You should link to that piece you did when you sketched out a conversation between yourself and a hypothetical supporter of Defund the Police where you pointed out all the flaws of the idea - that obviously someone needs to deal with crime, that obviously someone needs to have the power to arrest people, and thus you'll just end up back with the police anyway.
I'm going to be a huge dick and not even talk about communism or leftism as we understand it. I am going to say left of center political movements in the West, despite really vociferous protestation, have the worst grasp of actual history, and seem only interested in ever looking backwards a few decades, maybe a century, at most. There is plenty of history of 'defunded' police, in the sense that times and places have existed where there is no state or the state is too weak to enforce law and order with its agents, i.e. what we call in our civilization, the police. The result of that is never peace and harmony. At its lowest level and for much of human history it is reversion to the blood feud. Slightly more developed versions end up being what we would call feudal in nature, i.e. irregular enforcement at the discretion of parochial interests, whether that be a baron, a warlord, or some ecclesiastical or other religious authority (indeed parts of the world are still like this). None of this would look like justice to any modern Westerner, but while the fun of being a conservative is getting to remember everything and learn nothing I think part of the fun of being a leftist or progressive is getting to wake up every morning and experience the world as a completely novel and spontaneous phenomena, as if nothing came the day before.
I think you describe modern Progressives fairly well, but not all "Left-of-center" by any means. Besides, anyone could say the same thing about the far Right in this country too:
> They see no problem in the Executive Branch amassing tremendous power; with the Courts as collaborators, and the Legislature becoming all but impotent.
> They see no problem in following a pseudo-racial xenophobia in which the 'generational native-borns' are the only people who deserve universal human rights.
> They see no problem in thinking a particular dual religious framework (in this case Judeo-Christianity) is the only acceptable faith(s) in a secular form of government.
> They see no problem in accepting an economic model that actively works to expand both the poor and the rich, at the expense of the middle-class.
> And finally they see the current President as their long-awaited warrior-king who will take up the fight against corruption and unchecked power in government - despite him doing nothing of the sort, and in fact making it much worse.
There's oodles of historical precedents for how any of those scenarios will lead to very bad things. Yet the far Right has unendingly demonstrated they do not care one bit about historical precedent. They have their heads in the sand just as much (if not more) as the new Progs do.
I think you're right that this is a cause/symptom of radical politics regardless of side, rather than whether someone's left or right. One has Defund The Police, the other has DOGE. Certainly moderate leftists don't want to Burn The Fucking System To The Ground anymore than moderate right-wingers.
That said, from the POV of Freddie (and me), left-wingers making their own side look bad is more of a problem, no? Tactically speaking, the right making themselves look like idiots is a good thing for me (although honestly I'd prefer an intelligent argument on both sides).
Oh I would agree, the "Left" has certainly shown recently that it is perfectly capable of punching itself in its face without any help from the Right.
My main point was the commenters assertion that:
a) all Left-of-center political movements, or maybe just anyone Left-of-center in general, somehow don't understand history. Or are willfully ignorant of it. This is ridiculously untrue. Maybe some new Progs sure, but most of us on the (sane) Left don't associate or even like those guys. And...
b) all Conservatives somehow have this innate understanding of factual history (despite not learning from it). As if being on the Right somehow magically makes you a legit historian. Also ridiculous.
For the life of me I can't understand why they didn't use the term "reform" instead of defund.
The word "defund", to most people, if you simply look at the linguistics of the word alone without any historical bias, would seem to overwhelmingly imply dismantle. Because something like that with zero funding cannot hope to exist at all. Why they don't see this is beyond me, how could they not anticipate a problem with this word?? But then again modern Progressives like to invent and reinvent words all over the place with no discernable rhyme or reason, so I guess one shouldn't be surprised.
"Reform" on the other hand, seems to elicit exactly the kinds of things most people might be hoping for when it comes to policing in the U.S., the same things Freddie spells out in this article. How did no one raise their hand at any 'left' gathering, anywhere at all on the left half of the spectrum, and say something like, "Uhm...guys? How 'bout we use the word 'reform' instead?"
Ha! That sounds like some Soviet revolutionary stuff right there. Like those stories of Stalin supporters not wanting to be the first one to stop clapping out of fear of being seen as not loyal enough. If that's even remotely true, that's some wild stuff man.
A successful movement to end qualified immunity for officers that commit bad acts and violate their own policies around violent engagement would have been huge and meaningful.
Equally applicable to those who murder as to those who fail in their basic obligation to protect and serve. The outcome of the trial of the Uvalde officer who responded to the shooting there should be of a piece with police accountability discussions and of deep concern to students, their families, and everyone who works in a public school.
The left defunded mental institutions and orphanages for ... nothing and the foster system. They probably did intend to defund. History suggests they just erase anything that isn't perfect and then refuse to see the consequences.
As I said above, this is hardly unique to the left. The entire beginning of 2025 was an exercise in "let's rip these institutions to shreds and let whoever's left standing figure it out."
As Freddie has discussed many times, they all but eliminated long-term in-patient care. The 'better' care they replaced it with is much less intensive, decentralized, relies on families and for many needing this kind of care, inadequate.
Reagan, when governor of CA, was sued by the ACLU under laws passed by JFK regarding self determination. That has been carried forward under the banner that he specifically got rid of mental health care for no good reason.
I think ironically they were imitating the right on this one. Not in any sense of "being inspired by," but just realizing that a practical set of policy proposals is hard to implement and boring to campaign for, whereas cutting the budget for something by 80% is both easier and snappier (although it will lead to disastrous consequences).
