Why is it that people on the left insist on describing sensible programs with slogans that make those programs look crazy?. It’s fallacious to attack someone else with a strawman argument, but it’s just silly to try to defend yourself with one. And yet people on the left keep doing this. Bernie Sanders offers programs that would strengthen the safety net already present in our capitalist society, making changes that are differences in degree, and not in kind. And yet he insists on calling himself a socialist, thus losing the vote of every Cuban and Venezuelan in Florida. Sanders also claims that he wants to abolish all private health insurance, even though the bill he wrote abolishes only private primary insurance, and specifically protects private supplementary insurance. Both the media and the candidates ignored this distinction, and the result was the destruction of both Warren’s and Sanders’ candidacies. And now we have demands to “abolish” and “defund” the police, allegedly “supported” by arguments that demand something very different once you read the fine print.
https://www.nytimes.com/…/…/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
“Mariame Kaba’s New York Times Op-Ed was titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”. The article itself contains numerous examples of police abuse of power, but no explanations of how innocent people are to be protected from theft and murder if there were no police at all. instead, the article points out that it is important to “reduce contact between the public and the police.” and that reducing this contact would mean that “there would be less need for the police”. All of this true, important, and completely contradicts the title of the article. Reducing police contact with the public does not mean abolishing the police, neither literally nor metaphorically. Furthermore, if you are going to abolish the police, it’s not going to be enough to have less need of them. You’re going to have to have no need at all, and no sane person, not even Ms. Kaba, believes that is ever going to happen.
Another New York Times Op-Ed titled “No More Money for the Police” offers several thoughtful and imaginative solutions for combating police brutality, but give no support for the demand in the article’s title.
https://www.nytimes.com/…/…/george-floyd-police-funding.html
Instead, the article talks about “reducing the power of the police”, thus implicitly acknowledging that we can’t eliminate their power completely. The article also says “the police rarely guarantee safety.” thus acknowledging that sometimes they do guarantee safety, and thus we can’t completely defund them.
In the final paragraph, the authors seem to be aware that the article has not actually supported their alleged conclusion, and try to sneak it in anyway. “We need to reimagine public safety in ways that shrink and eventually abolish police and prisons while prioritizing education, housing, economic security, mental health and alternatives to conflict and violence.” (Italics mine) If you remove the words “and eventually abolish“ from the previous sentence, it becomes a thoughtful, original, and timely proposal. When you add those three words, it becomes naïve nonsense not supported in any way by the article itself.
I think that these actions are caused by what I like to call “small-tent politics“. Ever since the Clinton presidency, the Democrats have assumed that leftists will vote for the Democrat no matter what, if the Democrats run on the implicit slogan “ We’re not as bad as they are“. Progressive Democrats have understandably gotten tired of this, and they yearn for candidates who are not tailoring their campaigns to centrists, and taking Progressives for granted. Consequently, they sometimes are attracted to slogans which will clearly alienate centrists, because this shows a revolt against these kinds of compromises. This is not a winning strategy for national elections, however. What it does is produce a small but very enthusiastic group of supporters, and a large group of people who won’t vote for you no matter what.
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Thanks to Steve Sack for the use of the cartoon. You can see more of his cartoons here