Brand 1: Those who assert that it’s best that Trump wins in 2020, because then the nation will become disgusted with Trumpism and thus embrace a Progressive Savior (Bernie will be only 83!) in the 2024 election----which will proceed in perfectly normal fashion. In this version of the fairy tale, Trump and his GOP enablers do NOTHING to impede a free and fair election, despite having an additional four years in which to replace all federal judges (and probably a couple of Supreme Court Justices) with right-wing ideologues.
Brand 2: Those who assert that it’s best that Trump wins in 2020, because then the nation will become disgusted with Trumpism and thus embrace an actual Revolution, installing a benign Progressive Dictator, so that we can all live in the Worker’s Paradise.
It is very, very, very difficult to be patient with stupidity on either level of virulence. One cannot refrain from wishing to be able to bash their malfunctioning heads together, Moe Howard-like, in an attempt to knock some minimal portion of sense into them.
First of all, I’d point out that timing makes a difference. What a difference a pandemic and a recession can make, eh? I think a lot of the people (myself included, admittedly) are a lot more receptive to more aggressive reforms than we were even 6 months ago -even 3 months ago. But to your point, democratic socialism was a revolution looking for an outrage.
I think that is less the case now. If more than 70% of the country realizes that something is horribly wrong with the policing in this country and you’re still shitting your britches over how to label and spin a response to the problem, then Christ, we as a country have a much, much deeper problem, as that would be a sign that democracy is completely dysfunctional.
Exactly. This snarky, satirical tweet hits its target very well:
Another tweet all progressives should really take to heart is this one that reads “Dear Progressives–What the hell are you doing?” and includes a NYT graphic showing recent Yahoo News/YouGov polling data:
For those loath to click a Twitter link, the graphic reads as follows:
When you’ve got a historic opportunity to achieve significant reforms, it’s incredible political malpractice to find and adopt the one piece of messaging where you’ve got massive public opinion against you. :smack:
Body cameras? Dude, George Floyd got murdered by a cop who looked right into the camera. Body cameras didn’t stop Mesa, Arizona police officers from playing a sick-as-fuck game of Simon Says and wasting an unarmed pest abatement operator with machine gun fire – body cameras can’t stop bad cops from murdering people.
You know what does? Breaking the police unions. Breaking up the police organizations and reconstituting them as something new and improved.
And as I pointed out, we’re living in a different world then we were living in just 3 or 4 months ago. People aren’t in the mood for incremental anything - they want change.
No idea who Newsweek polled because 100% of my large and liberal social circle in my Democratic stronghold state completely disagree. Who’s paying for all the destruction? The taxes, insurance premiums and increased prices that we, the top 5 and 10 percenters will be paying for years to come. As far as I and the people I know are concerned, your burn down your public school that property taxes paid for, you don’t get another one. Pay to send your kids to private school. Same with the precinct. It’s gone? Guess you don’t really need their assistance. Tough shit, handle it yourself.
And the looters a/k/a/ “protestors”? They weren’t looting for food or medicine, they were cleaning out luxury goods and destroying private property. When we saw that happening, we couldn’t believe it was being allowed to go on. Cuomo should have taken over and brought in the National Guard. Destruction and looting more than crossed the line and should have been dealt with instantly. Throwing Molotov cocktails at the White House? I don’t care if Hitler is sun bathing in the Rose Garden, you don’t do that.
I never, ever thought I would agree with Trump over anything more than what day of the week it is and can’t even stand the sight of him, but he was 100% right in saying that when the looting starts, the shooting starts. People who got away with that behavior won’t hesitate for a second to take it even further next time.
And the ass-kissing that’s going on??? Jesus Christ. Just as an example, I got an e-mail from DSW (big shoe store with great prices) that said “We will listen to our Black associates, customers and followers and share their resources. We will partner with people of color in our industry”. WTF? How about you just listen to what your customer base, the people who spend money in your stores want and stock that. The only thing that wears shoes that I haven’t seen buying them at DSW are horses but now you’re running everything by a group of people just because they are black to get their seal of approval? This ass-kissing attitude is everywhere.
So yeah, a lot of peace loving, pot smoking, feed the poor and don’t go to war rainbow of liberals who themselves have participated in peaceful protests and sit-ins are going to be lining up to vote for Trump in the next election.