Because "reform" just means a few more trainings they pretend to go to and more paperwork for each bullet. Can't quite think of the word we need to address the serious issues with policing; maybe "dis-associate." We do need to have options for law enforcement besides armed men who think they're Dirty Harry.
You might console yourself that this seems to be a worldwide problem, not just with the American left. Youth movements in Nepal, Madagascar, and Mexico all rose up in recent years with much fervor and no plan whatsoever. I think this is kind of inevitable for revolutionary-minded ideologies in which you get lots of praise for criticizing the current order and blank stares when you start to talk about concrete plans. Conservatism has a built-in advantage in this regard: it takes as its starting assumption that governing is actually really hard, that current systems (like police) have been around a long time for very good reasons, and that change should be slow. The Left (in the internet age, anyway) seems inclined to magical thinking: if we just all have the right opinions and scream loud enough, we can somehow _will_ a better society into being without much thought or concrete, focused effort.
To put it bluntly: slow, incremental change -- the only durable kind of change -- is a conservative value, not a liberal one. If you want to see liberal values enacted with real impact, you need to convince temperamentally conservative people (working class whites and immigrants) that their interests are best served by those reforms.
I think this is correct but I don't think it's all completely useless. I remember how it was nearly 20 years ago when you basically had Radley Balko yelling into the void about the issues with police militarization, overly deferential jurisprudence, widespread lack of accountability and institutional rot, etc. I think the yelling combined with everyone having a camera in their pocket has created a bit of a sea change, at least in the sense that normal people are a lot more open to thinking there is a problem here than there used to be.
The downside for the revolutionaries is that improving things really requires a willingness to work through the procedural channels of liberal democracy. It's hard to accept that everything your racial studies professor at your SLAC said is totally ineffectual in practice but there's no reason to believe, even now, that we couldn't do things better in the future than we do today.
It doesn't require working through procedural channels if what you actually want is a revolution. Of course, I don't *actually* think most of them want a revolution...or, if they got it, they'd probably be pretty unhappy with it.
One of the nice things about being a right winger is watching these arguments that real/authentic/pragmatic left wing politics have never been tried" over and over.
I will say I agree with Freddie in the sense that "politics" completely divorced from pragmatism - or even an agenda - are doomed to fail. The theater kids suck, this is true.
Where I disagree with Freddie, is that the "moment of 2020" was worth defending on any basic level. From the start, all of the Summer of Floyd bullshit was an obvious, cynical, hustle to delay the deserved political death of execrable Acela Corridor Shitlib politicians in an election cycle. Politicians that "real leftists" pay lip service to despising, but vote for anyway because they also have to pay dramatic lip service to denouncing gross MAGAts, etc.
You would think the Bernie Bros who claim to analyze politics seriously would see, and comment upon, the fact that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders see 90% on economic issues going back to positions taken in the Obama years.
Pro labor
Pro tarriffs
Anti flood-the-zone immigration because it depresses wages
Even the non-theater kids have to participate in some level of the kayfabe in order to avoid social exclusion, I think.
I would definitely not say that Bernie and Trump are in 90% agreement on economic issues. Trump's signature bill (the name is so terrible I can't even say it--maybe I know how Phil Leotardo felt) absolutely gutted the very social programs Bernie is so dedicated on expanding. In many ways, it cut those programs to try to pay for the tax cuts for the obscenely rich, which, again, Bernie is fundamentally opposed to.
I was pretty sad that we got a huge political movement for police reform, and then instead of spending that energy on police reform (say, ending civil forfeiture and every kind of policing for a profit, restricting dynamic entry raids to rare very serious crimes, requiring an independent investigation of every death in police custody), we mostly spent it debating a (IMO) kind-of braindead ideology in which race and racism are the one thing explaining everything, denouncing people for insufficient zeal for the latest thing, etc.
My low-confidence guess is that Twitter made it really easy to coordinate meanness and enforce ideology, and that made it very hard for dumb rhetoric, policy proposals, and arguments to get any meaningful pushback. I mean, what happened to David Shor was pretty informative there--a serious left-wing political thinker pointed out a true and important thing on Twitter (nonviolent protests were good for the Democrats, violent ones were bad) and he got fired (very visibly) for it. I have to guess there were many more people who simply kept their mouths shut about the crazy rhetoric from their side, or even went along, just to avoid trouble.
It's possible to find non-crazy meanings for "defund the police," but I also think like 99% of normal people hearing that are going to assume it means what it sounds like, and think "so why don't the criminals just take over once we fire all the police?" Nobody had a great answer to that that made any sense, as far as I saw.
The problem I have with "left politics" in the US is that it seems so thoroughly detached from actual reality. They sloganize with such things as "Defund the Police" when what as a practical reality they really should be saying is "Reform the Police". Unbundle the police perhaps... It doesn't matter, it's all clickbait seeking virality and playing pretend rather than actual, practical, ACTIONABLE policy that must take place in the world of political reality. Shallow and not taken with any sort of strategic plan to change society. More like reacting to stubbing one's toe on something and throwing it out the door rather than thoughtfully rearranging the furniture so that stubbed toes aren't so likely.
I thoroughly enjoy your commentary on "leftish politics" Freddie.
So what is/was the "mass liberatory" moment as it was understood to be in 2020? Was it the Great Big Stupid George Floyd moral panic about race?
The race politics kayfabe that has driven Acela Corridor DNC strategy would have you believe that only ongoing, deliberate, state sanctioned racism - Jim Crow 2.0! - can explain gaps in quality of life indicators between black Americans and everyone else.
