If Republicans take over the Congress in the upcoming election—which they’re in a good position to do--it will be in no small part because of the “defund the police” movement, which has alienated, offended and frightened tens of millions of voters who might normally vote Democratic but worry about crime, and are thus willing to consider going Red.
Every Democratic leader knows this. Bill Clinton last month warned that Democrats will lose the Nov. 8 elections “if they lean too much into defund the police and socialism.” President Biden, President Obama and other leading Democrats have said the same. Polls prove that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to defunding the police, and even its adherents have become wary of using the phrase, which they know has become one of the most toxic in U.S. history. In the hotly contested Pennsylvania Senate race, the Democratic candidate, John Fetterman, declared, “It was always absurd to defund the police,” while the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, Tim Ryan, went on T.V. to assure voters that, when it comes to defunding the police, “I’m not that guy.
We’re seeing a party-wide rejection of police defunding on the part of Democrats. But it may be too late. The damage has already been done. After three years of hearing progressives demand that police departments be defunded—in the midst of an extraordinary crime wave sweeping American cities—voters are understandably suspicious of the Democratic Party. If crime is uppermost in voters’ minds--and polls suggest it is, along with inflation--they’re going to vote Republican.
Which leads to an interesting question: Was this the intention of progressives all along? Here in Oakland, the leading police defunders, such as Carroll Fife, Cat Brooks, Nikki Bas, Rebecca Kaplan and Sheng Thao, were being warned by late 2020 that their demands to defund OPD were likely to lead to a backlash for the very causes they champion. Among those warning them was me. It was clear to me that defunding the police was a fantastically stupid and dangerous idea, and that, if people revolted against it (which it was obvious they would), the result would be Democrats swept from office, replaced by Republicans who would do just what we see them doing today: taking away a woman’s right to choose, launching proxy wars against Transgendered people that are really wars against the entire LGBTQ community, lowering taxes on the rich, misrepresenting history, eliminating Medicare and Social Security, and destroying the First Amendment by making Christianity the official religion of America.
But Fife, Brooks et al. didn’t listen. They continued their war on the police, with the predictable result that their party is now on the verge of being relinquished to irrelevance. So I have to wonder: Is that what they actually wanted?
There are only two possibilities: Either Fife, Brooks et al. were too stupid to anticipate the consequences of their actions, or they acted deliberately, with malice of forethought, in attacking the Democratic Party. Since I don’t want to insult Fife, Brooks et al. with allegations of stupidity, I will make the charitable assumption that what they did was intentional. But then we have to wonder why. Why would Fife, Brooks et al. deliberately try to kill the Democratic Party?
For the answer, we have to turn to a basic tenet of early Communist ideology, namely, that their real, immediate struggle was against, not the capitalists, but the Social-Democrats—the moderately Leftist progressives of the emerging European social democracies. Radicals (and the Communists were truly radicals) always hate those who are closest to them on the ideological spectrum, who represent a threat to their viability; family quarrels are the most vicious. In a similar fashion, Fife, Brooks et al. hate and fear moderate Democrats, whom they see as impediments to their agendas. Only by destroying moderate Democracy can the radicals get on with their real war: against free-market conservatism.
Viewed from this perspective, it makes sense that the “woke” branch of the Democratic Party would seek to destroy the moderate center. In alleging this, I’m actually giving credit to Fife, Brooks et al. for having a subtle, thought-out policy. That policy appears to be working: They and their counterparts across America appear to be on the verge of handing the Congress of the United States to the MAGA Republicans—followed, in 2024 perhaps—by Trump 2.0. On Election Day, if Democrats go down, Fife, Brooks et al. will claim to be shocked, shocked; but their tears will have a crocodilian stench.
Steve Heimoff