"Defund the Police" Failed Because We Have No History

to do better next time, we have to learn from the past

You know I wrote and published my 2023 book How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement as a way to express admiration towards the 2020 political moment while subjecting it to careful criticism, which is the heart of political respect. It was then reviewed as a book that throw tomatoes at that moment and dismissed it entirely. In many ways, the book came out at exactly the wrong moment - it was too late to really defy the zeitgeist in a way that would have generated a lot of conversation, but early enough that it received a resentful and frankly dishonest reaction from many reviewers who were defensive of the protest movement. So it goes.

I was thinking of that book when I read Hamilton Nolan’s recent piece arguing that “defund the police” was the right demand for the 2020 moment, and that we failed because too many within the left-of-center refused to take up that banner and defend it strenuously. He’s wrong, and the way that he’s wrong is very important for us to talk about and understand. The lessons of recent history loom.

With hindsight, and with regret, it seems fairly obvious that part of the failure of the radical moment of the 2010s and early 2020s lay in the conditions of its own growth. Large numbers of people encountered radical left politics primarily through online networks like Twitter or Tumblr, spaces optimized for speed, virality, and tribal signaling rather than sustained study or collective discipline. (This may sound shocking to you, but history suggests that networks where people farm “likes” by launching endless dry one-liners and performing an obviously fraudulent stance of studied disaffection are not ideal places for political organizing.) As a result, many sincere converts arrived without a grounding in political theory, historical experience, or organizational practice, gaps that made it harder for the abortive 2020 mass liberatory movement to develop strategy, resolve internal disagreements, or withstand pressure from opponents and institutions. The movement gained visibility and numbers but lacked the shared intellectual and historical foundation needed to turn moral urgency into durable power. “Defund the police,” I will argue, was at the heart of that problem, a slogan without a strategy that was pushed by many people who had no coherent overarching theory of politics.

I think a lot of people with very good intentions were moved to sincerely and meaningfully commit to radical left politics in the past decade. I also think a lot of people saw that appearing to commit to these politics was the thing to do online, and so they appeared to do it. And I believe that “defund the police” rose as the battle cry in the summer of 2020 because it sounded like a good demand and nothing better coalesced to take its place, to unfortunate effect.

This all reflects an old and probably unresolvable tension: movements must open themselves up to newcomers if they are to grow, but growth without standards risks hollowing them out. The internet makes it easy to create a lot of ostensible converts, but these converts tend to hold their new ideologies very loosely, in large measure because they have not had the time or investment necessary to form real, durable, meaningful attachments. Even in the pre-internet era, the challenge has always been how to be welcoming while still insisting that supporters be informed, engaged, and oriented around a coherent worldview and a clear set of collective demands. I would argue that this is exactly where the 2020 moment and its broad-based, passionate, remarkably well-publicized and well-funded effort went wrong. And if we’re to do better in this current moment, we need to learn from our recent failures. So, two essential points to make: first, despite what many people assumed at the time, it is not at all the case that abolishing the police has traditionally been a left-wing demand, let alone the left-wing demand, and second, no one seems to agree on what defunding the police actually means, even now, which is terrible politics.

Abolishing the Police Has Never Been the Default Left Demand

The widespread belief that abolishing or defunding the police has historically been a central aim of far-left politics is ahistorical, a matter of taking relatively recent framing and retroactively applying it to our history. While many contemporary activists indeed embrace slogans like “defund the police,” this does not mean that police abolition has been a longstanding, universal goal of traditional socialist or communist movements; in fact, most historical left movements have supported law enforcement in theory, albeit with lots of conditions and aspirations, seeking to reshape them rather than to do away with them wholesale. I will hasten to say that this doesn’t mean that we’re beholden to those past commitments, not at all. But to have had the debate intelligently back in 2020, most of the people glomming on to “defund the police” would have needed to be aware of the history there, and most weren’t. That’s just reality.

What’s inarguable is that left theory has not defaulted to a broad assumption of police abolition throughout our history. The idea is, in fact, quite alien to many left traditions. To pick the most influential and inescapable example, communism as articulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels does not include an agenda to eliminate policing within pre-communist society. The Communist Manifesto, the foundational text of Marxism, analyzes class struggle and state power and says plainly that the state’s violent apparatus serves the upper classes and their hegemony; this is, obviously, well in keeping with “defund the police” rhetoric.” But the Manifesto and other core explications of Marxist theory do not call for abolishing law and order institutions in existing societies. Rather, they see state violence as tied to class rule and as something that will, in theory, be subject to the spontaneous “withering away” of the state - but only in the context of a fully realized classless society after workers have seized political power. This is a teleological point about the effects of a communist revolution, not a policy platform to abolish police in current societies. And attempting to skip steps and implement post-revolution goals in pre-revolutionary states is a notoriously bad idea in the history of radical politics.

