More likely than not, you know somebody who is open to the idea of defunding the police, the latest far-left policy proposal that increasingly seems to wield a disproportionate influence over public policy debates. You probably know more than one, or at the very least are regularly exposed to someone who supports the radical measure if you’re a regular consumer of print, digital, or televised media. That should give you pause if you’re convinced it’s nothing more than a slogan belted out by naive young people at a protest, a pipe dream that will stay just that, a dream.
Yes, the “defund the police” movement remains a relatively fringe one, with just 16% saying they support slashing law enforcement budgets, according to a YouGov poll taken at the end of May as riots began intensifying across the country. But dig into those numbers more, and you begin to see the roots of a political position that will likely be taken increasingly seriously. In some places, it already is.
Aside from the unsettling fact that nearly one-fifth of people, 19%, are not sure where they stand on the matter, “defunding the police” has its largest bloc of support with the managerial middle class, the relatively small but supremely influential cadre of professional supervisors who make roughly six figures and above. Twenty-five percent of those making over $100,000 a year support the cutting of funding for police departments, with another 10% remaining undecided. Twenty-seven percent of those who live in cities back the proposition, and 49% oppose the measure.
These people are disproportionately represented in media, corporate culture, and high-level public sector positions. That’s why your email inbox has likely been flooded by messages from banks, clothing retailers, video game companies, and grocery stores all declaring solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Public schools are pledging to revamp their curricula so that issues relating to “systemic racism” are properly emphasized while large corporations are mandating racial sensitivity training for all employees. Newsrooms around the country have declared that the Left’s racial ideology is now fact and must be rigorously reported on, akin to giving a weekly weather report or last night’s baseball scores.
Just like during the height of the “Abolish ICE” movement, conservatives tell themselves that when the Left comes out with a radical proposal, it gives them a natural electoral advantage. Liberal commentators fret over imaginary attack ads scaring suburban voters. Republican strategists salivate over a supposed layup that will counter accusations from Democrats that the GOP wants to take away health insurance from the poor. Already, the Republican National Committee and President Trump’s reelection campaign are sending emails nearly daily desperately trying to tie Joe Biden to Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
A Biden administration will likely not abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the former vice president has outlined the most left-wing immigration platform in modern history. He has already promised zero deportations in his first 100 days as president and deemed immigrant detention centers near the southern border as unnecessary. And that’s before you even start appointing officials who view any sort of border security as inherently prejudicial, an increasingly popular attitude by Democrats. Defeating Sanders in the primary was just a formality.
Although he will never be president, Sanders still remains one of the most influential politicians in the country, which is why much has been made about his decision not to back the “defund the police” movement, a supposed betrayal of his supporters. There is cause for some celebration that the nation’s preeminent socialist won’t sign onto the prevailing demand of his comrades, but his suggestions for reform will likely accomplish much of what the “defund the police” backers desire. Under the Sanders plan, any state that continues to use cash bail, something practiced by all 50 states, would lose access to federal funds.
In crucially vague terms, Sanders also calls for the stripping of “federal funds from departments that violate civil rights.” These violations would be recorded, in part, by mandatory “independent police conduct review boards” made up of members who are “broadly representative of the community.”
Carrot-and-stick laws have become commonplace for the government to bully states into complying with its new rules. The most notable examples of this practice include the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which tied federal highway funds to raising the drinking age to 21, and the Affordable Care Act with Medicaid funding.
One example of “civil rights” violations, according to the Left, is the concept of disparate impact. Defined broadly, practices in employment, housing, or other areas that have no declared discriminatory intent but still disproportionately harm a protected class can be considered a violation of the law. For years, the Left has dedicated itself to accelerating the trend to interpret disparate impact as self-proving evidence of racial discrimination. In the case of policing, it could simply be the reality that blacks are arrested at far higher rates than whites. The Obama administration argued something similar in 2015 with its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program, which gave Housing and Urban Development dramatically expanded power to find de facto segregation in America’s suburbs. If your town is deemed too white by a group of Washington bureaucrats and lawyers, the federal government can impose a variety of extreme measures, ranging from low-income housing quotas to regional tax-base sharing, until it sees an acceptable racial composition. The Supreme Court helped justify the Obama administration’s rule change, overseen by the far-left Julian Castro, in a 5-4 decision that same year.
