Democrats Are Squandering Their Dwindling Chances with the Public

Republicans have the upper hand across the country and are likely to cement de facto one-party rule in the next two election cycles. They packed the courts under Trump, they’re winning the gerrymandering battle, and they’ll subvert the electoral college to install Trump as president for life (scary part: Ivanka, after Donald J. dies in office, and even she’d be better than Chancellor DeSantis, Boebert, or Noem). After that, there won’t be much Democrats can do to win back influence at a national level.

Democrats have a strong grip on certain states, and they need to use that to prove they have a better vision. They’re doing it wrong, and the clock is ticking.

In states like California and Washington, Democrats have to show that their approach to government offers an experience that feels demonstrably better for everyone, including white people. Instead, they’re letting themselves get distracted and — if we’re being honest — just not governing very well.

Need proof? I’d like to refer your attention to Exhibit A: “defund the police.” They have identified a problem and an opportunity correctly, but they are going about the solution all wrong, if they’re even going about it at all.

Policing (really, the entire criminal justice system) is institutionally designed to enforce social norms, including racial segregation and discrimination. It also makes a lot of people feel safe, specifically: white people, who are still a majority in this country. Failure to acknowledge the latter fact gets you off on the wrong foot from the start.

In addition, the police have very powerful labor unions and really strong contracts. You can’t simply declare you’re going to defund the police without a plan for how you’re going to change the balance of power in negotiations with the existing force. Otherwise, you’re going to unsettle a lot of people, and even if they agree with you that social justice is important, their supportive smiles are going to get progressively more strained, the more they think that they will have to put up with crime and threat to their persons in return for helping historically underrepresented populations get fairer treatment. If you start saying you’re going to stop prosecuting misdemeanors to avoid punishing poor people, well…oops, you lost them already.

Or more to the point, you lost enough of them to weaken support and toss just enough sympathy over to the folks declaring loudly that they are for “law and order” and public safety.

I believe strongly that reconstituting a police force from the ground up can improve public safety, but that’s the bar you have to communicate from the start — greater public safety, not a false choice of greater social justice for an acceptable decline in public safety. It is not — and really can’t be — a zero sum game. You have to have a plan, and you have to move quickly; or you need a situation so bad, it forces you to start from scratch. That’s the Camden model. Alternatively, you can work collaboratively. That’s the Cincinnati model.

Here’s the worst way to approach it:

1. Start talking loudly about “defunding the police” with no plan for what comes next.
2. Develop proposals to reduce the police force’s budget and steer that money to social workers to handle welfare checks and mental health crises — the kinds of things the police aren’t well designed to handle. This is the right thing to do…in principle.
3. Leave the existing police force in place. Don’t make any structural reforms.
4. Having announced your vague intentions before your next round of contract negotiations with the police union, watch as they dig in their heels and block you from making any real changes.
5. In the next round of budget negotiations, realize you have no viable way to defund anything. Steer money back to the police.
6. Watch as the situation gets worse in every possible way: discriminatory policing is still in effect, your police force is demoralized and even more contemptuous of the community they ostensibly serve and protect (a community they likely live outside of), things feel worse to a majority of your citizens, your new social programs are woefully inadequate against the entrenched issues you’re trying to address, and your incompetence breeds a general cynicism and disillusionment towards social justice, because social justice seems to come at a cost, when greater social justice should be a benefit for all.

That is how the police reform discussion has gone in a number of major liberal bastions. It’s a squandered opportunity, and even worse — it’s a sign of naivete. It’s easy to believe that it is enough for something to be right for it to be successful. If you believe its appeal is self-evident, you become blind to the practicalities, because acknowledging that someone might derive benefit from something wrong feels like tacit acceptance of that something wrong. Look — people accept things that are imperfect or even actively awful all the time. It’s part of life. You have to have enough conviction in your ideals to understand how people actually relate to the less than ideal reality you’re trying to improve.

So far, progressives don’t seem very good at doing that. They need to learn. They need to understand how to make a police force both more equitable and more effective. The voices supporting the police (the ones proudly displaying the blue line bastardization of the American flag) are pushing us more and more towards a failed state, a kind of apartheid enforced by a militarized citizenry enjoying the sympathies of an authoritarian and no less militarized police force riddled with implicit and explicit biases. Where Democrats still have the upper hand, they have to show that their way isn’t just morally better, but practically better as well, and they need to do it fast.