Socialist and communist revolutions often used appeals to law and order as core parts of their messaging in trying to win the support of the people. The Bolsheviks, for example, were able to consolidate power in part because they so ardently signaled that they would be able to establish real order in post-Tsarist Russia, out of the chaos of the February revolution. The Viet Minh in North Vietnam made similar promises; so did Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution. I’m sure my commenters are going to pipe up and ponderously explain why those revolutions were Bad, Actually, but that’s simply besides the point. What I’m trying to establish here is that the idea that far-left politics necessarily entail anti-police animus, assumed in 2020 by many people who should have known better, was and is simply ahistorical. The question is far more complicated than that.

There is of course the endless debate about whether any 20th century state ever actually amounted to a communist government; I am one of those annoying types who insist that the answer is no, principally because the idea of a communist state is an oxymoron. (The old Trotskyist-Stalinist divide over the concepts of permanent revolution and socialism in one country stems from this contradiction.) But it is at least notable that the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, and other states that at least claimed to be communist republics demonstrate that law enforcement institutions were maintained and, in many cases, expanded under far-left rule. The nascent Soviet Union established the militsiya as its regular police force to maintain social control, enforce laws, and protect the governing order, with the communist party tightly intertwined with state functions. The early Soviet secret police, the Cheka, and its successors likewise played roles in internal security and counter-revolutionary suppression, roles directly tied to maintaining order. That’s the opposite of eliminating policing altogether. Post-revolutionary China and Cuba continued similar models, with significant national police and public security force expansion and police tasked with maintaining stability and enforcing the laws of the socialist state. Again, I have zero interest in debating whether these developments were good. I am interested in why exactly a lot of people decided that defunding/abolishing the police was something the left has always called for. That simply isn’t the case.

This piece from the Communist Party USA notes that even the Black Panthers, a very obvious point of comparison for contemporary anti-police activism, didn’t call for an end to policing but instead demanded community control of the police. Their goal was to shift accountability to local communities so that police would protect Black and working-class neighborhoods rather than oppress them. Again, you are fully free to say that this is the wrong model and that defunding/abolishing the police is the right move. That’s fine. But to have a useful political debate, you have to be grounded in left history and theory, and the 2020 “debate” did not; in general, that debate amounted to a lot of screaming, often on social media, often waged by people who appeared to have zero grounding in either theory or history.

The assumption that left movements have always been anti-police conflates several different strands of thought - radical critiques of how police are used under capitalism (that is, to enforce property relations and suppress dissent); local demands for accountability or community control; and very specific policy debates in contemporary U.S. politics about policing budgets. Those are all different things. We should know that. We should call things by their right names. We should be rigorous. We have to be.

Nobody Agrees About What “Defund the Police” Really Means

Now obviously the fact that police abolition has never been an assumed or universal element of left practice doesn’t mean that the concept hasn’t had left supporters, and the call to abolish prisons, and from there the police, grew for decades in the more social justice-y sides of the American left. Angela Davis’s 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? was a particularly influential text. (Unfortunately, it does not present what I would call a remotely actionable vision for how to replace prisons, but this is editorializing.) Yes, in the 21st century in particular, there was a strain of academic left identitarian politics that adopted police abolition as a core demand.

Personally, I would argue that this influence speaks to a lack of clear class politics within that particular coalition. As I spent considerable time demonstrating in my second book, a difficult reality for police abolition types to deal with is that both poorer Americans and Black Americans have consistently identified fighting crime and effective policing as higher priorities than the American average, and especially more than rich white liberals do. As I wrote in How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement,

despite the rhetoric that emanates from BlackLivesMatter and its many champions in the media, polling has shown again and again that Black respondents do not want significantly reduced police presence in their communities; in fact, they frequently call for more. This is a very durable finding in polling. Pew Research, for example, found that in June 2020, at the height of the George Floyd protest moment, 55 percent of Black respondents wanted police spending in their area to stay the same or to grow; by September 2021, that number had grown to 76 percent. Similarly, a Gallup poll from August 2020 found that 81 percent of Black respondents wanted the police presence in their area to stay constant or grow. An October 2022 poll of Black voters from The Grio and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only 17 percent supported decreasing funding for the police. There are many more such findings.

