We should keep that in mind when Schmoe “aim for the legs” Biden asks us to write his speeches. In the mean time let’s keep the pressure up. Abolish the Police. Hell, polling around here has surely skyrocketed on this issue from the days when one lonely visionary first typed “Abolish the Police!”
Who are we scaring? Are you afraid Unnamed Unstuck Poster is going to vote for Trump because I went too far?
You can call it whatever you want here.
But next time you mosey on down to Redondo for a protest, I think it would be fantastic if you had a different label on you sign.
The types of policies that would follow from successfully defunding the police are popular. Therefore, we should stop saying defund the police, while we advocate for those policies? OK…
I didn’t have any label in Redondo. I chatted with Suzzer and clapped when people drove by honking.
I did talk to little microdaughter today about making a “Black Lives Matter” sign for our house. That’s something that was at one time as provocative as “Defund the Police” is now. Something that I’m sure many liberals would have said “I’d prefer you had a ‘Hate Has No Home Here’ sign instead”.
I could argue that you want police to be scared, overreact, and ultimately come out looking worse because of their overreaction.
I have no idea what this post means, but I don’t think “don’t use political slogans which poll at 16% when the underlying ideas are popular” is an idea that requires me to write out a comprehensive argument for it.
The problem here is that you do actually want to Abolish The Police and you’re trying to shift the Overton window in your favor, which I have no interest in helping you to do.
Hell yeah. Anyone think politicians even entertain cutting police budgets if not for this kind of thing?
I don’t get it. What is confusing about the idea “don’t use unpopular slogans when advocating for popular ideas”?
This is from the “if the Republicans refuse to nominate Garland they’ll look REALLY BAD!” school of political strategy. You have to actually have good political messaging, you can’t rely on the public to figure out what’s going on.
Then what does polling have to do with it? We’re talking about what you want? Well, then, what do you want?
BLM has always been fine, imo. I don’t think it was ever anywhere near as provocative as “Defund the Police”. It also doesn’t have the major weakness that “Defund the Police” has.
Considering that 99.9% of the population had never heard of or considered defunding the police as an option two weeks ago, I think that polling at 16% is pretty damn good.
And the policies that would lead from defunding are good, like the source in your post said.
Yeah. 16% is amazing.
I want a new organization built and responsibilities shifted away from the police and into that organization. The scope of which responsibilities to shift would be up for debate, but “stuff like mental health and drug use” would be a great way of framing it to get broad support. My aim would be to stop police interacting with members of the public as much as possible.
That’s not what you want. That’s what I was trying to make clear with my polls and such earlier in the thread. “Abolish the Police” polls very poorly, but you don’t care, because your underlying idea of ACTUALLY ABOLISHING THE POLICE is genuinely unpopular, so the slogan isn’t doing you damage. My idea of “undermine the police by removing responsibilities from them” polls very well and thus the slogan is a millstone around its neck.
I think this is all a step in the right direction, but when Floyd passes a possibly counterfeit $20, in your scenario, they’re still calling the police and he’s still dead.
So you don’t believe in the Overton Window? You think you are going to push your platform there - have it be the platform most aggressively destructive to the current police institutions on the entire spectrum of discourse from political forums to street protests, and that’s going to end up with the best chance for enacting your platform - the then most radical platform that anyone has ever heard about?
Good political messaging often requires being confrontational. That’s what concepts like direct action are all about. The Democratic establishment playbook of prevent defense and trying to avoid offending the most people is not a good strategy.
The goal should be moving the Overton window on how people view police. It’s not a matter of finding the right slogan to somehow trick people into believing what is necessary without realizing that they are believing that.
We should want to create cognitive dissonance that breaks people’s minds and destroys the narratives that allow our police culture to flourish. This takes time and will be unpopular at the start.
Easiest nanodaughter ever.
This is big. Blame is really moving beyond “bad apples” here.