How did "Defund the police" stop meaning "Defund the police"? - Why mainstream progressives have a strong incentive to 'sanewash' hard leftist positions.

How did "Defund the police" stop meaning "Defund the police"? - Why mainstream progressives have a strong incentive to 'sanewash' hard leftist positions.

Effortpost

There's a really good thread on a focus group of Biden-leaning voters who ended up voting for Trump. Like all swing voters, they're insane, and they prove that fundamentally, a lot of people view Trump as a somewhat normal-if-crass President. They generally decided to vote Trump in the last two weeks before the election, which matches a few shifts in the polls that the hyper-observant might have noticed. But there's a few worth highlighting in particular.

18h 80% say racism exists in the criminal justice system. 60% have a favorable view of Black Lives Matter. These people voted for Trump!

18h Only one participant here agrees we should "defund the police." One woman says "That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said." 50% of people here say they think Biden was privately sympathetic to the position.

18h We are explaining the actual policies behind defund the police. One woman interrupts "that is not what defund the police means, I'm sorry. It means they want to defund the police."

18h "I didn't like being lied to about this over and over again" says another woman.

18h "Don't try and tell word don't mean what they say" she continues. Rest of group nodding heads.

So, in other words, normal people think Defund The Police means Defunding The Police. I think nobody reading this thread will be surprised by this, even those who might've been linked here as part of an argument with someone else. And let's be honest - defund is just a stand-in for "abolish". And we know that's true, because back when Abolish ICE was the mood on twitter, AOC was tweeting "Defund ICE", while leftist spaces were saying to abolish it. And the much older slogan "Abolish the Police" becomes translated to "Defund the Police" in 2020. In case there's any doubt, a quick google trends search shows pretty clearly that Defund The Police is not an old slogan, unlike "abolish the police", which actually has some non zero search bumps before May. The idea of 'defunding the police' is not new to 2020, and it's not new to 2020 politics no matter how obscure the older examples have been, but it's pretty clear I think that Defund means Abolish, and it reads like that to everyone else too. So why were there so many people on twitter who said otherwise, and insisted on the slogan?

Between May 10 and May 20, we can see that "Defund The Police" was hardly a slogan with much purchase - in fact, half the tweets here aren't even the slogan as we'd usually be familiar with. As a matter of fact, expand a bit further and the only account you get using it the way we'd be familiar with is one roleplaying as a cow. Just to contrast, again, see the same search period for "abolish the police". I doubt anyone is shocked to see how many more tweets there are about "Abolish the police", but I just want to make it clear - Abolish The Police was a well-worn, established slogan and ideology well and truly before "defund the police" became a thing, and the search trends graph for the two phrases are basically identical. We can set the search dates to include the 27th, 28th, and 29th, and that includes a few examples of "Defund the police" advocacy, but we don't really see what we're familiar with until we include the 30th and 31st. What I want to emphasize: This did spring up overnight. There was a very brief period where it was mainly defined - at least on twitter - by one New Republic article that did talk about "and use the money to refund into the community", but pretty much straight after, we get:

Tweet that goes "Defund the police, abolish the police"

"Except defund the police/abolish the police is a “slogan” which has been an organic, core part of the movement since pretty much the beginning. The original founders of BLM have *always* called for police abolition. If anything, liberals are the ones doing the hijacking."

Long twitter thread about the pragmatic concerns about defund the police as a slogan and dismissing them - it's worth reading because it's wrong. Ends with clearly pointing out that 'defund the police' talk is moving the overton window towards police abolition in mainstream BLM related advocacy, not the other way around (unlike the above tweet)

"RIGHT?? #DefundPolice is a rhetorical strategy / negotiating starting point. It’s the anchor point from which we start. It’s to frame the endeavor as being about building a NEW system that works for everyone."

Etc, etc. Look, we've all seen these types of tweets, I'm pretty sure, but I'm linking them for examples to prove what I'm saying to people who might have been blissfully unaware, and also because I have to admit that I'm about to start talking about a few things that I'm not going to be able to come close to sourcing well enough. But we know, pretty clearly, that there was a strong leftist side to Defund The Police that clearly meant "police abolition", and we also know that there was a side on twitter who claimed they didn't mean that, and I really assume I don't need to link example tweets at this point.

