Over at New York magazine, Eric Levitz offers up a lengthy column titled, "Ibram X. Kendi Does Not Run the Democratic Party."
It's difficult to excerpt, but he's basically taking on a recent Matt Bai column that excoriates leftists for their unhinged levels of identity politics and—sorry, but I can't think of a better word—semi-insane levels of wokeness. Levitz's argument is that even if this accurately describes certain quarters of the left, the mainstream of the Democratic Party remains doggedly mainstream:
My argument here is not that the worldview referenced by Bai is powerless....The problem with Bai’s piece is not that he criticizes some left-wing ideas despite knowing the GOP is the greater threat to liberal ideals. Rather, the problem is that he (1) falsely asserts that “mainstream” Democrats have abandoned liberal universalism for a doctrine of “vengeance” against white people and (2) suggests it would be rational for liberals to respond to this by withholding support for Democratic candidates, even as he produces no evidence to support either contention.
In a hyper-technical sense, Levitz is right. Most Democratic politicians—with Joe Biden very much in the lead—really are middle of the road. As much as Fox News would like to pretend otherwise, conservative attacks on wokeness almost never implicate actual members of Congress or other prominent Democratic politicos. That's because most prominent Democrats aren't big fans of wokeness.
But this misses the point. Mainstream Democrats might not believe this stuff, but they also aren't willing to loudly criticize it. And without that, Fox News has the stage all to themselves. They can run a segment about some writer or activist or school board member who has crackpot ideas and then just leave it dangling. Their audience will assume this is the direction liberals are going and nobody will step up to plainly say it's wrong.
As an example, consider everyone's favorite boogeyman, "defund the police." It became famous during the BLM protests in 2020, but is it a mainstream Democratic position? Absolutely not. There's not a single member of Congress who believes it in its literal sense, and very few who even believe it in its "clarified" sense of being merely a call to reduce or redistribute police funding.
Great! So dozens or hundreds of Democratic pols immediately stepped up to angrily denounce the idea and the people who backed it. Right?
Of course not. Your average Democratic mayor or governor or senator just kept their mouth shut. After all, why take the chance of becoming a target of woke activists and the Black community? They figured it would just fade away before long anyway.
On an individual level, that might be the smart play. But when everyone makes the smart play, it means that "defund the police" is left hanging out there with only the slightest pushback from the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Is it any wonder that Fox News gleefully takes advantage of that? Or that centrist voters end up vaguely thinking that Democrats are anti-police even as murder rates are soaring?
If mainstream Democrats are afraid to call out the worst excesses of their own party for fear of being called racist if they make even a slight mistake in how they do it, then they can hardly blame anyone for believing that the party embraces those excesses. Is this fair? Maybe, maybe not. But who cares? Fair or not, it's the way things are.
This is right, although with "Defund", I think it's important to understand that it isn't "the Black community" that would be the issue- it would be that woke spokespeople would call people who stridently criticized Defund "racist", and you don't want to be called racist, by anyone, in the Democratic Party in 2022.
"The Black community" in general wants laws enforced (although many of its members have no illusions about the brutality and racism of cops). In a number of these civil rights debates what you have is some very loud online activists who play by very destructive moves, where they immediately label people who disagree with them bigots- white supremacists, homophobes, misogynists, transphobes, etc.- often based on less than nothing at all. It's the only move they know.
But in a political party where that is basically the worst possible charge, it works.
It's more than online an activists unless you consider a federal elected office holder online activists.
But you are definitely right about the rest. The black community in Minneapolis voted against the dept. of public safety replacing the police. They want respect but also police to do their jobs and the vague ideas of what the dept. would actually do combined with months of battles between the mayor and the council over the wording of the question was a total failure for the dept. side.
I’m still pretty sure “child rapist” and “murderer” are worst charges that can be lobbed at another person, even on the leftest of left groups.
Sure, but those accusations don't work unless they are likely true.
But you can call anyone a bigot, and then there's a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose quality to trying to disprove it.
