This piece is part of a series on the gaps between the left and the far-left, why they exist, and why it might be important they don’t close.
In an interview last year, Barack Obama offered a critique to the Defund The Police movement, saying: ‘You lose people with “snappy” slogans like “defund the police.”’
Activists were understandably pretty pissed off with the criticism from the man who had once been (naively, it turns out) hoped to be a beginning of the end for racial tension in the country – not the force for clapping back at Black activism. Representative-elect Cori Bush, having won her House race in Missouri, fired back: “With all due respect, Mr. President - let’s talk about losing people. We lost Michael Brown Jr. We lost Breonna Taylor. We’re losing our loved ones to police violence. It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police.”
Police in their current form are a threat to non-white communities across the U.S.’s fifty states, and beyond. It’s pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that we need radical change to the culture and scope of policing, so we can put a stop to the literally never-ending wave of assassinations of Black and brown people. But Defund the Police isn’t a success story just yet.
So between Bush and Obama – who is right? In my last piece I argued that activists and moderates don’t need to agree with each other to be an effective team, and that it may even be a good strategy not to – and the story of the Defund movement has demonstrated that pretty well. Here’s how.
Let’s start with some facts. ‘Defund the Police’ is not, unfortunately, a popular slogan. Black Americans support it by a margin of 45-28, a for-against margin which is clear, if not exactly overwhelming. And unsurprisingly it polls extremely poorly among white Americans (23-61).
Yet on the actual issue of police presence, only 19% of Black Americans say they would like the police to spend less time in their area – a figure completely dissonant with their apparent support for defunding the police, the explicit goal of which is to limit police presence. This money might then be reallocated to various other policies to tackle the causes of crime.
To summarise: Black Americans like the idea of Defund, but not the reality; while white Americans might prefer the reality of Defund to the idea. That seems either paradoxical or nonsensical, but I think the reason for all of this is that Defund is much more successful at communicating an identity than it is at communicating a policy; the phrase polarises along racial and political lines, causing Black Americans who actually appreciate police presence to endorse it, and some white people who might be open to the policies to violently disavow it.
Moderates really don’t like Defund
Of the 11 candidates who made it to the ballots in the Democratic primary, from Amy Klobuchar to Bernie Sanders, none were willing to endorse ‘Defund the Police’. And for good reason, apparently: across the House and Senate elections in red and purple states, Democrats frequently cited voters telling them they would never vote for the party of ‘Defund the Police’, and had to scramble to distance themselves from it.
The political system is heavily stacked against Democrats in both the Electoral College and the Senate, and so unless you think some things are more important than winning elections (which you might!), pandering to moderates is essential, and everything else is secondary. Biden knows this, and stayed well clear of the Defund discourse in his campaign, making sure to praise the cops loudly and often, and actually promising investment in police programmes to tackle brutality. Whatever you make of that, doing otherwise could certainly have lost the 45,000 precarious votes in three states that swung the election. There are times to follow your heart; this was likely not one of them.
This also isn’t entirely a white people problem: non-white voters are much more moderate than many people realise, as hinted by the somewhat paradoxical, but relatively seismic shift of Latine voters towards Trump in 2020. Crucially, non-white switchers from Clinton ‘16 to Trump ‘20 are pretty conservative on policing, which lends a lot of credibility to Democratic Representative Conor Lamb’s insistence after his narrow Pennsylvania win that he and others lost voters over Defund the Police.
The slogan is bad
It’s important not to gaslight anyone about what ‘defunding’ implies: the dictionary definition is ‘to prevent from continuing to receive funds’, so defunding an organisation usually implies its abolition. Not only that, but nothing about ‘defund the police’ implies those funds will be reallocated to other things, let alone what those things would be. So for someone hearing about Defund the Police for the first time – which was all of us, at some point – the gap between what it sounds like it means, and what it actually means, is large.
The purpose of a slogan, a name, or a logo, is to distill the larger idea into something flexible, something that can be used or invoked or written or displayed in as many places as possible, to communicate a specific message quickly and efficiently. Defund the Police is catchy and stirring, which is why it stuck. But it’s also a really inaccurate distillation of the idea it’s trying to represent. And that makes it bad at its job.
Black Lives Matter on the other hand, couldn’t do a much better job of this. It implies, accuses and implicates everything it needs to – and as a bonus, it makes it impossible to oppose it without sounding racist as fuck. It’s true that that’s not enough to prevent it from being a highly polarising phrase, and you’ll notice that the most moderate Democrats don’t generally go around saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ to their audiences any more than is necessary. And yet none of them are complaining or asserting that BLM cost them any votes, which should make their comments that Defund did at least bit more compelling.