This position is deeply unserious on any serious analytical level, but as usual, the politics of emotion is effective until it comes time to craft actual policy.
> any moral political duty we have is simultaneously a duty to think and act strategically and effectively
It's not just the radicals that don't understand this. The resistance lib base believes that MAGA is an existential threat to democracy and the whole planet, and also that Democrats must not moderate on any of their unpopular positions in order to defeat it.
This is why in 2020, when my Boomer Liberal parents were exicted that the Floyd protests could lead to real, lasting reform, all I could say was "Oh you sweet summer child." Because I knew this was all based on social media energy, with everyone just trying to be cool and farm likes, and no discipline whatsoever. My parents spend very little time online whereas I swim in its waters every day. I could see the contours of how this all developed from Tumblr and Twitter. Sorry guys. It's not the same as when you were young. The Internet completely changed the dynamics.
This. People still talk like we’re in a pre internet era, like as if the institutions and modes of interaction from a time when people looked each other in the eye are at all applicable to online spaces with millions of people together in the thunderdome.
I feel like at this point it’s a deliberate head-in-the-sand out of a desire to avoid staring directly at the horror of what the internet does to social interaction. We’ve had enhanced-virality social media for two decades now; Jonathan Haidt and others have written multiple books on this; there’s no way intelligent commenters are ignorant of what the internet has done to us.
As somebody who has a couple of Boomer Liberal parents who spent a lot of time online and became Trump Authoritarians, please count your blessings.
I love and respect my parents. They took care of me growing up and did the best they could. They've gotten to such a vile place because of the internet and the right-wing echo chamber. It's genuinely sad. They will always have a this stain on their soul. I know I'll be thinking about it at their funerals. Awful stuff.
Sorry to hear that, man. I've heard similar stories. The Red Pill train is a bitch. I've always compared people like that to Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith.
"The Left made me do it!" they cry as they embrace MAGA.
I would quite vociferously push back against the idea that Defund the Police had no impact. They made the idea of being a police officer so toxic that people didn't want the smoke and decided to look elsewhere for a career. Here is an exercise for you. Do a Google search on cities with the worst police department staffing shortages in the country. It's a Who's Who of cities that desperately need more policing and not less. I watched all of the interviews with all of the advocates during this stretch and to the extent that anybody could answer the question "what is your solution then?" it was almost ALWAYS a young white female who probably grew up in Fairfield County with a master degree in some social work type field of study at an "elite" university whose solution was to bring somebody like her into a rough neighborhood and have criminals talk about their feelings. I am sure others had more substantive and possibly even effective ideas but they didn't seem to get any air time on MSNBC. The idea was DOA from the very start but yet somehow did damage.
I think "defund the police" sounds edgy and radical in a way that "Give the police meaningful oversight, fire bad cops, and pay the cops enough to attract quality candidates" doesn't. And this is common for slogans. Bumper stickers do not make for good policy ideas.
I know you know this, but it's good to emphasise in this context the relationship between mass ideology-in-formation and the preexistence of political leadership. The revolutionary situations you cite occurred in times of "Gramscian" hegemonic flux, where people were looking for new ways to understand and express what they saw happening around them. But they benefited from the presence of an educated and organised political cadre group with the intelligence and nous to shape and strengthen this developing awareness. There's a reason why even right wingers describe themselves as Leninists, since he was the 20th century master of this.
I don't think Western societies will ever advance beyond this periodic formation and collapse of shallow movements based on uneducated sentiment unless and until you have proper political organisation at the grassroots level. That organization has to be ruthless, in the sense that people who don't get it should not be allowed "in" to leadership, no matter how committed and energetic they may be.
One of the paradoxes of liberation politics is that it can't be a democracy. But that runs directly counter to the reality social media as the platform for political engagement. Good luck convincing people who think that their opinion is inherently valuable simply because they have an account on X to subordinate themselves to intelligent political planning and action.
Hmmmm... I don't think "defund the police" got its rise as an Internet meme.
"Defund the police" is very much an artifact of the Occupy Wall Street movement, much reported upon by the mainstream media. To the extent that OWS was an anarchist movement, the slogan was indeed intended to be taken literally.
It's the gender wars that were promulgated in the online Twitter/Tumlr Petri dish. 😀 (I think it's important to distinguish between political tides & cultural movements, though, of course, there's overlap.)
The "defund the police" slogan died, but then was resurrected during the 2020 George Floyd protests. (Indeed, the various "Occupy City Hall" protests at the time were a direct homage to OWS.) But by that time, it had taken on a far more symbolic context. I won't cite my own experiences here since I travel in the usual Boomer liberal circles & thus am an old hand at recontextualizing problematic catchphrases. Rather, I'll cite the experiences of my two far-left-of-center, social democrat offspring—one of whom was actually involved in police department reform in the progressive city where he lives: Both of them understood that "defund the police" was code for "reallocate police funding in better ways."
It's a lousy slogan because it _can_ be interpreted literally.
Oy gevalt. Never felt like subbing. But I'm doing it now, just this once, to call you out.
(Might leverage it later to remind commenters of their duty as Americans to make fun of Rhode Islanders, but eh, we'll carpet bomb that Newport Bridge when we get to it)
Police abolitionism as part of Occupy? Occupy as an "anarchist movement?" Pray tell, what parts of your ass you pull those from? Because being there, I remember we didn't have *any* of the former, and little of the latter.
First of all, the movement was started by Adbusters, that magazine by the students of hippies and Situationists who were far more concerned with you mindlessly buying stuff than they were about the nature of the state and police. Anarchists they are not. (Situationists hate anarchists, after all.)
