Sanewashing, and how Defund The Police stopped meaning Defund The Police

Inverse Florida

Sanewashing, and how Defund The Police stopped meaning Defund The Police

And also "Okay, here's what Trump actually means".

Inverse Florida

Jul 2

11

2

Nearly two years ago now, I wrote a reddit post that became the most influential thing I’d ever written in my life. It was about the Defund The Police movement, but more importantly, it was about why people who believed in Defund The Police insisted they didn’t want to defund the police. I made up a word to explain my idea, and the word itself has ended up living on, but I’m not totally satisfied with my original explanation of it. Things have changed a lot since I wrote that post. Defund is a zombie idea now, and I think the clearest examples of sanewashing in recent memory have been on the right At the same time, Defund is still a really useful historical example. Sanewashing is all about social dynamics between overlapping communities - and Defund is the best example of this, so I’ve written this updated version, with more examples from the right, and more evidence for it on the left. So to start with, let’s go to Defund. (Also, most of the post was about it.)

At the time that I wrote that post, there was a thread on Twitter detailing a voter focus panel. It was people who decided to vote Trump in the last two weeks before the election. The thread has since been deleted, but I still have the text of the key tweets.

    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.

Normal people think Defund The Police means Defunding The Police. They actually get angry when you try to tell them “the actual policies behind it” because you’re telling them that Defund The Police doesn’t mean Defund The Police. And yet, I’d be the idea of “Defund doesn’t mean the police won’t be funded, it just means that the burden will be spread around the government” and the other copes invented to explain it are pretty familiar. But what’s worse, is that they took someone who’s been clearly opposed to it from the beginning - Joe Biden - and they’re convinced that he’s secretly sympathetic to it. There seems to be a trend among a lot of political normies where they think moderate left people are way more left than they actually are - they see AOC as the centerpoint for left wing rhetoric, and not Joe Biden!

Whenever you wanted to make a point against Defund, people who believed in Defund would say "What defund the police really means is" and then promote some reasonable proposals about lightening the burden on police departments. A lot of people go out of their way to explain it doesn't mean abolishing the police - which is a much older movement in leftist circles.

I should specify - by leftist I specifically mean radical left anti-capitalist as a catch-all phrase, and as opposed to liberal. People who fit that description in online politics, whether they’re socialists, anarchists, communists, and more, call their entire political side “Lefitsts”, and make it clear they believe “Liberals” are an opposing side, so I just use the language that they use. In fact, you’ll struggle to find leftists talking about Defund in a way that doesn’t just mean Abolish prior to 2020. And police abolition was definitely one of the key, radical ideas in online leftist spaces for a very long time, on the back of the ACAB logic (Which I’ll get to more in a second). The Defund movement sprang up whole cloth in 2020 on the backs of the protest movement, and the google trends results shows that it essentially sprung up in 2020.

On this Google Trends image, the red line is Defund The Police, the blue one is Abolish The Police. Note how completely flat the red one is before 2020!

I’ve seen supporters of Defund insist that it’s been an ongoing movement or an old idea, and it’s always clearly meant something other than simply Defunding The Police. Except if we go back to 2016, we can see in a piece in the Guardian, "Defund The Police" sounds pretty much like "Abolish The Police". The piece is explicitly against the idea of reforming the police, or even "community policing". Another piece on a marxist website is clear about the call to "disarm, defund and disempower the police". A leftist police abolition leaflet makes the link between defunding and abolition, another example says "dismantle, divest, defund", another article about the Baltimpore Police budget is tagged with "Abolition", clearly linked together in the Chicago Reader, a - of all things - Lush interview with an M4BL rep talks about the demand to defund police departments as being part of as being part of a call "for city, state and federal governments to abolish policing as we currently understand it.". A town that actually voted to "defund" their police department in 2014 was reported as voting to "eliminate" it. Whenever it needs to be made clear that there's no link to abolition, older sources will say 'partially defund' or significantly defund'. And from all the way back in 2007, there's probably no need to say what the Communist Party of Canada means when they say "Defund the Police"

But 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" was a rallying cry as it is today. 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. Again: This did spring up overnight. It correlates well with the spring of "Abolish the Police" too. 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. 

