" issues. It's undeniable that people in these groups have an entirely different, objectively worse experience than straight cis White men. My arguments here are slavery, forced incarceration and sterilization, and genocide, to say nothing of ongoing discrimination and prejudice and institutional problems today. This country hasn't been dealing with "identity" for a decade, it's been dealing with it from before the time its 1st president was a slaver. The idea that this has only been a problem roughly since Obama was president is... the nicest thing I can say here is naive.
> Moreover, many people (myself included) think that this identity politics stuff is tearing at our social fabric, not only by fostering racial divides, but also because Americans of all stripes are losing trust in institutions which have increasingly rejected aspirational neutrality and objectivity in favor of progressive activism.
It's true that there are more voices at the table, voices protesting police violence (a real problem), the wage gap (a real problem), the epidemic of domestic violence and sexual assault (a real problem), mass incarceration (a real problem). Addressing these problems is gonna be pretty hard, and accountability has to be a part of it. That means when White dudes sexually harass women at work, or when White women threaten to bring down state violence against Black birdwatchers minding their own business, or when cops murder people, they're gonna face consequences (hopefully, anyway). It's easy to see how that creates resentment amongst those currently in power: the rules are changing and mostly not in their favor.
So if you think the problem is that people are talking about this stuff, then I guess a reasonable solution is for them to shut up about it. But if you think the problems are the problems themselves, then shutting up is actively harmful. Hence slogans like "silence is violence", etc.
> the Iraq/Afghan wars were bipartisan
Nah, Bush/Cheney lied [0]. A lot.
> I don't think deregulation is a clear and universal evil
Totally agree, for example before Carter deregulated airlines they were a hilarious mess. But like, rolling back EPA standards is an obvious bad idea, unless you're a company that's only profitable by ignoring climate destruction externalities.
I think loss of faith in institutions is less that they're moving in the direction of progressive activism (honestly can't come up with any examples here, regardless my counterexample is SCOTUS) and more that they're blatantly partisan and corrupt: like the widely panned CDC halving of quarantine times right around peak holiday travel time. I think we've been frog boiled so long in corruption we don't even notice it anymore. My partner was listening to NPR the other morning and they had the exchange at the end:
> INSKEEP: Oh, that's right. Trump was not happy with Kemp because Kemp told the truth about the 2020 election. Is it possible, though, that Greene could actually be thrown off the ballot?
> FOWLER: Well, the short answer is no. A federal judge did rule that this complaint process could continue, but it'll be a high bar to meet to remove Greene. Also, remember; the final decision rests with the secretary of state. That's Brad Raffensperger, who's facing a Trump-backed primary challenge next month, too.
Great, public servants not doing their job because of party affiliation. After decades (centuries?) of this, how could Americans not be cynical about public institutions?
> I consider Democrats' empty words and gestures (as they pertain to climate) to be just another kind of inaction
Democrats have tried again and again to get something going, but Republicans continue to block it. And hey guess what, fossil fuel energy companies are huge Republican donors and essentially run many State parties. I'll give you Joe Manchin though, I guess he is technically a Democrat?
Re: carbon pricing, it's a little involved but basically it's very politically unviable: businesses tend to push these costs onto consumers and these kinds of policies can fail under misinformation campaigns [1]. The fossil fuel industry knows this, which is why their lobbyists push it [2], because they know it will never pass, because they're very able to launch an intense misinformation campaign against it.
> if you believe (as I do) that the world is really burning, why don't Democrats offer a budget proposal which reflects that
Because of Republicans (corrupted by the fossil fuel industry) and the filibuster. Remember that one time the Obama administration invested in green energy companies? The right refers to it as the Solyndra scandal, the left refers to it as "the policies that gave us Tesla".
> Why did they allow themselves to be completely and wholly fixated on an obviously fake crisis of racist police killings for the better part of the last decade?
It is extremely not fake. The stats are totally off balance [3]. Black Americans represent 12.7% of Americans, but make up between 30-40% of police killings.
> Why do we allocate so much of our national debate bandwidth to pronouns and bathroom policies if we believe we're veering toward mass extinction?
This is a wedge issue pushed by Republicans to try and get Democrats to defend "icky" trans people in competitive elections. Democrats aren't the ones pushing this. We'd love it if conservatives were just polite and used people's preferred pronouns and stayed out of our private lives (bathrooms, bedrooms, and doctors' offices, for example).
> That said, I think it's super destructive to use Republican behavior (or in many cases, a caricature thereof) to excuse every criticism of Democratic behavior.
Oh I hate whataboutism, but that's not what I'm doing here. You were making an argument about Democrats tearing our country apart with identity politics in the last decade, and I counterargued that identity polities are extremely important, and not new. I'm also assailing a false equivalency between Democrats' identity policies (stipulating they're bad, which they're not) with Republicans'... all other policies. There's not a "both sides" to be had here. The Republican party is bankrupt, policy-wise, and the way they win elections is through wedge issues and fake (Fox) news to get their voters frothed up with rage and resentment. It works, sure, but it's Faustian, and we're seeing the effects of decades of that kind of politics.
[0]: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/02/hillary-clinton-...
[1]: https://earth.org/carbon-tax-pros-and-cons/
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v1Yg6XejyE&t=85s
[3]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
He's literally a luxury columnist.
You may not owe luxury columnists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Dang you need to really revaluate your decisions on when to post or call people out for "rule violations".
(Btw the guideline against calling names isn't limited to people in the community.)
Him being an elite - someone who knows he's intrinsically superior to everyone else by virtue of selection - is 100% relevant to his opinions being flawed.
I can empathise with people who are nothing like me. I can understand silly things that people like me do, and how they must look to people who are not like me.
It is only infant humans that can’t understand that anything exists outside of themselves.
Are we all infants?
I'd appreciate your consideration.
Due to some widely shared youtube videos and other new and zeitgeisty trends, empathy has been put on a pedestal and sympathy and been thoroughly denigrated.
The problem is that people are not that capable of real empathy in complex or strongly divergent experiences, this modern "synthetic empathy" generated in peoples imaginations is actively harmful, is not empathy, and is worse than sympathy (which was always a serviceable emotion and the most accurate framing for many circumstances.)
As someone born with a heart defect that almost killed them and forced me into formative and constant meditation on death starting at 4 years old, and then had my parents die young and my family financially ruined by medical bills so I had to quit highschool and start working fulltime I have personally observed that empathy as a mental model has a strong failure mode.
I doubt at 15 you could have had empathy for me, (unless you shared a similar experience) I doubt older wiser you could still empathize with 15 year old me in any meaningful way, certainly no peer I ever met at the time could (agqin, unless they had dealt with the same.)
I think peoples ability to empathize has been far oversold, so while you can understand and empathize with "silly things", outside of that I'd settle for some good old fashioned (and real) sympathy.
Sympathy has a certain acknowledgment of lack of understanding and thus intellectual and emotional humility, and I think humility is what is missing in this modern synthetic empathy.
Experiences in general and certainly extremely divergent ones do not have the same qualia and empathy is a false siren.
People don't understand as much as they think, they should show sympathy to those whose experiences are far outside their own and help them tangibly when possible.
These people are more prone to believe that it’s only possible to obtain insight about a circumstance from only those individuals in said circumstance.
When people comment about this, it generates confusion for people like you. :)
Agreed, couldn't be further away from your typical Yale graduate.
Homeless to Yale isn't that different from Cisco-engineer-parents to Yale. You're still at Yale. You're still hobknobbing with the elites, and you are one of them.
He is part of the problem, even if he doesn't get it.