Not a terrible take at all. I actually agree.
Reform the police isn’t quite as catchy but is more flexible.
I’m simply acknowledging that there is a tiny number of strong progressives in any level of government. There is a reason for this. Perhaps some of the assumptions about messaging should be reevaluated.
I’m probably what passes for a centrist on this forum and even I know that lobbyists are for making politicians happy and protesters are for making them sad.
You can get power from the official political process or you can get power by making such a massive pain in the ass out of yourself that they had to adapt to you rather than the other way around.
Honestly with the results of this most recent election I think the protesters have a better chance of getting meaningful change done than the Democratic Party does.
EDIT: I think the protesters message to Democrats is to do something about the criminal justice situation or they’re going to keep marching around chanting defund/abolish the police. They’re the problem the Democratic politicians have to solve not the other way around.
I don’t disagree with the any of this.
My comment was directed at tab saying maybe people don’t care that the message “defund the police” didn’t work politically. I was pointing out that is a very odd position to take assuming the goal is to eventually have the actual power to defund the police.
At the local level the Democrats aren’t in any danger of losing power. It’s important to remember that the main place the power on this particular issue exists is on the local level… and most cities are run by Democrats.
So if the goal was to motivate the Democratic Party to get their local officials to make the protests stop… I’d say ‘defund the police’ is close to perfect.
Hurting national Dems to force them to do something about local Dems is the whole point.
We don’t need 60 senators for major metropolitan areas to change how they resource and run their criminal justice systems. Pretty hard to convince someone like PocketChads that he should hold up on getting the absolute max leverage he can get in terms of risk:impact on the local (Democrat!) pro police ghouls because he might hurt national Democrats… the last time they had 60 votes in the Senate they bailed out the banks and passed the GOP’s healthcare bill.
Let’s face it, my countries political process is hopelessly broken. I mean hopelessly. Messaging + good distribution could get us somewhere, but that’s going to take years.
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I went to three BLM protests. They raised awareness for sure but the defund the police message not only failed miserably but likely backfired. You can count the number of cities or states that are doing anything like defunding on one hand. It was bad messaging. Admitting so isn’t saying the protests or goal was wrong. It’s saying a mistake was made around the message. If we want to get the power to actual defund the police we have to be willing to self evaluate.
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Cite?
I agree that it’s bad messaging. I think Black Lives Matter was too, and that’s very unpopular around here. The thing that made me come around on BLM (I think Our Lives Matter or Our Lives Matter Too would have been much harder to spin while still saying the same thing) was arriving at the logic I just posted.
The reason these huge protests are breaking out at this scale and the messaging is so bad is that the last time we did this we had excellent leaders who were pretty great at messaging… and they all got shot. Now it’s super decentralized and whatever goes viral goes viral. These kinds of things are insanely flat now, which means there’s not going to be 6 people who are all great with words arguing about the perfect way to put it in a conference room somewhere.
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So defund and abolish are the same thing? Is reforming? That seems more popular now since the protests.
A huge part of the problem in this country is that the media, the police, and entertainment are all very much in bed with each other. The number of white Americans in particular who are in the cop cult is pretty staggering. Once I started seeing cop shows as what they are, which is propaganda, I’ve felt really grossed out by the whole idea.
I’m really glad Gen Z didn’t fall for it. I suspect defund the police/ abolish the police are big because they generate amazing engagement on social media. If what we need to do as a country is talk about the cops and what they mean to us it might be the perfect message.
Also fuck the pollsters. They’d have me believe that AOC is unpopular and that we won 54 Senate seats. Stuff that gets a lot of social media engagement is popular, not what pollsters claim dinosaurs who answer pollster phone calls think.
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The protests aren’t necessarily a failure if they produced no meaningful short-term change. This is a long-term movement. I don’t have a problem with people who chose to treat the 2020 elections as ephemeral in the context of chasing their priorities.
The whole point is the idea of massive cuts, or elimination of the police, is wildly unpopular. Like amazingly unpopular. Less than 30% even among the people you would think most likely to support it.
Had the message been “refocus the police” or “stop the police from doing social work” or demilitarize the police” or “rethink law enforcement” we might not have had such a low support and been able to get more communities to do the actual things we all wanted.
Now it’s odd to have this argument because it assumes “someone” decided defund the police would be the message when in fact it was organic. Hard to know how to counter live organic messaging coming from a widespread protest movement. There is no communications team to ask for a change of message.
I totally get this sentiment but it’s really dangerous. It’s our only existing method of knowing how to message and doing so will simply lead us all to just reinforce our own exiting biases.
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Let me add I wasn’t lying when I said a couple weeks ago I was dead fucking wrong on my belief that centrism of some kind was the path. It failed pretty badly in the election. I now see the point of many of the strong progressives who were arguing for more severe measures. I’ll need to learn more about how this will work, and I won’t always agree, but I do think it is the path most likely to be fruitful.
That being said, people shouldn’t assume a critique of a given method is a critique of the whole philosophy.
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Unpopular opinions sometimes become popular. It’s reasonable to run a long-term campaign to educate people and drive down the popularity of and trust in local police.
You keep assuming I’m critiquing the protests or goal. I’m not. I’m only critiquing the messaging.
Honestly the more I look at politics over the last 30 years, listening to pollsters about what was popular before we did it might be where the country went wrong. Especially since in with the younger generations nothing sells like authenticity.
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The messaging is part of the goals.
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Its as high as 50% with dems.
“Similarly, in the three polls with breakdowns by party, Democrats on average supported the “defund the police” movement 50 percent to 34 percent,”
Not that popularity should be the only factor. Some things start off as not popular and gain popularity over time.