Defund has, pretty clearly, always meant defund - as in the same way Republicans have meant 'Defund Planned Parenthood', and 'Defund Obamacare', or what others like AOC have meant when they've said 'Defund ICE'. Defund is a short few steps away from 'Abolish'. 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 that meaning is much older than 2020.

And we also know that there was a side on twitter who claimed they didn't mean that, and would lecture anyone who got under the impression it did mean that. And I really assume I don't need to link example tweets at this point. They were the ones who assured that "Defund the Police" meant a specific set of policies - likely the ones the focus group participants didn't want to hear - and not really about police abolition. Or, in other words, that Defund The Police didn't really mean Defund The Police.

There’s pretty much no offender worse than this graphic. It’s too long for me to embed it in this post, but god it’s awful.

There were multiple "defund the police" factions on twitter, but I don’t think any of them saw it that way. Both were ultimately supporting different policies, but I think each would claim that the other faction believed in the same things theirs did. Most people weren’t even aware there were other factions. I think, in a sense, the most important part was whether or not someone believed in Defund The Police. There were people who meant it as abolish, and there were people who didn’t, but they signed onto the same idea, claimed to believe the same thing, and then insisted it actually meant something else.

But, there were different factions. But what’s really important is that they did overlap. And how they overlap matters a lot, because it’s that overlap that creates sanewashing.

The different parts of online left communities

Like every other social network, Twitter has different “parts”, or communities, subcultures, whatever you want to call them - different bubbles in the social graph are networked more closely than others. And there’s a leftist Twitter subculture, and a mainstream progressive one.

But every part of Twitter is still a social network. It’s still built out of links from one person to another on a graph, and mainstream progressive spaces are linked directly to leftist spaces through - for lack of a better term - "SJWspaces" and SJW figures. And 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'. Sorry, I don’t actually have a better word for it, because “woke” is even worse, but there’s a difference between "SJW" spaces and general social progressivism.

Social progressivism is just a normal trait of American liberalism, and it’s also based. But what's specific to "SJW" spaces is that they spread the case for overall social progressivism through social dynamics first, 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.

The only thing online, very left spaces all share in common - whether tankie, liberal, progressive, leftist, or whatever else you can think of - is a commitment to this specific brand of social progressivism. More moderate spaces in 2022 are less subject to this pressure than ever, but its still its influence is still present in most of them, and has only metastasized into something even worse on TikTok.

When I first wrote about this, I thought most peopel reading wouldn’t be very familiar with the way SJW spaces operated, but at this point if you’ve interacted with politics online in the last 15 years, you’ve probably interacted with an SJW space. You’re probably familiar with tweets that make a big claim about a social issue, and then insist you believe in it, or you are Bad. This is the sort of thing I mean when I say social dynamics first, argument second.

As an example - I'm trans myself, and one of the most common forms of trans activist posting I’ve seen is "Listen to trans people". This is a super moralized demand - made to cis people, usually attached to a long thread about the particular sufferings attached to being trans, with sentiments like "I'm so sick of x and also y," and the need to "Listen to trans people". Implicit in the sentiment is that x and y are happening because cis people won’t just listen to trans people. Equally implicit, cis people who did listen would be good cis people.

These threads won’t be totally devoid of argument, but the key call to action is "Listen to trans people" - in other words, 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 Person, you will Listen To Trans People like the one in the thread. "SJW" spaces spread their desired 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. I mean, look at this!