Somehow, Matt Gaetz & Paul des Jarlais are more popular than ever, despite this.
I guess IOKIYAR even applies to paedarasty & forced abortions.
Kevin, you keep saying Dems need to defend mainstream Democratic positions and not cede ground to Fox News. Fair enough. But what about mainstream media? Fox is killing them in the ratings game by putting out BS that tickles the indignant gene of the masses. Why don't they go on the attack? JFC their stock in trade is accurate credible information, yet they let themselves be beaten by these information frauds. From a business standpoint, why not point out that "our information is better" with more than slogans? How about a "fox watch" on NBC news? John Stewart could do it, why not the evening news. They defend their turf about as aggressively as Ted Cruz defends his wife
At this point, we're about a month, tops, from Jon Stewart joining Tucker Carlson as an approving guest of the FOXnews 8pm hour, just like Jon's fellow lefty Glemm Greemwald & former Democrat voter KKKlay Travis.
Let's be real. Mr. Bai bounces around from WaPo to NYT to Yahoo. No matter what the venue, he's always looking for an angle to generate clicks. He has apparently determined that the truth is more boring than clickbait.
Hmm. This is known as the ad hominem fallacy.
What you say may or may not be true about Bai, but it's irrelevant to the point about Democrat condemnation of wokism. And the fact that you want to talk about this rather than the point Kevin raised pretty much confirms his point...
Fallcies are a fallacy in most cases. The reputation of the speaker doesn't matter to arguments, but it does matter to his factual assertions. So while he could be making a valid argument, it's soundness depends on his not being a liar or being biased.
Fallacies are a way for midwits to dodge the issue.
The Republicans are better at playing the 'pin the tail on the donkey' game than Democrats.
To illustrate, BLM posts bail for Quintez Brown, who attempted to murder politician Craig Greenberg. So the GOP will say 'You support BLM? So there you support the murder of politicians?'
In contrast, the Democrats, it seems, have not adequately been able to hang the January 6th horror on the broader Republican party.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10522989/BLM-helps-raise-100-000-bail-defund-police-activist-student-21-charged-attempted-murder.html
Let's be real: where were you on January 6, 2021?
& don't say, "Not at the Marchon Washington".
As far as I know, there is no “BLM national headquarters” which suggests BLM isn’t as organized of a group as, say, the Democratic National Committee. Anybody can pose as “BLM” and collect money for whatever they want.
Today we are all W.E.B. du Fraud.
Well, let's consider how media works for a moment. If a pol, in a town hall, distances themself from an extreme left position with "Well, that's a bridge too far for me, but their hearts are in the right place. I think we need to keep focus on (Talking Points X, Y and Z)"
Do you think this would get reported in the media? I don't. And yet it would be reassuring to everyone who was listening.
I think there's tons of "soft distancing" that happens and is not remarked on because there's no food fight.
This works very well in house, but it doesn't get the message out to the edge cases too well. So that's a problem with the way the typical congresscritter messages.
Imagine that. The comparative “centrists” of a party hesitant/afraid to call out the much more fringe elements of that party…
Like +5!
Yeah, but the difference is most Republicans do believe all that stuff and the rest is for optics. Democrats don't actually believe that stuff but don't say so for optical reasons.
Okay, I get that, but a quick web search for "defund the police" and "Pelosi" pops this up:
"'Well, with all the respect in the world for Cori Bush, that is not the position of the Democratic Party,' Pelosi told anchor George Stephanopoulos when asked on ABC's 'This Week' about Bush’s comments and how she thinks Democrats should be addressing rising crime."
That's just from this past Sunday.
I suppose Republican leaders call out their "fringe" too, but supporters of Trump's election-overturning campaign aren't considered "fringe."
Rockefeller Orange County GQPer Kevin Drum will only be happy when Neoliberal Nancy gives Cori Bush & the Squad the Full Sistah Souljah Treatment.
& not even then.
"If mainstream Democrats are afraid to call out the worst excesses of their own party for fear of being called racist if they make even a slight mistake in how they do it, then they can hardly blame anyone for believing that the party embraces those excesses."