To put it simply - there were multiple "defund the police" factions on twitter. They overlapped significantly, and the specific type of that overlap is the core of what this post is finally going to be about. The social network overlap of hard-leftists with mainstream progressives creates an incentive for mainstream progressives to 'sane-wash' leftist slogans or activism.

This is a very rough way of putting it, but let's say you can categorize twitter spaces as fitting, roughly, into certain subcultures. Someone with a lot more data processing tools at their disposal could probably figure out some more specific outlines for this, but I'd make the argument that in essence, mainstream progressive online spaces are linked directly to hard leftist spaces by way of - for lack of a better term - "sjw spaces" and sjw figures. By "SJW", I mean accounts that are really more focused on a specific genre of social activism, and more focused on that than they are, say, anti-capitalism, or even necessarily 'medicare for all'.

There's a whole constellation of left-and-left-adjacent online spaces, including tankie spaces, "generic left" spaces, anarchist spaces, etc, and likewise there's a whole constellation of progressive spaces from sock twitter, warren stan twitter, etc, but ultimately, one thing (almost) all these spaces share is a commitment to a specific brand of social progressivism. Now this is where it gets very difficult to talk about things here - I'm about to talk about things that'll make sense to people who've been on the inside of the subculture I'm talking about, but would be less intuitive outside it. So I want to draw a distinction between "SJW" spaces and general social progressivism.

General social progressivism is just a trait of mainstream American liberalism now, and it's pretty much here to stay. "SJW" spaces are a vector for this, and really, the origin of all the versions that exist now, regardless of how different they may have become. What's specific to "SJW" spaces is that they spread the case for overall social progressivism through social dynamics primarily, and argument second which is why I'm singling them out, and why I'm singling them out as something worth pointing out about how they're shared between progressives and leftists.

As an example - I'm trans myself, and one of the most common forms of trans activism I've seen other trans people make is "Listen to trans people". This is generally made as a highly moralized demand to cis people, usually attached to a long thread about the particular sufferings attached to being trans, with some sentiments like "I'm so sick of x and also y," and the need to "Listen to trans people". It's not devoid of argument, but the key call to action is "Listen to trans people" - in other words, really, an appeal to "you should be a good person", a condemnation of people who don't "Listen to trans people", and the implication that if you're a Good Cis Perosn, you will Listen To Trans People like the one in the thread. "SJW" spaces spread their desired information and views to sympathetic people by appealing to the morality, empathy, and fairness of the situation, but with a strong serving of 'those who do not adapt to these views and positions are inherently guilty'.

(In practice, this only ever means 'listen to trans people that my specific political subgroup has decided are the authorities', of course.)

This dynamic - appeal to empathy, morality, fairness, and the implication of a) a strong existing consensus that you're not aware of as a member of the outsider, privileged group, and b) invocation of guilt for the people who must exist and don't adapt to the views being spread - is the primary way that "SJW" spaces have spread social progressive positions, with argument almost being only a secondary feature to that. Unfortunately, I can't back this up with detailed citations. If you've been involved in these spaces before the way I have, you know what I'm talking about.

What I think is pretty clear is that there's a significant overlap between mainstream progressives and hard leftists by the way that they all follow the same "SJW" social sphere. If you imagine everyone on twitter falls into specific social bubbles, I'm saying that people in otherwise separated bubbles are linked together by a venn diagram overlap with following people who exist in the "SJW" bubbles. This is how information and key rhetoric will spread so readily from hard leftist spaces to mainstream progressives - because it spreads through the "SJW" space, and it spreads by the same dynamic of implication of strong consensus, of a long history of established truth, and an implication of guilt if you can't get with the program.

And that's exactly how 'defund the police' can spread up through hard leftist spaces into mainstream progressive spaces - through the same dynamic, again, of:

Implication of long-established consensus

Moralizing holding the position, so that not holding it implies guilt.