If you really believe that, then I have to question just how “liberal” you really are, as that would have inevitably exacerbated an already tense situation. Nevermind being liberal or not liberal, anyone with a shred of human decency understands that shooting someone dead is grossly disproportionate to the crime of taking shit from a store. And your supposition that they’d escalate it next time is just a privileged man’s paranoia, which is exactly what empowers police officers to abuse the rights of “dangerous” minority “thugs.” Attending church services don’t make you a liberal. Your donations don’t make you a liberal. Your humanity does.
Yeah, you’re a “progressive.” We should be worried that “progressives” like you are going to abandon the democratic party and vote for Trump because even though he completely botched a pandemic response that had been in place for years, even though he has shredded constitutional limits on presidential power, and even though he ordered his law enforcement agencies to disrupt peaceful protests for a fucking photo op, none of THAT really matters. Black people expressing outrage is just too much for you to handle. It threatens you. Some “liberal”.
So far, signs are good that top Democrats are aware of the potential political hazard (something that was not yet clear when I wrote the OP).
Absolutely. But only 16% of them want to cut police funding. That’s not 16% who want to abolish the police altogether, that’s 16% who want to cut funding at all. You can’t find a surer political loser than that.
And as I wrote on that 1968 thread (it’s more on-topic here):
Like you, I can’t stand the sight of Trump. Also like you, I’m not going to reflexively refuse to agree with something he says that happens to be right in a “stopped clock” way. But this is not one of those times. The Supreme Court ruled decades ago that it is not permissable to shoot people for theft or other crimes–you can only shoot them to protect yourself or others from imminent physical danger to themselves (not to property). Which is as it should be IMO.
This isn’t 1968. Democrats don’t have the White House. There wasn’t a pandemic or a recession that borders on depression in 1968. The country was less diverse and less sensitive to diversity issues back then.
The country is feeling the effects of republican “leadership” - leadership that ignored science and ended up killing tens of thousands of people that otherwise might have lived, and sent our economy into a tailspin. Leadership that is presiding over a wealth gap that is leaving millions in a permanent underclass. Leadership that has been doubling and tripling down on racist themes and ethnic divisions through Charlottesville, through ICE child abuse, through police-involved murders. Leadership that is eroding the Constitution and the rule of law. Leadership that deliberately violated civil liberties and threatened to sic America’s own military on demonstrably peaceful protesters for a fucking photo op with a so-over-the-top fake Christian president.
And we’re seriously wondering whether people are going to revolt against Democrats? Shit, we’re pretty good at suspending reality.
I don’t believe that republicans can keep getting away with this, but if they do, then we honestly don’t deserve liberty, or to be democratic, or a republic anymore.
Meanwhile, it would be nice if people “progressives” would stop being scared and running from their own shadows for once, and recognize the moment of opportunity that’s in front of them.
Recognizing the opportunity is exactly the point. When you have overwhelming supermajority support for a bunch of reforms but instead agitate for the one agenda item–cutting police budgets–that has only 16 percent? That is just begging to blow the opportunity.
Not that it really matters, BTW, but just as a matter of history: 1968 was, coincidentally, actually the last major flu pandemic in the U.S., dwarfing the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
What you just advocated is police brutality. You didn’t say arrest the looters, or contain the looters or gas them. You want them shot–you want the police to use disproportionate violence.
Trump is not right. You don’t put out a fire by adding more sparks. You don’t add more violence to a violent situation. All that does is make those who felt justified in being violent more violent. That’s escalation.
Shooting the looters would just mean that more people would join the cause. The protest is against police brutality, so the police being even more brutal and killing in a situation where they can’t claim they were in fear for their lives would only make thing worse.
This whole thing ignited because of a single person being killed unnecessarily–someone who may have done something illegal, but nothing warranting dying. And Trump’s solution–the one you approve of–is to kill even more people to show them who is boss.
It’s utterly ridiculous. Ask anyone who is skilled in negotiation and deescalation why you don’t get more violent to stop violence. That’s literally one of the problems with police and how they are trained.
It probably doesn’t matter because cutting police funding (or not) is a local issue that local governments and voters are left to deal with. If the City of Minneapolis wants to cut funding for its police and voters there are okay with it, then it doesn’t matter what other communities think. Beyond the issue of policing, I think people want justice - not just racial justice but economic justice. Not just racial justice, but economic justice as well. It’s not a coincidence that so many white people and people of various backgrounds joined BLM protests, which is something they wouldn’t have done even three or four years ago. When you have that kind of energy, that’s a time to make substantive change. Nobody’s talking about eliminating police departments entirely, just rethinking what they do and rethinking what kind of relationships they have with their communities, which is past due.