If there's a thing you can't say because your party will make you regret saying it, then that thing IS the de facto position of your party.
Well, meh. I fumbled that. I meant something like:
If there's a thing you can't challenge because your party will make you regret it, then that thing is the de facto position of your party.
There is no doubt that "defund the police" is political poison.
But there is still a problem with no politically tenable solution, if you want it to be solved. Police culture is rogue and unaccountable, and strongly but not exclusively racist in application. And that's largely because even "mainstream" Democrats accept that reality and even want it. They want police to randomly harass a young black man walking in the "wrong neighborhood" in a way they would never accept if applied to their sons. This is but one example.
"Defunding" as a reform arose because nothing else worked. And it won't pass either, and a short time later Derek Chauvinism is back in style, just don't make us look at it. Redemption redux.
I don't have a solution, at least not a politically tenable one. But we have completely omitted the moral dimension of the issue. Anti-anti-racists have a point, if we're honest.
The "mainstream" Democrats don't favor "defunding" the police. They don't even favor any plausible reform. And that's because the police are doing what we expect them to. We just don't want to see it. And we certainly don't want to deal with it morally.
There really is no solution because we...
1. Need stricter gun laws
2. Raise education requirements for police, they should have a college degree and include some sociology and psychology. This would help ameliorate the success rate of recruits with right wing power fantasies and dumb bullies who grew up to be bullies with badges. It would also by its nature make policing more likely to attract liberals instead of overwhelmingly right wingers.
3. Standardize rules and tactics and training as much as possible. Right now we need to fight 20,000 fights. A police dept. Can hire a whacko bird to train their guys and no one knows.
4. Triple the firearms training and repeat yearly. Police in Europe train much much more with weapons than US cops.
Ironically this was the true purpose of 2nd amendment: make sure everyone had a rifle and could use it so when the militia got called out the government didn't have to pay for training and supplies. But now because anyone in America can be armed to the teeth officers are much more afraid and justifiably so, that any public interaction will result in an exchange of gunfire.
To me that is what real reform would looj like.
I don't think being kept busy attacking what is basically your own side, is good politics. That doesn't look "strong" - instinctively, people don't want a leader that is busy attacking their own side. That's not pro-survival in an existential conflict.
But sure, Dem politicians could broadcast some kind of law'n'order message. "Good police for good policing" or w/e ... not "ACAB" ha ha.
I dunno. Liz Cheney looks strong to me, and up to a couple years ago I'd never been a great admirer of hers.
It's easy to trash talk the other side. Standing up to your own takes guts.
"It's easy to trash talk the other side. Standing up to your own takes guts."
Or, it's an easy way to woo a gullible press/national audience, a la John McCain laundering his personal dislike of GW Bush into being a straight-shootin' maverick.
Full props to the man for not killing the ACA, though. And by "full props," I mean nearly the same amount of applause as is due the 47 Dems and 2 independents who also voted to not kill the ACA.
She's still light years better than democrats at politicking. ALL republicans are. Like or not Democrats are a feminine nurturing party and Republicans are a dominating party.
Strength is always always always the bedrock of everything else. You can't do anything without strength.
Fuck Liz Cheney. She’s too stupid to realize where her party is now. “I’m a republican but I don’t want most of the stuff actual Republican voters and politicians support”? Total fucking idiot.
Agreed. The idea that the way Dems win is to accept republican framing and attack other dems just doesn't make any sense to me. Kevin has a very prominent "let's punch the left and then we'll win over voters" tendency, while also acknowledging that Fox and right wing media are the real problem and all dems will be portrayed as baby murdering, castro loving reverse-racists no matter what they say or do.
This all makes sense....until you consider the argument that was popular a decade ago: mainstream Republicans need to defend the mainstream or else they will lose every election for decades. Given the dismal results of that prediction....I dunno.
Republicans have a lot of structural advantages in our political system that lead to them being able to ignore public opinion to a larger degree than democrats and still be rewarded with power.