When you exist in a social space that spreads a view through this way, and is the consensus of everyone around you, this doesn't exactly promote careful thought about what you retweet or spread before you spread it, especially when everything is attached as something that needs to be spread and activised on. A great example of the mindset this creates can be found in the comments of Big Joel's "Twitter and empathy" video, about a very popular twitter thread about how male survivors of a mass shooting were sexist.

I was half listening to the video at the start and forgot how it had started. Hearing the tweet read in your voice I was one of the people who would half consciously like it. I actually started to wonder if I would response "appropriately" in the situation. Having you come back in and talk about how you were repulsed by the tweets literally took me off guard. I was like "oh yeah wow. He's right. These were bad tweets." I don't think my brain gets challenged enough on its initial responses to narrative and I just wanna say thanks. This video rocked. I like it a lot.

and another one:

I never read the original tweet, but I admit that as you read the thread to me, I had the same empathetic knee jerk reaction as I'm sure many of the men who "liked" the thread did. I honestly was confused at first when you said you were angered by it. Then you laid out your case and I realized "Oh wow, of course that's wrong. How did I not see that at first."

(This is a very good video by the way.)

So, now say you're someone who exists in a left-adjacent social space, who's taken up specific positions that have arrived to you through an "SJW" space, and now has to defend them to people who don't exist in any of your usual social spaces. These are ideas that you don't understand completely, because you absorbed them through social dynamics and not by detailed convincing arguments, but they're ones you're confident are right because you were assured, in essence, that there's a mass consensus behind them. When people are correctly pointing out that the arguments behind the position people around your space are advancing fail, but you're not going to give up the position because you're certain it's right, what are you going to do? I'm arguing you're going to sanewash it. And by that I mean, what you do is go "Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]".

Keep in mind, this is really different to just a straightforward Motte-and-Bailey. This is more like pure-motte. It's everyone else putting out bailey's directly, and advocating for the bailey, but you're saying - and half believing - that they're really advocating for motteism, and that the motte is the real thing. You often don't even have to believe the other people are advocating for that - in which case, you sort of motte-and-bailey for them, saying "Sure, they really want Bailey, but you have to Motte to get to Bailey, so why don't we just Motte?"

But the key thing about this is it's a social dynamic - that is, there's a strong social incentive to do this, because the pressure of guilt if you don't believe the right thing, or some version of it, is very strong, so you invent arguments for what other people believe, to explain why they're right, even though they don't seem to hold those positions themselves. I did this so many times in the past. And then the people who were arguing poorly in the first place will begin to retweet your position as if it was what they meant all along - or they won't even claim that it was what they meant, they're just retweeting it because it's an argument that points slightly to their conclusion, even if it's actually totally different to what they meant. If you're sanewashing, you won't let people make their argument for themselves, you'll do it for them, and you'll do it often, presenting the most reasonable version of what the people in your social group are pressuring you to believe so you can still do activism properly without surrendering the beliefs that you'd be guilty for not having. (Edit: You can think of it as basically, the people who just say "bailey" are creating a market for people to produce mottes for them.)

Again, for another example of this at work, see the Tara Reade story, and the whole thing about "Believe All Women". This has been done to death here by now, but I want to say that back in February when I still considered myself a leftist, I would've been terrified to even suggest that Tara Reade - had she been a thing at the time - was lying. The social weight of the subcultures I was involved in just clamped down on me. It was essentially a dogma that it was unimaginable to speak against. This is essentially, 100% of the reason why it was impossible for some people to admit that the Tara Reade story was obviously false - they had to sanewash for their social group, but most people had already been sanewashing "Believe All Women" for years before that as well. Even though the end result of that slogan was the smash up we saw earlier this year. It's not hard to even find in this subreddit people making excuses for why "Believe All Women" doesn't have to mean what it clearly does - that's sanewashing.

So with all that explained - I think it's pretty simple. Mainstream progressives 'sanewashed' the "Defund The Police" position because they'd acquired the position through social spaces that imply anyone who doesn't hold those positions are guilty. If you exist in social spaces like that primarily, you almost don't have the option to dissent. The incentives against it are too strong. And that's how and why people will continually push for completely dumb slogans and ideas like that, even when it makes no sense - and sometimes, especially when it makes no sense. Because they assume it has to, and will rationalize their own reasons why it does.