If you’ve ever lived through a major city election in a particularly Black city like Washington DC or New Orleans or Atlanta etc, you may have observed that local Black politicians often strive to be perceived as the law and order candidate in their races, precisely because of these dynamics. Those politicians are simply meeting voter demand. And it makes sense: if you’re more likely to be the victim of violent crime, as Black Americans are, and you have less financial ability to replace stolen property, as many Black Americans do, then you are understandably more sensitive to policing of violent crime and property crime. That doesn’t mean that police abolition is necessarily the wrong goal. But it does point to tensions within the defund the police movement, tensions that were (like so much else in 2020) almost never explored, thanks to the rancor and hysteria of the moment.

Disentangling the exact lineage of defunding the police within the social justice movement would be a difficult and thankless task. What I’m more interested in right now is where it all led: to an embrace of “defund the police” as a slogan that was tied to total incoherence about what that demand actually meant. One of the disorienting things about the summer of 2020 was how many people were united behind the notion of defunding the police even as many of them had basic disagreements about what they were actually calling for. To again quote my book:

many who supported defunding the police insisted that the intent had never been to abolish the police at all. In this telling, “defund the police” means reducing the budgets of police departments, drawing down their resources, and redirecting some of those funds to other uses, such as social work and emergency medical services. Sometimes activists describe this as “unbundling” the police departments, identifying purposes other than the use of socially-sanctioned force to establish order and removing those purposes from the purview of the police. I find little to object to in these proposals, but it’s worth saying that they represent a profound mismatch between the revolutionary zeal of the people who called to defund the police and the actual policy. It also represents a good example of “sanewashing,” an internet term that refers to the process through which radical ideas are gradually watered down to be more appealing to the wider public. You will easily imagine how this played out in 2020 – the call to defund the police was inescapable on left-leaning social media, decent people who were outraged about Floyd’s murder wanted to support the cause, but the concept of police abolition was too radical for them to express. So they did some sanewashing and came up with a more palatable version.

At times, supporters of the more watered-down version of defunding the police would insist that no one would ever call for total abolition. It was therefore somewhat useful when in June The New York Times published the opinion piece “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” That piece, written with considerable brio, does not include anything like a plan.

This confusion persists. Here’s how Nolan defines defunding the police:

In 2020, millions of Americans marched in the streets to protest police violence. Millions of people called for defunding the police. What did they mean by that? They meant that it is unwise to continually buy more and more loaded guns and leave them around our house in the name of safety. They meant, concretely, that our government at every level should spend less money on armed local police and armed state police and armed federal police, and spend more money on addressing the social and economic issues that are the underlying causes of what we call “crime.”

Respectfully, no. No, this is not what the millions who marched in the streets meant by defunding the police. This is what Hamilton Nolan means when he talks about defunding the police. As the above linked NYT piece points out, there was always an activist vanguard that was very deliberately and explicitly saying that the police should be abolished in full, not just have their funding cut. The addition of gun control rhetoric is quite odd, to me, especially given how many people in the Black activist class reject gun control, seeing it as a means for the white police state to rob Black revolutionaries of their fighting ability. And what exactly does “concretely” mean here? Is what follows really that concrete? How much less money? How should these funding drawdowns be performed? For which functions that the police currently perform? Nolan’s definition of a broad-strokes approach to police reform seems sensible enough to me, but there’s nothing concrete about it, and no, millions of people did not take to the streets with his particular vision in mind, and yes that matters. This all matters! The details matter! And the refusal to accept that this is all profoundly controversial even within the left-of-center, to say nothing of within broader society, just seems like weakness to me. None of this will be easy, all of it will entail a great deal of fighting, and getting performatively mad about it failed us the last time.

And this is what I’m left with when I see very justifiable rage over the killing of Renee Good and read pieces like Nolan’s: I still have no idea what the plan is. Nolan’s belief that extreme measures are necessary for dealing with a patently extreme situation, in Trump’s America, is entirely correct and well-taken. But any moral political duty we have is simultaneously a duty to think and act strategically and effectively. That’s what failed most obviously and most tragically in the 2020 moment; all of the passion and attention and public sentiment died on the vine because it was never harnessed in a way that was strategic, that admitted to political limits, that was willing to prioritize and make concessions, that practiced the basic work not just of politics but of radical politics specifically. Because I assure you that past successful left movements, like those in Russia or Cuba or Vietnam, were waged with aching clarity about specific goals and a profound willingness to confront reality as it really was. If we’re to make any progress in the current moment, we too need to be ruthless with ourselves, to accept our limits and, more than anything, to know what we want in profoundly concrete terms. Right now, we don’t, and if the activist class insists on marching to battle with the same confusion that they did in 2020, they are bound to fail.

I am begging you: if you want this new moment of resistance to be more effective than the last, you must learn the lessons of recent history, and you must change. The time is always right to be harder on ourselves, for protestors and for anyone else.