A problem here is that the far left voices generally aren't wing, just impractical. We know beyond any reasonable doubt that access to resources is correlated with various measures of success. No one seriously disputes that African Americans were traditionally locked out of a great deal of resources. Given the correlation between resources and success it is impossible to model any scenario where a group deprived of resources in an earlier period ever catches up to the group with more resources in that earlier period. This is where people like Kendi are ultimately coming from. It isn't vengeance or some heightened sense of identity, it's just facing reality.
Now that reality is not practical because people don't like to think this way. But it makes it very had to denounce without being dishonest. What is the answer to African Americans not having wealth which doesn't address the fact that they could not retain wealth or make the same kind of investments as white people? Even if you try universal programs you still have all those big accumulations of wealth.
Maybe these problems are too intractable to be worth solving but it is hard for anyone that cares about evidence to denounce ideas strongly rooted in evidence. And so called woke ideas are tied in evidence. You can just do what the right does and lie about it but if someone who is your ally starts lying about you it would create a lot of anger. So it's really hard for the left to bridge the gap between the possible and people who point out really inconvenient realities.
First sentence should read wrong instead of wing.
Can you not simply stage a coup like you did 1100 years ago? You were quite a good emperor.
Despite my handle, I don't think that kind of violence is a terribly great way to transfer power. Though at least he kept it personal and didn't involve a bunch of innocent soldiers and civilians.
LOL.
Whatever you say, GETTR ass tramp.
Well said!
I think I agree with your point, if I can put it as simply: my disagreement with the 'woke' is not substantive, but tactical. 'Electability' matters. And politics is not a graduate seminar.
The Left may diagnose problems correctly, but they are terrible at coming up with answers. Politics is always the art of the possible.
“And so called woke ideas are tied in evidence.”
Three members of the SF school board were just voted out of office in a recall election. Among their many infuriating infractions:
Voting to remove names like Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein from schools because, among other things, that’s supposedly what historically underrepresented community members wanted, and the importance of historical knowledge was explicitly rejected (by one of the now recalled commissioners) in an interview with New Yorker magazine.
They refused to appoint a gay dad (off minority children) to a post on a volunteer board because he’s white, and that’s not the kind of diversity they were looking for. The board in question, apparently, remains free of openly gay people: in SF.
They refused to hire a school reopening consultant because the consultant in question had worked for a charter school. And one now recalled commissioner didn’t want a return to white supremacy.
They ended merit based admissions at a high school with a large percentage of Asian students. One of the now recalled commissioners, it turns out, had earlier tweeted her complaints about Asians who get ahead thanks to white supremacy.
After their recall, at least one of these commissioners complained that they had been voted out because of racists (in one of the few major cities in the history of the USA with a black female mayor who was voted into office by a large majority).
And their list of reality-defying antics goes on, but there are plenty of articles out there where you can find more info.
The point for now is this: if you think “so called woke ideas are tied in evidence” then you’re missing the actual problem. People have legitimate concerns not just with the unhinged presentation but also with the fact-free substance of woke ideas. People think a lot of woke people are out of touch with reality for a reason: a lot of them are. And, yes, as Kevin states, it’s definitely a problem if Democrats don’t do more to point this out.
It appears that Democrats did point this out to those three SF school board members.
It's crazy that a school board election is national news.
We’ll, when the school board tries to do such crazy things as rename schools named after George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson you tend to get the national spotlight shined on you.
*Well
Democrats vote their crazies out. Republicans vote them in.
John Edwards & Anthony Weiner would be in office still, if GQP.
Kind of like how Matt Gaetz & Gym Jordan are.
School board have always been full of loonies, no one wants a dead end job that doesn't go anywhere, requires a significant amount of time, and gets you nothing except hate except people that are either a bit crazy or are civic minded. But on the left the really extreme levels of this stuff are mostly filtered out even by state legislature levels, there's few even at the level of municipal politics. I can't say that none of these people exist, but do you really think it's important for national level politicians to be talking about what is going on at the level of a school board? Hey past this level and what's left of the whole stuff is evidence based, Kendi certainly is even if you disagree with him.