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If you’re not familiar with what truscum and transmed mean - they’re other groups of trans people! So “Listen to trans people” is being invoked against people who are saying to listen to trans people! How does that work? Because the “Listen to x group” trope relies on the idea that there’s a strong, pre-existing consensus among whichever minority group you have to listen to, a position that represents the real, Legitimate Opinion Of X Minority Group. Even when there’s other members of the minority group dissenting, you have people say “Well just listen to x group” - by which they mean, “Accept what I’ve been told is the Legitimate Opinion of X Minority Group, no matter how many of them actually hold it”, because the people who invoke this trope can’t tell the difference between those ideas. You can ask these people “Do you realize not every trans person thinks the same”, and they can say “Yes”, but they’ll still act like Listening To Trans People means accepting that specific opinion.

This dynamic is based on an appeal to empathy, morality and fairness. But alsom the invocation of a strong existing consensus that you're not aware of as a member of the outsider, privileged group - in fact, that you can never be aware of - and insisting everyone who hasn’t already accepted the new point of view are blameworthy, are the real keys to how views in SJW spaces advance. And I think to a lot of people who’ve never been in these spaces, it just sounds like a ridiculous strawman, but if you’ve ever lived within those spaces, you probably recognize this, or a million different versions of it. Arguments are secondary to social dynamics.

The social network overlap of leftists with mainstream progressives creates an incentive for mainstream progressives to 'sanewash' leftist slogans or activism.

The Venn diagram of online left political spaces all overlap, and the space where they overlap are the ”SJW” spaces. 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 live in a social space where every view spreads through these vectors, and it’s the consensus of everyone around you, this doesn't exactly promote careful thought about what you retweet or spread.

What happens, is you rely entirely on social proof.

Especially when everything is urgent. Everything needs to be spread and activised on. A great example of this mindset 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 - if these are vital ideas that everyone has to adopt for moral reasons, how do you defend them to people who don't exist in any of your usual social spaces? You don't understand these ideas completely, because you absorbed them through social proof and not by convincing arguments. But they're ones you're confident are right because you were assured there's 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. You can think of it as basically, the people who just say "bailey" are creating a market for people to produce mottes for them.

Twitter avatar for @ne0liberal

Neoliberal 🌐🇺🇦 @ne0liberal

Mainstream progressives feel the need to support it, because they're not Team Good Guys if they don't.

The Vox piece above basically outright says "I don't understand policy, but my social circle approves so I do too!", before Voxsplaining how it's just a narrative/idea. 

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7:30 PM ∙ Dec 2, 2020

275Likes15Retweets

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 2020 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 would have completely crushed me. It was a dogma that it was unimaginable to speak against. This is 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 in 2020.

Once you grasp the idea, you start to see sanewashers everywhere. Even within leftist groups, they don’t need progressives to sanewash them, because there’ll be some segment of them who are attached to reality enough to not want to say something obviously wrong.

Twitter avatar for @inverseflorida

Inverse Florida 🌐🥑📚 @inverseflorida

I'm rewriting my Sanewashing post for Substack, and I saw a thread where people were saying ACAB to a cop. Both of these memes were posted in the same thread. It's hard to ask for better examples than this. 

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3:15 PM ∙ Jul 1, 2022

I think the reason is that all political groups are made of different factions that don’t really agree, but aren’t really aware that they disagree. They may not even actually be aware of each other as distinct groups. They still form social networks online, and they form social content pipelines to produce memes like the above, but they ultimately believe there’s this one narrative that says what their political group Really Is, that everyone else in their group holds that narrative, and without realizing it - they disagree on what that narrative is.

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, you 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.

I’ve spent this entire post talking about the left - but this is obviously a thing on the right too. Conservatives have sanewashed the groomer discourse, and have a rich tradition of sanewashing Trump, Trump’s corona ideas, and inventing ideas like Trump Derangement Syndrome to avoid having to sanewash by saying “Oh these criticisms are too ridiculous to listen to anyway”. And at some point, I should write about that in more detail, because the most prominent conservatives who do it aren’t blindly submitting to Social Proof, they’re knowingly lying out of fear.

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Eli

Jul 4

·edited Jul 13