Cometk wrote:Goodspeed wrote:I guess Americans don't need to actually read the article because they already know everything
Cometk wrote:Ah yeah the billionaires astroturfing the “defund the police” movement and not the exact opposite
What's the opposite of that? Defunding the police was never popular
After Floyd’s murder, progressive activists quickly coalesced around defunding the police as a slogan and policy objective. (The slogan was itself a compromise between activists who favored reduction of police budgets and those who favored outright abolition.)
re: the opposite: billionaires and the capitalist class want and need the police as an entity to enforce the state's monopoly on violence, to conserve the order of private property remaining private. it isn't wanted the other way around.
A liberal lawyer from the west coast walks into a bar in a poor red state, runs into a Trump supporter. Asks him: "Why do you keep voting against your own interests?" Trump guy replies: "Why do you?"
Your argument is based on a reductive and overly cynical assumption. It assumes people vote and donate only according to their financial interests, when in fact there are many examples of people who act against their financial interests when voting, donating, lobbying etc. You seem to forget that people have convictions, and that everyone makes their own compromises between these convictions and their financial interests. Yes, taxing the wealthy is going to sound worse to you if you're wealthy, but if your convictions tell you it's the right thing to do, maybe they win out, especially if it's money you can afford to lose.
Answer me this: What would happen to your worldview if you won the lottery? Or if you simply landed a good job making 150k a year, making you rich over time. Would you turn against taxing the wealthy?
Here's something actually supported by data: Universities crank out progressives. They also crank out people who tend to land good jobs. The college-educated class, a portion of which ends up rich, is overwhelmingly progressive. It's therefore no surprise that many democrat donors are further left on the political spectrum than the party's voter base.
Defund the police is a great example of this disconnect. It's a grassroots movement, but activist groups supported by progressive donors jumped on it. It, like many other progressive ideas, was sold as highly popular. After all, it's
good and in the interest of minority groups. How could it not be popular? Fact is, it wasn't. Even less so among minority groups. As the article points out, they disproportionately expressed support for
higher police funding, along with more realistic reforms. So the point there is less about astroturfing, more about the disconnect between the college-educated donor class and the much more moderate voter base that the democrats actually need to win elections.
None of this is to say defund the police is wrong. It probably makes some good points, I don't even really know because it's irrelevant. Politics is about compromise. Highly unpopular and uncompromising movements like these becoming the face of the democratic party, alienating their more moderate voter base including the very minorities whose interests these movements are supposed to be protecting, is very unhelpful.
After Floyd’s murder, progressive activists quickly coalesced around defunding the police as a slogan and policy objective. (The slogan was itself a compromise between activists who favored reduction of police budgets and those who favored outright abolition.) Defunding the police never commanded strong support among the public, which has rejected it by margins of more than two to one, and is unpopular among Democrats. Black and Hispanic Democratic voters are more likely than their white counterparts to support higher spending on police, and no more than one-quarter of any Democratic constituency, Black or white, supports reduced funding. Black voters have consistently registered support both for reforming police to crack down on racism and abuse and increasing the level of protection for residents of high-crime areas.
As longtime Minneapolis police-reform activist Nekima Levy Armstrong lamented, most Black Minneapolis residents wanted serious police reform: “Instead, what we got was progressive posturing of a kind seen throughout the country and a missed opportunity to bring about real change and racial justice.” There are at least some models of police reform that combine greater accountability with more robust protection. Camden, New Jersey, for example, reconstituted its corrupt, abusive police force with one that was both more responsive and larger. Those kinds of reforms are not easy, but they at least have a chance of success since they can command significant public approval (which is not a sufficient condition to enact a high-profile reform, but it is a necessary one). There was never a world in which a concept supported by less than 20 percent of the public was going to emerge victorious.
love prisons 