I think the ideas of someone like Ibram Kendi can and should be debated. I don’t see anything wrong with treating “anti racist” ideology as one among many streams of thought that may or may not have some validity. But assertions that Kendi is evidence based are dubious at best. That’s not necessarily a problem, though, as long as we’re free to put his ideas under a microscope. But are we?
I think it’s now fair to assert that the paragraph above would get me branded as a racist by many among the “anti racist” crowd: they don’t want to be debated, they want fealty; otherwise, you’re a racist.
And I do think it’s a problem when DEI programs start popping up in every university and business. Just speaking from my own perspective: Last week the HR department @ my job sent out an email announcing new DEI training. I haven’t seen it yet, but I heard from many colleagues expressing unhappiness at the anticipated imposition of an ideology. Just yesterday, I was in a grad class where one fellow student spoke briefly about the need for mandatory anti-racist training before any of us are allowed to be teachers. The syllabus for the class declares that our professor hopes we’ll all join her on her anti racist crusade (which would seem to preclude the possibility for us to feel free to discuss other systems of thought in the class).
All of these situations are obviously problematic. People associate them with a vague idea of “the Left” and the democrats, and that’s bad for us. It’s one thing to debate the evidence or lack of it in a given ideology. It’s another thing to have an ideology “systematically” imposed with open debate taken off the table. That approach will ultimately backfire on everyone on the left. Ignoring that fact is just ignoring the reality of the situation.
Who knew Jello Biafra still had so much pull in San Francisco municipal politics.
I bet he has three pitchers of iced tea chilling for when Dianne Feinstein dies.
So… one random (large) school board somewhere was acting crazy… and everyone on the left must pay the price?
Good luck making sure all 100m+ democrats behave better in the future. God forbid even 3 of them say or do anything make-funable, like these 3 SF school board members did… or elections everywhere will be lost!
But it makes it very had to denounce without being dishonest
No. There's plenty of utterly extreme, bashit-crazy stuff that comes out of the mouths (or the keyboards) of the Kendi faction. That's not to deny that much of the core of their critique is valid. But they layer the rational stuff with lots of condemnable idiocy. And Democrats should call them out for it.
But it is obviously false that "it is impossible to model any scenario where a group deprived of resources in an earlier period ever catches up to the group with more resources in that earlier period."
My wife's family are all Jews from Lithuania and Ukraine, where they were isolated, had the crappiest farm land (I'm not sure if they owned the land or were tenant farmers), and forbidden to practice many professions. They arrived here dirt poor, not speaking English, and yet their children managed to prosper, and their grandchildren actually did catch up with the group with more resources.
And there are many examples of groups that, on average, came here poor, were discriminated against here as well (though rarely as badly as in the old country), and yet managed to prosper.
Just sayin'
Democratic Party leaders like Pelosi have stated they don’t support “defund the police” or whatever other nonsense some lefty said that gets amplified by the right. Is she supposed to yell her position every morning on what really is a non-issue? Don’t people have agency? One of the problems I see in the country is that the press lives for controversy as you have highlighted in your Fox News commentary. If people want to be hysterical I don’t think there is much that can be done, we will just have to reap what we sow, kind of what’s happening with COVID.
Sorry, Kevin, but this is quite unfair. Biden said numerous times that he does NOT support defunding the police, starting with the primaries and continuing with his debate with Trump. That didn't stop Trump from trying to tar him with it. Quite a few of the other presidential candidates took similar positions. And so too have other Democratic politicians when asked. Maybe they don't go out of their way to condemn the phrase or the idea, but why should they?
You correctly say that almost NO Democratic politicians at any level support the phrase and very few support the idea behind it. It's a straw man used by Fox and their allies to lie about what Democrats think.
This would hardly be the first such misrepresentation by Fox News, now would it.