You know, there are plenty of police reforms that the right would happily sign onto. Don’t forget that Trump already signed a good criminal justice reform bill, and his ‘base’ was totally okay with it.
Common-sense reform a large percentage of the public would support:
End asset forfeiture, and ‘financial policing’ in general.
Dismantle police unions. They are the primary force protecting bad cops.
End qualified immunity for police officers.
Destroy or give back all the military hardware the police got from the military. Take it away from all the other alphabet agencies as well. The Department of Education does not need armored vehicles and grenade launchers, and neither do the local cops.
End the drug war for all but the very hardest, most dangerous drugs (PCP and Heroin, for example)
Legal reform. Get the thousands of useless regulations off the books that give the cops the right to shake down people for myriad small offenses, like selling a few off-pack cigarettes on the street to make pocket money.
Stop expanding the role of police where other authorities are better suited.
Take those cops that are no longer busting people for cigarettes or other silly crimes, and put them to work walking a beat and reconnecting with neighborhoods so they understand them better. At the same time we realized that marines in humvees did no good in Iraq and we made them walk beats among the people to gain their trust and intel, we did the exact opposite at home.
A common-sense yet fairly radical plan like that woild make the protestors look more reasonable, and would give Democrats a platform they could actually campaign on and implement. ‘Defund the Police’ is a slogan politicians will run from - if they want to be elected.
One problem the Democrats will have with police reform is that Joe Biden was a major champion of all the things that need to be abolished, And if he picks Kamala Harris as his running mate, it will be worse as she was a ‘law and order’ DA that championed harsh policing, asset forfeiture, etc.
But while the slogan is suddenly everywhere, so far it doesn’t poll well. Four polls conducted in the past two weeks1 found that Americans opposed the “defund the police” movement or “defunding police departments” 58 percent to 31 percent, on average.
I’m a Conservative Republican and let me go down that list. 1 & 2–agreed.
I’m not sure I would end it entirely, but I would certainly change the “clearly established law” standard to a standard where a police officer acting in good faith committed an act that was truly an unsettled area of law and it could be shown that he was properly trained and really and truly “made a bad guess in a gray area.” Not the current nearly impossible to overcome standard.
Agreed
Not sure. I agree in principle, but I worry about how society would handle it. Cocaine in state stores? People on the streets selling it cheaper to evade state taxes? What then? I could be persuaded by a specific proposal that ensures quality of life issues.
Basically agree. But then you have to wonder how similar laws will be enforced. If this guy can sell loose cigs on the street, then how can you make me get a business license and pay tax when I have a stand selling items three feet from him? If you set a dollar amount so the guy selling cigs is okay and I’m not, then you still have the same enforcement system just at a different dollar level. I mean, the problem isn’t necessarily that we enforce laws against selling loose cigarettes on the street (there has to be some reason to not allow loose singles to be sold, even if it is because we wan’t licensed and trained sellers selling smokes so that kids don’t get them), it is that we can’t do it without killing the person we are arresting—also unless we make passing fake $20s legal, how does this help George Floyd?
Agree, again if we had more details. If we are talking about sending social workers to a domestic violence call like I have seen advanced in other threads, then no.
I would add disallowing pretext stops entirely. There is not much that makes a person feel like he or she is being treated unfairly than when an officer stops you, claiming that he believes you are committing a serious crime, but admitting he has no evidence of that, but oh looky he can stop you because your seat belt was twisted. It permits racial profiling and general distrust of the police.
But at least we have a good start where me, a conservative and a Republican, are on board with most things. But until a concrete proposal is floated, especially WRT legalizing drugs and letting certain minor crimes go and what that will entail, it is difficult to say whether I support this package or not.
It is how it works, in fact it is exactly "how it works. "
“Defund the police” means- literally- get rid of all but volunteer Police depts.
And if you ask a hundred liberals and progressives what “defund the police” means, they will come up with 101 answers, from abolishing police entirely to cutting the fat from bloated police budgets.
I guess I can see how one may come to that conclusion.
When republicans defund planned parenthood, it is with the hope and expectation that it no longer exist. When they defund Sesame Street, it is under the assumption that we will no longer be able to tell you how to get there.
Both are still here though. So, yeah, in the republican’s mind, “Defund” means to get rid of. In a liberals mind “Defund” means to reduce the effectiveness of.