Biden currently supports eliminating cash bail, and his own campaign staffers had no problem donating money to help release the dozens of individuals arrested for felonies following the riots in Minneapolis. Presumably, he agrees with his former boss’s position on disparate impact, and his criminal justice plan refers to “incentivizing states” through grants eight times. One of the four “core principles” of his plan for “Strengthening America’s Commitment to Justice” is the “root[ing] out [of] racial, gender, and income-based disparities in the system.” In an interview with CBS earlier this month, he said, “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness and, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”
Public opinion regarding race issues has already begun to shift radically in the Trump era. In roughly the past two years, polling shows that net support for the Black Lives Matter movement has swung dramatically in its favor by 28 points, with some of the biggest gains coming from those with a postgraduate degree. Since the protests and riots following the death of George Floyd, the margin in which people support Black Lives Matter has increased by 11 points. Just two years ago, more people opposed Black Lives Matter than supported it.
And as people have changed their views on Black Lives Matter, so has Black Lives Matter changed how it sees itself. Although the movement was founded with radical black nationalist intentions, it’s now explicitly an anti-police movement with the goal of abolishing law enforcement completely, according to a petition on its website. People currently supporting Black Lives Matter aren’t necessarily on board with all the movement’s aims, but it’s safe to assume a culture of pressure to conform will place the direction of criminal justice reform not in the hands of the vast majority but with left-wing fanatics who have no problem publicly dismissing their critics as bigots, nearly a death sentence. Across corporations and academia, people are already losing their jobs for bothering to question the movement’s narratives, and much of the press seem entirely disinterested in treating the concept of “defunding the police” with the kind of mockery directed at the president’s border wall proposal.
Nor is it safe to assume that the bipartisan, incremental police reforms currently discussed in Congress will be the end of the debate. Not only have several city governments pledged to cut back funding to their police forces, but Minneapolis is in the early stages of abolishing it altogether. There is no evidence that voters in these cities support any of this, but the fear of being tarnished as a detractor of Black Lives Matter has silenced all opposition. Change is happening whether you like it or not.
The era we’re living through has drawn many comparisons to the 1960s, when a cultural revolution and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society fundamentally changed the nature and the trajectory of the country. There is reason to believe, particularly in the era of the internet and institutional control by the Left, that change will only accelerate in the 2020s. But despite the instability of that era leading to the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the legislative accomplishments of that time by Democrats have not been meaningfully undermined since and, in fact, have only been built on by members of both parties.
Civil rights legislation was generally supported by the country’s white population in the 1960s, although President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 allowed Johnson and his congressional allies to ram through a bill substantially expanding the racial protections and the means to enforce them than what his predecessor had in mind. Despite busing, affirmative action, and an ever-growing federal bureaucracy that facilitated countless lawsuits over supposed racial grievances all growing increasingly unpopular throughout the 20th century, people were stuck with the Civil Rights Act (which some estimate cost trillions over half a century) that they initially supported out of goodwill. There is certainly no doubt that numerous Republicans currently in Congress oppose myriad provisions within the Civil Rights Act, at least on philosophical grounds, but few, aside from Sen. Rand Paul, who is generally dismissed as a novelty, dare publicly question one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in the country’s history. Reagan, who promised to end the practice of affirmative action “with the stroke of a pen” and to stop “welfare queens” from abusing government assistance, did neither of those things and saw the federal government grow by 2.5% each year he was in office.
Immigration policy tells a similar story, with the Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 overturning the “national origins” system in place for over 40 years in favor of one more supposedly just and equitable. “The days of unlimited immigration are past,” Johnson said at a bill signing ceremony next to the Statue of Liberty. The country then saw more immigrants in the 50 years that followed, 59 million, than had ever come to the country since its founding. People at the time who supported sweeping immigration reform certainly did not sign up for a complete demographic transformation of the country. Despite the public favoring less immigration by 7-1 during some periods of Reagan’s presidency, efforts at immigration reform in the 1980s failed immensely and even backfired, with the 1986 immigration bill simultaneously increasing penalties on employers for hiring illegal immigrants while also strengthening language outlawing the discrimination on the basis of national origin. The number of illegal immigrants in the country increased virtually every year since Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which was sold as “a major step toward meeting [the] challenge [of illegal immigration] to our sovereignty.”
Perhaps you believe a “silent majority” can save the country from the further erosion of constitutional rights or avert the proven fact that higher crime rates coincide with decreased policing. Right now, however, there is no clear majority in favor of just about anything. The president has rarely enjoyed support from half the country since winning the 2016 election with 46.1% of the vote and is currently seeing his worst approval ratings since entering office. In the 20th century, most people disfavored affirmative action and racial quotas, and yet, they persist to this day. Assuming voters do give Trump four more years, two new questions should be raised: What good has remaining silent done? And why should the Left’s efforts to transform policing be any different this time around?
Joseph Simonson is a political reporter for the Washington Examiner.