Oh dear lord. I strongly suspect you're a troll, but I'll cut you some slack and ask you if a) You show you know what the slogan 'defunding the police' really means, b) Quote his actual words along with link to a reputable source where he said that, and c) Explain what you think Biden meant by that quote.
Anything else and you're outta here. I'm sure you agree that the way to deal with trolls is first to unmask them, then proceed to rain Hell down on the despicable creature, amirite?
"President Joe Biden said at a CNN town hall on Tuesday that he remains opposed to calls for "defunding the police" -- a rallying cry for activists seeking reforms in law enforcement.
In response to a question about how to avoid overly constraining police while addressing racial disparities, Biden replied, "By number one, not defunding the police." " https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/politics/defunding-police-biden-town-hall-trnd/index.html See also https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53997196 3 months later.
It's not my job to multiply examples. Do it yourself. And spare me your accusations.
I guess hippie punching never gets old. I'm sure it would be an excellent use of the Dems time to be denouncing members of their coalition for the ravings of Fox News.
I've already seen a TV commercial by a Republican woman blaming Democrats for Lia Thomas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7iHpnC7hmU
"woke liberals are ruining women's sports"
KKKlay Travis is already running ads for his 2026 Tennessee gubernatorial campaign?
This is all part of the same issue of Democrats not campaigning against the people they're running against for fear of offending the idiots who won't vote for them anyway, --because they're afraid of motivating the crowd that already sacked the capitol, and because they're afraid of seeming divisive.
Honestly.
As I've said before, it won't matter. The only way for anyone to get any press coverage is to say something outrageous. The most you might get is someone at Fox saying, "see, there's even one or two Democrats on our side!" Five minutes after they've said this, they will go back to claiming everyone on the left, including Democrats, agree with whatever outrageous thing was said.
It's blaming the victim. Black Americans have gone through the same thing for decades: "Well, if you just distanced yourself from people like [fill in the blank], White Americans wouldn't be thinking you're all radicals!"
See, also, FOXnews set approving of incest-haver Ilhan Omer tweeting supportively of the donors to the Kanadian Kovid Konvoy.
As was pointed out above, centrist democrats making centrist statements either are not covered, or are only covered in "Democrats in disarray" articles. FoxNews is trying and succeeding in driving the narrative, and the rest of the MSM goes along for the ride.
Lamestream media, please.
Even the Nation is supportively retweeting the Center for Immigration Studies.
The Republican Party unashamedly embraces the most lunatic ravings of their looney right and actively attempts to silence its “moderates”. No conspiracy “theory” is too lunatic for them and they are quite willing to demonize the police when they enforce the law instead of doing their bidding.
But apparently we liberals should all hang our heads in shame for not being forceful enough when some slogan we disagree with is uttered by someone on the left. I’m sorry, but I’m tired of this shit.
<>
Kevin, um have you checked your meds? Anything at all Mainstream Democrats say or do will have absolutely ZERO influence on what Fox News does, and what their audience believes.
I'm definitely in favour of pushback but not because it will have any effect on the right or Fox News
Fox watchers aren't your audience. Those people aren't persuadable; it's like trying to convince Rachel Maddow to vote for Romney.
Your audience is suburbanite CNN watchers -- the 10-20% of the population that switches between voting R and D.
You can see this play out in Minneapolis. Mayor Frey drew a lot of ire for refusing to "refund police." But then he won reelection and the ballot measure to replace the police department with a new public safety department failed.
Autocorrect problems...."defund police"
Once again, the strange use of left/right blows me away. Not all white's are rich. Not all blacks are poor. It's a dialectical illusion to think otherwise. Most of the illusion of white richness is debt ridden corporations, creating more upper middle class jobs with white families. What black activists try to hide is the drug money blacks are flush with. Off book criminals waving drugs and guns bought by the same white middle class. Who needs school??
Kendi is a black bigot. She lives delusional fantasies that are as dangerous as identity white "Christians" .
Democrats version of identity politics is that everyone's identity should be respected, while conservatives version of identity politics is that there is only one identity that should be respected, theirs, and everyone else should be spat on.
