Once again, the left fucking sucks at communication.
Don’t defund the police, SAVE the police. Social Alternatives to Violent Escalation. There’s your slogan.
What’s the goal? Stop wasting our police officers’ time on stuff that’s better left to social workers, like homelessness, drug issues, traffic stops, etc… Work on fixing that stuff on the root level so we can let the police focus on solving actual crimes instead of forcing them to do all this other stuff they’re not trained for.
But isn’t that exactly the same thing as “defund the police”? Why yes, it absolutely fucking is, but in a way that tells the nationalistic bootlickers what they want to hear instead of setting ourselves up as the enemy.
Your mistake here is thinking that anything that comes from the “librul left” would ever be something they want to hear. They have no policy stance. They have no moral center. Their goals are to oppose anything that “the left” wants. GW started and championed common core in schools. As soon as a D took office, common core was the devil.
The right allegedly wanted to “bring our troops home,” yet didn’t do that despite having control of Congress and the executive branch for years. Then when Biden does just that, he’s eviscerated by the right wing media and called a coward.
We’re better off working for the polices we need and not fretting about how the “nationalist bootlickers” hear it, because they will never hear it right.
Although I’m firmly in camp ACAB and “defund”, I agree with your positioning here. The subtlety might get lost on some of the denser among us, but it’s a more palatable way to approach the necessary reform.
Come on, it’s just more warmed over “politics of respectability”… The right is able and empowered to say the most egregious things and is in fact applauded for it, and anyone on the left who speaks the truth is condemned. This is just more of the same. You really can’t speak truth to power if you’re not willing to tell the truth. It doesn’t matter how polite people are and how nicely they act, the boot is not coming off the necks of Black and working class Americans until they demand it.
I’m not sure rebranding would work though. Police unions know that the money for their paychecks and departments would be in danger. They’re not going to sleep on making sure their communities know that this is an attack.
People who live, work, and identify in communities that depend on law enforcement work would recognize this immediately as propaganda. And on the media people consume there would be constant reminders that " this means disgusting urban ‘social workers’ are going to suck up resources and leave our good lawful communities ravaged. Good white sons of cops are going to go hungry while the tenth child of a welfare queen gets an antifa-themed pedicure because he’s depressed about not enough of your children being gay… on YOUR DIME!!!"
It writes itself.
The mistake here is thinking that people are choosing their priorities based simply on stupidity or gullibility and can easily be swayed by branding. They’re not though.
I mean the thing that floors me is that people think they wouldn’t somehow. Maybe because it eats away at the myth that there’s no good in unionization for the worker? I dunno…
No, the Slave Patrol is rotten to it’s core, and it’s rebranding as police never changed anything. There is nothing left to save. It isn’t a few bad apples, it’s a barrel of mouldy calvados.
Besides, any rebranding the left does will only last as long as the right works out how to attack it. So that would be about a month at most after Gab and the chans try out various tactics and find out what is most effective.
Whatever we do we are their enemy. Forget trying to appeal to the right wing, that is suicide by toxicity.
I agree with you completely, I really do, and would love for those on the side of justice and equality to be empowered to speak truth to power without being obliterated by our duplicitous media, but at this point I’d be happy with some pragmatic steps to get things moving, and if that’s repositioning the marketing around the defund movement so be it.
It’s not enough, I know. What you mention about the rights’ ability to say horrible shit and be applauded is disgusting. I would still rather have some steps taken to reframe the issue in a way that some real reform could take place and the suggestion here didn’t sound like the worst to me.
The problem is that it’s not going to work. They right will push back and the mainstream will eat it up and accept whatever they say. There is no evidence that “rebranding” will help get the ball moving. Public pressure, continued evidence of corruption and violence in the public sphere, and telling the truth free from corporate exercises will be more effective in the long term. It’s not the right wing that we need to convince, it’s the centrists.
Indeed, and it’s the centrists whom I thought would glom onto the terminology @MikeTheBard proposed. I recognize that people entrenched on the right are too far gone at this point.
Until they buy into the line that the right is pushing yet again… I think at this point, people are either onboard with dismantling a racist, rotten system, or they’re not. I’d argue that it’s better to stand up for what’s right based on the evidence that we can all see than it is to constantly try to capture the support of people who can be so easily swayed away from what’s right.
So we have to reach centrists, but there’s only a binary here? There are people (and how they even function in life is beyond me) who are somehow unsure about all of this. I don’t know how to get these people on the right side of history, but consistent messaging hasn’t hurt the right.
If the left could muster that sort of disciplined repetition and language energy the right brings, maybe we’d make more progress, but I have my doubts.
How can people who aren’t in control of the narrative “reframe” it though? Most of the people trying to communicate the horrors of police brutality and overarching problems in law enforcement aren’t the ones controlling any narratives anywhere.
meanwhile when it comes to reaching centrists one of the hardest parts I imagine is the fact that they’re going to be looking for a point of compromise that favors themselves and their lifestyle, and realistically if they didn’t think the right could offer them something and coexist with them, they wouldn’t be centrists.
It helps to be on the right side of history, I’d argue. continued messaging around WHY police reform is necessary helps, too. I’d argue that changing the message only hurts, because it just reinforces the right’s argument that there is no consistency on the left.
Part of the reason that the right has such consistency is because they are top down authoritarians at heart. We’re not. We disagree, because we all come from different perspectives and positions and there is little appetite for shoving all of us into the same square hole. Doing that means we’ve already lost…
The right are far less politically diverse than the left.
The right are mostly free market capitalists, classical conservatives, libertarians and fascists, and they are all converging on fascism. Some are becoming “centrist” as they find the point where the right go too far, but that is the overton window moving dangerously to the right and what they believe staying where it is. They still believe what they believed ten years ago, and back then it was right wing.
The left are liberals, social democrats, democratic socialists, libertarian socialists, market socialists, state socialists, marxist leninists, anarchists, and that is without breaking them down into subgroups. Liberals and social democrats are milder capitalists but still capitalists, Marxist Leninists are extreme authoritarians while libertarian socialists and anarchists are anti-authoritarians who have a history of being purged and liquidated by the MLs. We disagree, and it makes more sense to accept that and move on than to force an uneasy left unity on us that will inevitably lead to bloodshed (as history has shown us too many times).
You don’t like “Defund the Police”? Go and do your own thing then, don’t try and hijack an already established movement. Some of us have already toned down our argument from “Abolish the Police”, you are going to have a hard job trying to persuade us to move further.
I get wanting to think that. That maybe if we just figured out how to communicate better, it would make a difference. But I don’t think it’s very likely anymore. Or at least not in our current moment.
Think for a bit about this phrase, if you saw it written in an article 5 years ago: “You know what? Black lives matter.”
Only a monster would argue with that, right? Yet somehow it’s been twisted to mean, “they matter MORE THAN YOURS!!!” and BLM is now touted as a terrorist organization by the right.
In the environmental movement, “Save the Whales” was never twisted to imply, “Fuck the Tortoises!” But that’s what we’re dealing with when it comes to messaging.
In some countries, like maybe Japan and Norway, “save the whales” has been alleged to be equivalent to “fuck the fishermen,” and precipitates cultural controversy kinda like arguments here about logging and coal mining …
There is no evidence that “rebranding” will help get the ball moving. Public pressure, continued evidence of corruption and violence in the public sphere, and telling the truth free from corporate exercises will be more effective in the long term. It’s not the right wing that we need to convince, it’s the centrists.