It’s also true, to be fair, that sometimes a logo just isn’t that important. A lot is made for instance of the supposed perfectness of Nike’s logo – but to be honest, does it really imply ‘athletic performance’ in a visual way to most people? I thought it was a tick until I was 22, not the swoosh of a runner rounding a bend. The real reason it came to represent athletic performance to most people is because Nike spent lots of money plastering it all over the professional athletes who are Very Good At Sport.
But unlike Nike, some people are extremely skeptical of Defund the Police’s supporters, or go to great lengths to weaponise anything they can against them. So unfortunately, the bar is just higher. Defund needs to be really good at persuading people it's a productive idea, but it insists on getting off on the wrong foot with everyone it meets. To the uninitiated, Defund just feels radical; and feelings can be very hard to shake, even in the face of mountains of evidence. Activists will painstakingly explain that actually, the policies are very rational; but if most of the online energy has to go into writing out explanations and drawing up illustrations to show that actually Defund isn’t very radical at all, the battle’s already lost.
Does that mean it has to be abandoned? The police have been systematically killing Black people on the streets of the U.S. for an extremely long time. If a Black person is in the streets holding a Defund the Police sign, they know someone who has been abused by the police, and quite likely have faced some kind of police mistreatment or brutality themselves: their patience for semantics will be thin. But – for anyone who agrees, and is open to a change of slogan, ‘Refund the Community’ would probably be more accurate, might be more persuasive, and could improve the chances of the exact same bundle of policies getting enacted.
The point here though is not to poke at and complain about the Defund movement, it’s to say that branding matters, and Defund the Police perfectly illustrates why. Maybe the policy itself would never have taken off, no matter the name. But without better branding it never had a chance.
The policy is… debatable
To briefly touch on the idea itself, Matt Yglesias argued – at a time when many people believed Defund the Police was a bad slogan for a good idea – that defunding the police was actually just a bad idea. When activists said reform was a lost cause, he countered that police reform is less hopeless than people think, and also that a lot of the reforms that could actually work might cost money.
He is in agreement with activists on the core issue: police departments have far too much power and too much protection from the consequences of their actions. His suggestion though is to try and carefully strip away the actual policies that give them excessive employee protections that stop them getting away with it every time, and that it might be possible to lure police into giving that up using the simplest bargaining chip there is: Big Buck Pay Rises. But that takes... funds, unfortunately. And looks fucking terrible, if we’re talking optics. Maybe there’s something else you can trade them, I don’t know, but it really has to be pretty juicy to convince them to willingly get fired more often. But it would be great if it worked – police departments where it’s easy to get rid of the bad ones, and easy to keep the good ones.
Last year NYC announced it would enact an actual Defund policy – beginning a programme where specialist mental health teams will respond to non-criminal mental health-related 911 calls, rather than police. This is a win, and it’s also pretty shocking that this was something being left to the police previously. It’s not clear however whether this programme runs on funds appropriated from the NYPD, and it certainly seems plausible that things like this can be done by just increasing the total amount of funding, rather than taking it from elsewhere.
So yeah. I don’t have a strong opinion here. I’m certainly open to all arguments, and I understand that ‘reform’ is a word used by those embedded in so much privilege that when the opportunity for real change comes along, it scares them. I’m for anything that reduces the racism and brutality inflicted by police forces, and if cutting their budgets (to invest it in community programmes) achieves that, then I’m for it.
Feminism
A while back, people (including teenage me, as I’ve discussed) felt Feminism was a bad name – shouldn’t it be called ‘Equalism’ if it was a fight for equality? This was rightly dismissed as a stupid excuse, so I was conscious of this in my internal debate about whether Defund the Police really was bad branding – am I just the eternal white guy who complains that the movement ‘has merit, but they’re just going about it all wrong’?
I think though that the difference between the two movements is that Feminism is actually just good branding, and always was. It’s a clear and crystallised banner with a clear and crystallised message: women have been mistreated, and this group of people is united around advocating for their rights. It wasn’t popular, but nothing about it is misleading, and the critiques of it weren’t justified. The same just doesn’t go for Defund.