So, why should anyone else respect that identity? Yet we are constantly hectored to do so.
To call people who vote for Republicans racist is to miss the greater point, they're not just racist, they would kill the whole of humanity simply to never think of them again. Given the option to actually pull that off almost all of them would vote for it.
But no one will mention this because to a reasonable person it sounds far fetched, and the people who vote for Republicans would deny it loudly if they heard it, but given the option to do it that's exactly what they would do, and they know they would do it and they think it's exhilarating.
But we have to be worried about offending them.
"The way things are" is that the massive right-wing propaganda network would peddle creative fiction about what Democrats intend to do no matter what Democrats actually said. The idea that Pelosi or Schumer could go on Fox and be allowed to denounce Cori Bush, for example, even if they were of a mind to, is ludicrous. They'd be interrupted, talked over, contradicted and if necessary, have their mics shut off.
Example: not one Democrat anywhere, to my knowledge - not even one "extreme leftist" - has ever said the pandemic is a great excuse to extend government control over the population. Yet this has been the received wisdom on the right for at least 18 months now. They don't need liberals to say anything "woke". In fact they prefer just to make stuff up.
Kendi does run the party. And he ran it into a ditch. The black criminal class and the George Floyd looters have ruined any chance of democrats keeping control of congress. It’s ok really. Nothing interesting was ever going to come from democrats in government anyway.
I guess we’re going to have a war in Ukraine destroy our economy too. Yippee.
Thanks for the racism. Fuck off now.
When I see that about 20% of the LAPD police force is still vaccinated, and recall that the department also has a long history of institutional racism, maybe defunding isn't such a bad idea at least in the short term. Seems like there is a 20% savings in salaries that could be used to hire people that actually care about public safety.
unvaccinated, 80% are vaccinated.
It's a bad idea if media coverage of an LA police defunding convinces up-for-grabs voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Georgia they should vote for law-and-order Republicans in their respective senate races.
Plus, even on the policy merits, what, exactly is accomplished? Assuming staffing cuts flow from budget cuts, how do you insure it's only (or even mainly) the bad right wing cops that get the boot? Tests of ideology? Seems to me the wiser course of action is to focus relentlessly on increasing standards, professionalism, training, etc. But sure, that's not as dramatic as "defunding" and it'll take a lot of time and a lot of effort. (And yes, a lot of money: probably the greatest inanity of the defund nonsense was that it ignored the reality that the high quality policing all Americans need and deserve is likely to cost more, not less.)
PS—Angelenos by all accounts are utterly freaked out about what they perceive to be a huge crime wave, and given that it's LA we're talking about, a defund move would be absolutely guaranteed to generate heaps of media coverage that would be harmful to Democrats:
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/how-bad-is-crime-in-l-a/
Strongly agree on courses of action. Also: Reduce, even strive to eliminate, police overtime. There is a lot of evidence that long shifts lead to deteriorating performance and poorer judgment in all kinds of work. That may mean actually adding positions to meet coverage goals for patrol.
+1
Anti-Girl Scout cookie poster,
https://i.redd.it/fiymnuc09ug81.jpg
There's an argument to be made that, once the hard left started talking about defunding the police, Democrats were already "losing" and there probably wasn't much to be gained by hippie-punching, because at that point you're only increasing the salience of an issue that hurts you. In other words, in an ideal world, Dems would find a way to get people on the left to be more careful about making inane statements that could potentially be ginned up by the right into major scandals that are picked up by the non-partisan media. But that ideal world is not the one we live in. I think this is the key advantage for Republicans on messaging. It's not that their politicians are always so smart about political communication. It's that the right-wing policy activist and digital media ecosystems are a lot smarter* (than their equivalent on the left). This often has the effect of creating (largely bullshit) "issues" that spill over into, say, ABC/NBC/CBS coverage. And guess which cohort still watches those broadcasts? Yep, the diminishing number of persuadable (and typically low info) voters. To put it another way, don't worry about Fox News viewers. Rather, worry about Fox News's ability to push the right-wing's messaging agenda into the wider media world.
