They do. One of the most successful directors of all time built his career telling stories about faking low cultural status.
Perhaps that’s too abstract. But if people don’t fake low culture, then what is Hillbilly Elegy?
The very opposite.
It seems hard to argue that there haven’t been disruptive changes considering violent crime levels (esp homicides), but I fully agree that “capitalists” (or maybe corporatists?) embraced BLM and other identity stuff because it’s a convenient distraction from substantial policy issues. A lot of folks made themselves into “useful idiots” over the last decade.
[citation needed]
> consequentially violent crime is way, way up.
You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?
Sure thing: "An event study design finds census places with early BLM protests experienced a 10% to 15% decrease in police homicides from 2014 through 2019, around 200 fewer deaths." - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097
> You're claiming that the US, unlike the rest of the civilized world, can't address crime without having death squads summarily execute people for trivial or imagined offences every other week?
The US obviously doesn't have "death squads" who "summarily execute people every other week". Lol I can't imagine asking for a citation about police killings and then tossing this claim out there.
I'd also contest whether activists really got much of what they were asking for. They generally weren't asking for simply no-police. Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.
> Rather they were asking for issues like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness to be addressed rather than just being policed.
I’m sure some were asking for those things, but mostly this was a media retcon when it was becoming apparent that “abolish the police” was jeopardizing Biden’s election campaign (“when protesters say ‘abolish the police’ and ‘all cops are bastards’, surely they’re really advocating for more spending on social services, right?”).
Protesters wanted to re-allocate resources away from the police towards other services, so that cops are not the first responders to every situation, they often wanted fewer police with more training.
Crime goes up as a result of the material conditions of people. The more unequal society is, the more poor and desperate people get, the higher crime is going to be. Acting like it's merely a function of enforcement is silly.
Richard Rosenfeld speaking to The Guardian: “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson Effect”
Vox reporting on Travis Campbell’s research: “Campbell’s research indicates that these protests correlate with a 10% increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests”.
Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi found that prominent BLM protests were associated with 900 excess homicides in the 5 cities they examined and 34k excess felonies. They report that the leading hypothesis is a change in policing activity, and the cities they studied had precipitous drops in the quantity of police-civilian interactions following the protests.
These are professional criminologists and economists—I doubt they’re being “silly” as you suggest.
The solution is obvious. Start rolling heads of Police Chiefs until they get their hierarchies of people in line. If it ends with the entire police union fired so be it, insubordinate lawless police are worse than useless.
Capitalists have co-opted the least disruptive demands of advocates in an attempt to draw attention away from the actual point. They think if they focus on saying words and not doing deeds, people will move on and forget.