As the movement evolved in those days beyond Adbusters' reach, when people like me got involved in spite of them? The anarchists were always bunched off and kept at arms length. What memories I have of the camp at Oscar Grant Park in downtown Oakland, I faintly recall they were on the northern edges of the encampment*. (If you're curious about others, the Palestinian solidarity types and postcolonials were corralled in the middle in a little triangle next to the pallet paths, equidistant from the assembly stage and the kitchens. There weren't too many other types that were corralled.)
To suggest police defunding/abolitionism was part of Occupy is an AI hallucination at best. Not saying that we weren't protesting police violence in some ways (consider the name Oscar Grant Park...we were calling out police brutality against blacks before BLM even existed), but the whole thing would've never gotten as big as it did, whether in NYC or Oakland (let alone anywhere else), without some cooperation with the cops. Police abolitionism was on nobody's mind outside a few, and it was never a core point of discussion in the general assembly. Besides, the focus was always on the 1%, not the police. (There was a *reason* those postcolonialists were corralled.) The homages to Occupy that occurred during the George Floyd protests were more about the *tactics* used by Occupy than any of the politics.
After all, I think most of the George Floyd protesters would've found Occupy's politics racist in that "not capital-B Black enough" way BLM slammed Bernie with back in 2016. This was before Trayvon Martin, after all.
As for the anarchists, if there was any "contribution" they made to Occupy, it's killing what cooperation existed by taking over those buildings (which *nobody* agreed to, and only a few outside their group supported) after the Oakland general strike, which either caused or accelerated the movement's decline, depending on your angle. So no, Occupy wasn't anarchist.
And what about "defund/abolish?" If you really want answers, move a couple years ahead. You were onto something with gender, since the biggest voices of "defund/abolish" seem to be feminist women/queers of the PMC/MANGO/shitlib/terminally online stripe. You know, the same people who were constantly on Twitter/Tumblr the mid-to-late 2010s and were constantly on the hunt for problematics. The ones who sided with the girlfriend in the Maury-drama-blown-out-of-proportion that was GamerGate (take this as my contempt toward the ENTIRETY of that shitshow...the ones who sided with the boyfriend were just as bad). The same ones who were hired in droves post-June 2020 by Teen Vogue and other mainstream media publications so these pubs could appear "progressive" and then got their asses kicked to the curb the past two years because of budget woes/"vibe shift"/people got bored of their shit. The Defector/New Inquiry types. Their alternative to policing offers some insight as how "defund/abolish" came to be: Restorative justice, in which the accused and the victim are simply expected to talk out their problems. (They also are super into harm reduction when it comes to drugs.)
Way I see it, that speaks to the rise of "defund/abolish" in a very specific way: Feminism's (understandable) distrust of the criminal justice system due to real (and perceived) incompetencies in its handling of sexual assault and preference for mediation over conflict, mixed in with the terminally online's overconsumption of media manifesting a crippling fear of anything negative, especially violence. This creates an infantile worldview in which the very nature of police is inherently wrong and problematic, and the only way to resolve this wrongness is to get rid of it as much as possible and replace it with something that doesn't feel or vibe like policing at all, even if it's ineffectual. Race issues are just a front for that.
Certainly nothing to do with Occupy.
*I speak for the downtown encampment. The one by Lake Merritt may have had more anarchists, but I never went out to that one, and it was always a secondary camp. Ditto the poseurs of Occupy SF.
You're right: Your dick is MUCH bigger than my dick.
If you could read as well as you can rant, you'd note that I qualified, "To the extent that OWS was an anarchist movement..." and I am referring here to its organizational methods, not to members of one of your cliques in Oscar Grant Park in downtown Oakland in 2011.
I distinctly remember lively conversations about cutting police funding on several occasions in Zuccotti Park when I was down there delivering supplies to friends. Maybe that conversation was one people in Oakland weren't interested in having. I hope at least you got laid.
"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."
When the NPR totebag set say "Defund the police!" what they mean is "Take money from the undeserving (blue collar meathead cops, most of whom lack Serious Academic Credentials and who are famously unwoke to boot) and give to the deserving (white collar social workers with appropriate degrees who can be counted on to uphold the latest and most censorious standards of political correctness)".
This! And so ironic in NYC where the NYPD is majority minority, unlike the NYC teacher’s union (as a proxy for white collar social work types) is majority white.
You should link to that piece you did when you sketched out a conversation between yourself and a hypothetical supporter of Defund the Police where you pointed out all the flaws of the idea - that obviously someone needs to deal with crime, that obviously someone needs to have the power to arrest people, and thus you'll just end up back with the police anyway.
I'm going to be a huge dick and not even talk about communism or leftism as we understand it. I am going to say left of center political movements in the West, despite really vociferous protestation, have the worst grasp of actual history, and seem only interested in ever looking backwards a few decades, maybe a century, at most. There is plenty of history of 'defunded' police, in the sense that times and places have existed where there is no state or the state is too weak to enforce law and order with its agents, i.e. what we call in our civilization, the police. The result of that is never peace and harmony. At its lowest level and for much of human history it is reversion to the blood feud. Slightly more developed versions end up being what we would call feudal in nature, i.e. irregular enforcement at the discretion of parochial interests, whether that be a baron, a warlord, or some ecclesiastical or other religious authority (indeed parts of the world are still like this). None of this would look like justice to any modern Westerner, but while the fun of being a conservative is getting to remember everything and learn nothing I think part of the fun of being a leftist or progressive is getting to wake up every morning and experience the world as a completely novel and spontaneous phenomena, as if nothing came the day before.