The other key difference is one of era. The West is much more polarised than it was even twenty years ago - today, right wing voters will just block you out if they can suss out you’re ‘a lib’ within the first five seconds of you talking; so if your goal is to persuade people, it’s more important now than it ever has been to not be provocative when it’s really not necessary. Defund the Police is a relatively nice, appealing idea that’s been dressed up in a vampire costume.
That’s all well and good if you’ve managed to make your movement a success anyway, but there are very few signs that Defund the Police has taken off and achieved its goals, or that it will any time soon.
Give people better arguments
Cori Bush and Obama beefing isn’t bad because they’re disagreeing in public - healthy disagreement is where persuasion starts. But Obama should know by now that his credibility is with America’s centre, and he should stick to using that to convince them to do stuff (like police reform and community investment), not waste his time talking down to activists who don’t love him any more.
But likewise, any confusion on Bush’s part that Obama – King Unity incarnate – isn’t pro-Defund is play-acting, and speaking down to him like you need to educate him on the issue is just farming for twitter likes. These two have very different roles to play, and they should stick to them.
Centrists hold all the power. Centrist civilians decide the President, they decide who the centrist Senators are, and then the centrist Senators decide which policies happen. If you elect 49 progressives but the 50th is a centrist curmudgeon, your agenda is pretty irrelevant (see: Democrat Senators trying to get the covid relief bill past Joe Manchin without him diluting it to oblivion).
The purpose of activism (Bush’s realm) is to directly or indirectly convince those people that a given idea is actually good, and so persuasion is always the aim of the game. The idea isn’t to get Joe Manchin and some far-left activists to sit down together and hash it out; but it’s helpful for instance for a radical progressive to win over someone who’s a tiny bit to their right, and for someone like that to win over someone who’s a tiny bit to their right, and so on. That’s the Overton Window in action, and eventually that wave might just barely ripple far enough to move a few people in the middle, so that some actual change might happen.
Rather than moving as a single unit, agreeing on everything, the Democratic party should – and generally does – operate openly as a spectrum. The progressives energise and activate the moderates, the moderates cajole and cut deals with the centrists, and the centrists assuage and reassure the rest of the country that they’re not going to do anything crazy. Within that spectrum, disagreement will happen constantly, but as long as it’s civil, and everyone’s making reasonable points, that’s good, and even healthy.
But for that to work you need everyone making good, robust arguments that people want to listen to. And ‘Defund the Police’ is not only polarising (to be fair, most things are these days), but it’s a poor representation of itself, giving moderates the easiest of excuses to zone out the moment you open your mouth. Even if they really want to listen, they’ll tell you their voters won’t let them, and they won’t be lying.
Of course, progress never stops. But it moves too slowly: Only when society becomes embarrassed enough over the Black names it took last week, a reluctant hand loosens its grip on the status quo – and then squeezes again. ‘Enough’, it says. I want a better world than that. And that means doing whatever it takes to make things move quicker.
But the centrists scare easy, and so making it easy for people to animate against your ideas is the worst thing you can do. The goal is to make it as difficult as possible for a politician on your side to be laughed out the room by the colleagues to their right, and the phrase ‘Defund the Police’ has obstructed good arguments from being both made and listened to.
It is good that people are pushing for radical changes to policing, and for greater funding to be put into community support to solve problems; problems that currently, trigger-happy police are getting involved in and causing untold deaths. This is obviously-good policy that in a sane world centrists should be open to. But ‘Defund the Police’ as an identity and as a brand is too unpopular for them to ever hear you out. And we’re just stuck that way. There’s no escape from that.
And while it’s too late for any one person to steer the course of the movement, I can’t help but think about another universe, one where the movement was dubbed Refund the Community or something else, and the swell of sympathy and support for last year’s protests became a unifying issue, rather than a polarising one. There, the hispanic vote did not swing right, moderate white Democrats did not shit the bed, and Biden won a bit more convincingly; maybe Democrats picked up an extra Senate seat for Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, and even kicked Susan Collins out of Maine, and reforms to policing and community programmes flew through congress within the first 100 days. A precious handful of Black lives were perhaps saved – or perhaps not.
Maybe that’s just a fantasy, but who knows? It’s at least worth bearing in mind.
Activists put in the emotional and physical labour of drawing attention to an issue. But the words you choose to distill the issue into are the vessel in which they will be carried to the centre of the country, where its fate will be decided; it’s much better to Trojan Horse your idea than to Straw Man it. Activists don’t owe people anything – but they probably owe themselves good branding.