I know not everyone agrees with him, but give him a read if you haven't: David Shor talks a lot about "salience." You generally want to move the national discussion toward issues that help you, and away from those that hurt you.
He cites the example of a GOP attack against Democrats involving healthcare. I don't recall the specifics, but apparently the attack backfired. It was hard-hitting, but it raised the salience of an issue on which voters trust Democrats more. Same thing in reverse for immigration: If the election is on immigration, Democrats are in a bad position, even if (per polls) the public often claims to support Democrats on policy specifics.
*Although "smarter" isn't necessarily the right word. A better way to describe it is probably: folks on the right care more about winning elections, and toward that end they want to help the GOP. Much of the progressive left policy activist and digital media community simply doesn't care about the fortunes of Democrats running for office. First and foremost they care about clicks, media coverage, book sales and so on. And in many cases they're outright hostile to the Democratic Party.
TLDR: calls for Democrats in office to engage in better messaging in order to counteract their left flank might well be futile; because the problem isn't political messaging as such. The problem is that much of the progressive-left policy activist and digital media community doesn't share the incentives of the politicians. It's not clear the latter have meaningful leverage on the former.
David Shor is just a more careful David Sirota or Matt Orfalea.
But within six months, DS will be joining fellow newly-minted True Blue Conservative Ryan Grim at CPAC Budapest.
David Shor is just a more careful David Sirota or Matt Orfalea. But within six months, DS will be joining fellow newly-minted True Blue Conservative Ryan Grim at CPAC Budapest.
Wait, what? Sometimes it's hard to tell if you're being ironic, or are actually that badly mistaken.
Sirota is a hard left editor at Jacobin who worked on the Sanders campaign and spends much of his time blasting the Biden White House when he's not eviscerating other corporate sellout Dem scum like Obama and Hillary. Shor is a mainstream Yglesian-style technocratic liberal who, among other things, wants to see people like Sirota largely marginalized in Democratic politics because he things such types hurt Democrats when elections roll around.
I could see David Sirota going full Right Wing Greenwald. But not David Shor.
Sirota, Orfalea, Grim, & Shor are all white #idpol mongers. Shor, trying to come off as an FDR Democrat, but from the center, just doesn't do antiblack whisper campaigns like 2000 Sirota or Martin Luther King porno mashups like Orfalea.
While Kevin's point is valid I think it is very naive to think that moderate Dems could taketh issue away from Fox. They would scream just as loud as now; their constituency will never notice that they are lied to.
Um . . . isn't this how Trump took over the Republican party? I don't think it is a disease solely of Democrats. Rather, it is the way politics works. You don't diss your supporters even if you think they're nuts. That's the best way to get unelected.
The average American doesn't pay attention to policies, they pay attention to your vision of the future.
And right now, the Democratic vision of America is based on racial essentialism. Look at some recent examples:
A Democratic controlled school board in SF decided that Lincoln was too racist to have a school named after him, and that school board also tried to turn a selective high school (the Lowell school) into one chosen by lottery, to avoid having "the wrong" racial mix at the school.
Similar attempts are being made to do the same to Stuyvesant HS in NYC.
The President of the US announced that no matter how someone else's judicial philosophy matched his, his only candidates for the Supreme Court will be Black women.
A few years ago, none of the Democratic candidates for President was willing to say they'd block illegal immigration, and if my memory is correct, none was even willing to come out against race-based reparations.
For that matter, look at how many people in any even barely left leaning discussions use 'white male' as a derogatory label.
That's our brand, and if you doubt it, please find me one Democratic politician who's pushed back against any of the above. Our vision of the future is one in which everyone is labeled by their ethnic background and gender identity, and opportunities are doled out based on those identities in order to make up for the past.
Obama ran as a uniter, with his One America theme. He won the presidency twice. No one is running on that theme today, and that, more than anything else, is why I think we're going to get wiped out in November.
And both Reagan and Trump promised to nominate a woman to the SC, but that's all forgotten when Dems are in charge.