BRAVO for that last sentence! I need to embroider it on some kind of antimacassar. 😀
*runs to Google “antimacassar”*
Hey, today I learned something. Thanks!
I'll take a stab at this.
I think you describe modern Progressives fairly well, but not all "Left-of-center" by any means. Besides, anyone could say the same thing about the far Right in this country too:
> They see no problem in the Executive Branch amassing tremendous power; with the Courts as collaborators, and the Legislature becoming all but impotent.
> They see no problem in following a pseudo-racial xenophobia in which the 'generational native-borns' are the only people who deserve universal human rights.
> They see no problem in thinking a particular dual religious framework (in this case Judeo-Christianity) is the only acceptable faith(s) in a secular form of government.
> They see no problem in accepting an economic model that actively works to expand both the poor and the rich, at the expense of the middle-class.
> And finally they see the current President as their long-awaited warrior-king who will take up the fight against corruption and unchecked power in government - despite him doing nothing of the sort, and in fact making it much worse.
There's oodles of historical precedents for how any of those scenarios will lead to very bad things. Yet the far Right has unendingly demonstrated they do not care one bit about historical precedent. They have their heads in the sand just as much (if not more) as the new Progs do.
I think you're right that this is a cause/symptom of radical politics regardless of side, rather than whether someone's left or right. One has Defund The Police, the other has DOGE. Certainly moderate leftists don't want to Burn The Fucking System To The Ground anymore than moderate right-wingers.
That said, from the POV of Freddie (and me), left-wingers making their own side look bad is more of a problem, no? Tactically speaking, the right making themselves look like idiots is a good thing for me (although honestly I'd prefer an intelligent argument on both sides).
Oh I would agree, the "Left" has certainly shown recently that it is perfectly capable of punching itself in its face without any help from the Right.
My main point was the commenters assertion that:
a) all Left-of-center political movements, or maybe just anyone Left-of-center in general, somehow don't understand history. Or are willfully ignorant of it. This is ridiculously untrue. Maybe some new Progs sure, but most of us on the (sane) Left don't associate or even like those guys. And...
b) all Conservatives somehow have this innate understanding of factual history (despite not learning from it). As if being on the Right somehow magically makes you a legit historian. Also ridiculous.
For the life of me I can't understand why they didn't use the term "reform" instead of defund.
The word "defund", to most people, if you simply look at the linguistics of the word alone without any historical bias, would seem to overwhelmingly imply dismantle. Because something like that with zero funding cannot hope to exist at all. Why they don't see this is beyond me, how could they not anticipate a problem with this word?? But then again modern Progressives like to invent and reinvent words all over the place with no discernable rhyme or reason, so I guess one shouldn't be surprised.
"Reform" on the other hand, seems to elicit exactly the kinds of things most people might be hoping for when it comes to policing in the U.S., the same things Freddie spells out in this article. How did no one raise their hand at any 'left' gathering, anywhere at all on the left half of the spectrum, and say something like, "Uhm...guys? How 'bout we use the word 'reform' instead?"
It's mind-boggling.
Why didn't they? Simple answer: the Iron Law of Institutions (https://medium.com/@jesse.singal/the-iron-law-of-institutions-and-the-left-333c42c246af). The more extreme-sounding version actually had some support, and challenging it would imply that the challenger wasn't as committed to revolutionary change as other people within the group.
Ha! That sounds like some Soviet revolutionary stuff right there. Like those stories of Stalin supporters not wanting to be the first one to stop clapping out of fear of being seen as not loyal enough. If that's even remotely true, that's some wild stuff man.
A successful movement to end qualified immunity for officers that commit bad acts and violate their own policies around violent engagement would have been huge and meaningful.
Equally applicable to those who murder as to those who fail in their basic obligation to protect and serve. The outcome of the trial of the Uvalde officer who responded to the shooting there should be of a piece with police accountability discussions and of deep concern to students, their families, and everyone who works in a public school.
The left defunded mental institutions and orphanages for ... nothing and the foster system. They probably did intend to defund. History suggests they just erase anything that isn't perfect and then refuse to see the consequences.
As I said above, this is hardly unique to the left. The entire beginning of 2025 was an exercise in "let's rip these institutions to shreds and let whoever's left standing figure it out."
Was it genuinely "the left"? Because I'm pretty sure Reagan gutted federal spending on mental healthcare.
It was a movement started by the left because of the horrific conditions of asylums, but the idea was *better* treatment, not none.
As Freddie has discussed many times, they all but eliminated long-term in-patient care. The 'better' care they replaced it with is much less intensive, decentralized, relies on families and for many needing this kind of care, inadequate.
Who is "they"? The so-called "left"? Honest question.
Reagan, when governor of CA, was sued by the ACLU under laws passed by JFK regarding self determination. That has been carried forward under the banner that he specifically got rid of mental health care for no good reason.
I think ironically they were imitating the right on this one. Not in any sense of "being inspired by," but just realizing that a practical set of policy proposals is hard to implement and boring to campaign for, whereas cutting the budget for something by 80% is both easier and snappier (although it will lead to disastrous consequences).
Because "reform" just means a few more trainings they pretend to go to and more paperwork for each bullet. Can't quite think of the word we need to address the serious issues with policing; maybe "dis-associate." We do need to have options for law enforcement besides armed men who think they're Dirty Harry.
I had people tell me it was designed to be deliberately provocative and combatative. Not the best way to win adherents.
