Need To Know Basis

So I was listening to "It's Been A Minute" on NPR yesterday, and Sam Sanders was speaking with comedians W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu. He asked them if they had a critique of the Progressive Left. Long story short, they didn't. Which is unsurprising. Messrs. Bell and Kondabolu are activists and comedians, not salespeople. They can be utterly convinced of the perfection of their product.

When Mr. Sanders posed the question, he asked, with something of a mocking tone, if the slogan should have been "defund the police." When Mr. Bell answered, he said:

If you're afraid of the idea of "defund the police" what you're telling me is that you haven't Googled it.

Even though I understand exactly what is meant by "defund the police," I decided to Google it. And one can make the case that Mr. Bell is absolutely correct. The Wikipedia entry that Google serves up explains, more or less exactly, the most commonly understood sentiment behind the slogan. So does the top link, which goes to a Brookings Institution article on the topic.

But when I looked, the first entry in "Top stories" was an opinion piece in The Guardian: "Here's what interviewing voters taught me about the slogan 'defund the police'."

We tried to explain the actual policies behind the slogan “defund the police”. We noted that many activists who use this phrase simply want to reduce police funding and reallocate some of it to social services. One woman interrupted us to say “that is not what defund the police means, I’m sorry. It means they want to defund the police.” “I didn’t like being lied to about this over and over again,” added another woman. “Don’t try and tell me words don’t mean what they say,” she continued. The rest of the group nodded their heads in agreement.

Fox News contributor and columnist Byron York seconds this. Note his wording when he speaks of "Defund the Police:"

But some Democrats worried that embracing such a radical proposal might hurt them politically, so they suggested that it actually meant re-directing some, but not all, funds from police to things like mental health treatment and affordable housing.

While it may not be possible to understand what Mr. York believes from his statement, he's pretty clearly telling audiences that the more nuanced understanding of the slogan is deliberate deception, aimed at mollifying spooked voters and hiding the actual intent.

This is, of course, the primary problem with sloganeering. It tends to put forward ideas as a shorthand. There is some necessity in this. "Narrow the scope of police departments and divert some of their funding to other public safety and community support resources," is much more nuanced (although in some ways still incomplete) but far too long to place on a protest sign. It's fine for people like W. Kamau Bell to insist that the problem is with these Trump voters and not with the slogan itself, but if winning elections is the goal, one has to, as the saying goes "meet people where they are." Insisting instead that people have a responsibility to move to where they are supposed to be doesn't get one anywhere.

It's also worth pointing out that there have been calls from activists to abolish police departments. I mean "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" is pretty unambiguous, even if the column itself isn't quite as strident as the headline makes it out to be. But this, of course, is one of the problems with headlines, while they're meant to be attractions to the articles they front, sometimes, they become substitutes. This, however, doesn't mean that the headline is misleading. There is a fairly vocal constituency for the idea that the very concept of policing in the United States is so racist and corrupted that it's beyond salvaging; doing away with it in favor of something new is the only path forward. The problem is that the slogans and chants don't explain what that something new would actually look like.

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder.
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

And this is the problem that the activists have. Claiming that these people have some sort of affirmative responsibility to "educate themselves" so that they come to the correct conclusions may feel good, but it's often predicated on the idea that truths are self-evidently correct; that when accurate and inaccurate ideas are laid out side by side, the well-meaning will know which is which.