It was a stupendous blunder, made by people with a dearth of understanding about how much words matter.
You might console yourself that this seems to be a worldwide problem, not just with the American left. Youth movements in Nepal, Madagascar, and Mexico all rose up in recent years with much fervor and no plan whatsoever. I think this is kind of inevitable for revolutionary-minded ideologies in which you get lots of praise for criticizing the current order and blank stares when you start to talk about concrete plans. Conservatism has a built-in advantage in this regard: it takes as its starting assumption that governing is actually really hard, that current systems (like police) have been around a long time for very good reasons, and that change should be slow. The Left (in the internet age, anyway) seems inclined to magical thinking: if we just all have the right opinions and scream loud enough, we can somehow _will_ a better society into being without much thought or concrete, focused effort.
To put it bluntly: slow, incremental change -- the only durable kind of change -- is a conservative value, not a liberal one. If you want to see liberal values enacted with real impact, you need to convince temperamentally conservative people (working class whites and immigrants) that their interests are best served by those reforms.
I think this is correct but I don't think it's all completely useless. I remember how it was nearly 20 years ago when you basically had Radley Balko yelling into the void about the issues with police militarization, overly deferential jurisprudence, widespread lack of accountability and institutional rot, etc. I think the yelling combined with everyone having a camera in their pocket has created a bit of a sea change, at least in the sense that normal people are a lot more open to thinking there is a problem here than there used to be.
The downside for the revolutionaries is that improving things really requires a willingness to work through the procedural channels of liberal democracy. It's hard to accept that everything your racial studies professor at your SLAC said is totally ineffectual in practice but there's no reason to believe, even now, that we couldn't do things better in the future than we do today.
It doesn't require working through procedural channels if what you actually want is a revolution. Of course, I don't *actually* think most of them want a revolution...or, if they got it, they'd probably be pretty unhappy with it.
One of the nice things about being a right winger is watching these arguments that real/authentic/pragmatic left wing politics have never been tried" over and over.
I will say I agree with Freddie in the sense that "politics" completely divorced from pragmatism - or even an agenda - are doomed to fail. The theater kids suck, this is true.
Where I disagree with Freddie, is that the "moment of 2020" was worth defending on any basic level. From the start, all of the Summer of Floyd bullshit was an obvious, cynical, hustle to delay the deserved political death of execrable Acela Corridor Shitlib politicians in an election cycle. Politicians that "real leftists" pay lip service to despising, but vote for anyway because they also have to pay dramatic lip service to denouncing gross MAGAts, etc.
You would think the Bernie Bros who claim to analyze politics seriously would see, and comment upon, the fact that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders see 90% on economic issues going back to positions taken in the Obama years.
Pro labor
Pro tarriffs
Anti flood-the-zone immigration because it depresses wages
Even the non-theater kids have to participate in some level of the kayfabe in order to avoid social exclusion, I think.
I would definitely not say that Bernie and Trump are in 90% agreement on economic issues. Trump's signature bill (the name is so terrible I can't even say it--maybe I know how Phil Leotardo felt) absolutely gutted the very social programs Bernie is so dedicated on expanding. In many ways, it cut those programs to try to pay for the tax cuts for the obscenely rich, which, again, Bernie is fundamentally opposed to.
I was pretty sad that we got a huge political movement for police reform, and then instead of spending that energy on police reform (say, ending civil forfeiture and every kind of policing for a profit, restricting dynamic entry raids to rare very serious crimes, requiring an independent investigation of every death in police custody), we mostly spent it debating a (IMO) kind-of braindead ideology in which race and racism are the one thing explaining everything, denouncing people for insufficient zeal for the latest thing, etc.
My low-confidence guess is that Twitter made it really easy to coordinate meanness and enforce ideology, and that made it very hard for dumb rhetoric, policy proposals, and arguments to get any meaningful pushback. I mean, what happened to David Shor was pretty informative there--a serious left-wing political thinker pointed out a true and important thing on Twitter (nonviolent protests were good for the Democrats, violent ones were bad) and he got fired (very visibly) for it. I have to guess there were many more people who simply kept their mouths shut about the crazy rhetoric from their side, or even went along, just to avoid trouble.
It's possible to find non-crazy meanings for "defund the police," but I also think like 99% of normal people hearing that are going to assume it means what it sounds like, and think "so why don't the criminals just take over once we fire all the police?" Nobody had a great answer to that that made any sense, as far as I saw.
The problem I have with "left politics" in the US is that it seems so thoroughly detached from actual reality. They sloganize with such things as "Defund the Police" when what as a practical reality they really should be saying is "Reform the Police". Unbundle the police perhaps... It doesn't matter, it's all clickbait seeking virality and playing pretend rather than actual, practical, ACTIONABLE policy that must take place in the world of political reality. Shallow and not taken with any sort of strategic plan to change society. More like reacting to stubbing one's toe on something and throwing it out the door rather than thoughtfully rearranging the furniture so that stubbed toes aren't so likely.
I thoroughly enjoy your commentary on "leftish politics" Freddie.
Slogans resonate with theater kids, because actors always have to rehearse their lines.
Slogans resonate with most people. Very few people, even those who vote in every election, are in any sense deep thinkers about politics.
So what is/was the "mass liberatory" moment as it was understood to be in 2020? Was it the Great Big Stupid George Floyd moral panic about race?
The race politics kayfabe that has driven Acela Corridor DNC strategy would have you believe that only ongoing, deliberate, state sanctioned racism - Jim Crow 2.0! - can explain gaps in quality of life indicators between black Americans and everyone else.
This position is deeply unserious on any serious analytical level, but as usual, the politics of emotion is effective until it comes time to craft actual policy.
> any moral political duty we have is simultaneously a duty to think and act strategically and effectively
It's not just the radicals that don't understand this. The resistance lib base believes that MAGA is an existential threat to democracy and the whole planet, and also that Democrats must not moderate on any of their unpopular positions in order to defeat it.
This is why in 2020, when my Boomer Liberal parents were exicted that the Floyd protests could lead to real, lasting reform, all I could say was "Oh you sweet summer child." Because I knew this was all based on social media energy, with everyone just trying to be cool and farm likes, and no discipline whatsoever. My parents spend very little time online whereas I swim in its waters every day. I could see the contours of how this all developed from Tumblr and Twitter. Sorry guys. It's not the same as when you were young. The Internet completely changed the dynamics.
This. People still talk like we’re in a pre internet era, like as if the institutions and modes of interaction from a time when people looked each other in the eye are at all applicable to online spaces with millions of people together in the thunderdome.
I feel like at this point it’s a deliberate head-in-the-sand out of a desire to avoid staring directly at the horror of what the internet does to social interaction. We’ve had enhanced-virality social media for two decades now; Jonathan Haidt and others have written multiple books on this; there’s no way intelligent commenters are ignorant of what the internet has done to us.
Yup. FWIW, it's probably good that my parents don't spend a lot of time online. Their mental health is no doubt better because of it.
The downside is they miss a lot of nuances as to how discourse and social trends really spread in the 21st century.
As somebody who has a couple of Boomer Liberal parents who spent a lot of time online and became Trump Authoritarians, please count your blessings.
I love and respect my parents. They took care of me growing up and did the best they could. They've gotten to such a vile place because of the internet and the right-wing echo chamber. It's genuinely sad. They will always have a this stain on their soul. I know I'll be thinking about it at their funerals. Awful stuff.
Sorry to hear that, man. I've heard similar stories. The Red Pill train is a bitch. I've always compared people like that to Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith.
"The Left made me do it!" they cry as they embrace MAGA.
Wrong. You have done that yourself.
We're all responsible for our actions.
Boomer liberals in a right wing echo chamber?
I would quite vociferously push back against the idea that Defund the Police had no impact. They made the idea of being a police officer so toxic that people didn't want the smoke and decided to look elsewhere for a career. Here is an exercise for you. Do a Google search on cities with the worst police department staffing shortages in the country. It's a Who's Who of cities that desperately need more policing and not less. I watched all of the interviews with all of the advocates during this stretch and to the extent that anybody could answer the question "what is your solution then?" it was almost ALWAYS a young white female who probably grew up in Fairfield County with a master degree in some social work type field of study at an "elite" university whose solution was to bring somebody like her into a rough neighborhood and have criminals talk about their feelings. I am sure others had more substantive and possibly even effective ideas but they didn't seem to get any air time on MSNBC. The idea was DOA from the very start but yet somehow did damage.
I think "defund the police" sounds edgy and radical in a way that "Give the police meaningful oversight, fire bad cops, and pay the cops enough to attract quality candidates" doesn't. And this is common for slogans. Bumper stickers do not make for good policy ideas.
Please, for 2026, let's put the phrase 'I am begging you' on a high shelf and leave it untouched.
I know you know this, but it's good to emphasise in this context the relationship between mass ideology-in-formation and the preexistence of political leadership. The revolutionary situations you cite occurred in times of "Gramscian" hegemonic flux, where people were looking for new ways to understand and express what they saw happening around them. But they benefited from the presence of an educated and organised political cadre group with the intelligence and nous to shape and strengthen this developing awareness. There's a reason why even right wingers describe themselves as Leninists, since he was the 20th century master of this.
I don't think Western societies will ever advance beyond this periodic formation and collapse of shallow movements based on uneducated sentiment unless and until you have proper political organisation at the grassroots level. That organization has to be ruthless, in the sense that people who don't get it should not be allowed "in" to leadership, no matter how committed and energetic they may be.
One of the paradoxes of liberation politics is that it can't be a democracy. But that runs directly counter to the reality social media as the platform for political engagement. Good luck convincing people who think that their opinion is inherently valuable simply because they have an account on X to subordinate themselves to intelligent political planning and action.
Hmmmm... I don't think "defund the police" got its rise as an Internet meme.
"Defund the police" is very much an artifact of the Occupy Wall Street movement, much reported upon by the mainstream media. To the extent that OWS was an anarchist movement, the slogan was indeed intended to be taken literally.
It's the gender wars that were promulgated in the online Twitter/Tumlr Petri dish. 😀 (I think it's important to distinguish between political tides & cultural movements, though, of course, there's overlap.)
The "defund the police" slogan died, but then was resurrected during the 2020 George Floyd protests. (Indeed, the various "Occupy City Hall" protests at the time were a direct homage to OWS.) But by that time, it had taken on a far more symbolic context. I won't cite my own experiences here since I travel in the usual Boomer liberal circles & thus am an old hand at recontextualizing problematic catchphrases. Rather, I'll cite the experiences of my two far-left-of-center, social democrat offspring—one of whom was actually involved in police department reform in the progressive city where he lives: Both of them understood that "defund the police" was code for "reallocate police funding in better ways."
It's a lousy slogan because it _can_ be interpreted literally.
Oy gevalt. Never felt like subbing. But I'm doing it now, just this once, to call you out.
(Might leverage it later to remind commenters of their duty as Americans to make fun of Rhode Islanders, but eh, we'll carpet bomb that Newport Bridge when we get to it)
Police abolitionism as part of Occupy? Occupy as an "anarchist movement?" Pray tell, what parts of your ass you pull those from? Because being there, I remember we didn't have *any* of the former, and little of the latter.
First of all, the movement was started by Adbusters, that magazine by the students of hippies and Situationists who were far more concerned with you mindlessly buying stuff than they were about the nature of the state and police. Anarchists they are not. (Situationists hate anarchists, after all.)
As the movement evolved in those days beyond Adbusters' reach, when people like me got involved in spite of them? The anarchists were always bunched off and kept at arms length. What memories I have of the camp at Oscar Grant Park in downtown Oakland, I faintly recall they were on the northern edges of the encampment*. (If you're curious about others, the Palestinian solidarity types and postcolonials were corralled in the middle in a little triangle next to the pallet paths, equidistant from the assembly stage and the kitchens. There weren't too many other types that were corralled.)
To suggest police defunding/abolitionism was part of Occupy is an AI hallucination at best. Not saying that we weren't protesting police violence in some ways (consider the name Oscar Grant Park...we were calling out police brutality against blacks before BLM even existed), but the whole thing would've never gotten as big as it did, whether in NYC or Oakland (let alone anywhere else), without some cooperation with the cops. Police abolitionism was on nobody's mind outside a few, and it was never a core point of discussion in the general assembly. Besides, the focus was always on the 1%, not the police. (There was a *reason* those postcolonialists were corralled.) The homages to Occupy that occurred during the George Floyd protests were more about the *tactics* used by Occupy than any of the politics.
After all, I think most of the George Floyd protesters would've found Occupy's politics racist in that "not capital-B Black enough" way BLM slammed Bernie with back in 2016. This was before Trayvon Martin, after all.
As for the anarchists, if there was any "contribution" they made to Occupy, it's killing what cooperation existed by taking over those buildings (which *nobody* agreed to, and only a few outside their group supported) after the Oakland general strike, which either caused or accelerated the movement's decline, depending on your angle. So no, Occupy wasn't anarchist.
And what about "defund/abolish?" If you really want answers, move a couple years ahead. You were onto something with gender, since the biggest voices of "defund/abolish" seem to be feminist women/queers of the PMC/MANGO/shitlib/terminally online stripe. You know, the same people who were constantly on Twitter/Tumblr the mid-to-late 2010s and were constantly on the hunt for problematics. The ones who sided with the girlfriend in the Maury-drama-blown-out-of-proportion that was GamerGate (take this as my contempt toward the ENTIRETY of that shitshow...the ones who sided with the boyfriend were just as bad). The same ones who were hired in droves post-June 2020 by Teen Vogue and other mainstream media publications so these pubs could appear "progressive" and then got their asses kicked to the curb the past two years because of budget woes/"vibe shift"/people got bored of their shit. The Defector/New Inquiry types. Their alternative to policing offers some insight as how "defund/abolish" came to be: Restorative justice, in which the accused and the victim are simply expected to talk out their problems. (They also are super into harm reduction when it comes to drugs.)
Way I see it, that speaks to the rise of "defund/abolish" in a very specific way: Feminism's (understandable) distrust of the criminal justice system due to real (and perceived) incompetencies in its handling of sexual assault and preference for mediation over conflict, mixed in with the terminally online's overconsumption of media manifesting a crippling fear of anything negative, especially violence. This creates an infantile worldview in which the very nature of police is inherently wrong and problematic, and the only way to resolve this wrongness is to get rid of it as much as possible and replace it with something that doesn't feel or vibe like policing at all, even if it's ineffectual. Race issues are just a front for that.
Certainly nothing to do with Occupy.
*I speak for the downtown encampment. The one by Lake Merritt may have had more anarchists, but I never went out to that one, and it was always a secondary camp. Ditto the poseurs of Occupy SF.
You're right: Your dick is MUCH bigger than my dick.
If you could read as well as you can rant, you'd note that I qualified, "To the extent that OWS was an anarchist movement..." and I am referring here to its organizational methods, not to members of one of your cliques in Oscar Grant Park in downtown Oakland in 2011.
I distinctly remember lively conversations about cutting police funding on several occasions in Zuccotti Park when I was down there delivering supplies to friends. Maybe that conversation was one people in Oakland weren't interested in having. I hope at least you got laid.
"Your dick is bigger than my dick"?
Quite a non-sequitur there. I just think you're a liar and a fabulist.
I wrote about an electronic general strike. It would kneecap the tech bros and wpuld really like your opinion on it. https://open.substack.com/pub/christineaxsmith/p/an-electronic-general-strike?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=j36hb
"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."
When the NPR totebag set say "Defund the police!" what they mean is "Take money from the undeserving (blue collar meathead cops, most of whom lack Serious Academic Credentials and who are famously unwoke to boot) and give to the deserving (white collar social workers with appropriate degrees who can be counted on to uphold the latest and most censorious standards of political correctness)".
This! And so ironic in NYC where the NYPD is majority minority, unlike the NYC teacher’s union (as a proxy for white collar social work types) is majority white.
Randall Collins, "Seven Reasons Why Police are Disliked," _The Sociological Eye_, June 5, 2020 https://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2020/06/seven-reasons-why-police-are-disliked.html is worth considering. [Collins is an emeritus professor of sociology, University of Pennsylvania: https://sociology.sas.upenn.edu/people/collins] Collins makes some suggestions for reforms and remedies, some of which would seem to require increases in funding. Collins' posting seems to have drawn very little comment online.