You can’t start from the top; you have to start with the people

Someone I was talking to about Biden on Mastodon went off on Tuesday, raging against “A GENOCIDAL OCTOGENARIAN WHO WANTS 2 PUT 100,000 MORE POLICE IN UR STREETS.”

Now obviously, I have several things I could choose to say about that. However, there’s one point in particular I think I need to make here, so I’ll do that instead.

As everyone who has read me for long knows, I am in favour of tearing current American law enforcement down to the ground and starting completely over with dramatically reduced functions. Everything that can be handed off to non-police agencies should be handed off to non-police agencies.

I do not believe current law enforcement can be “reformed,” I think we have to start over. I have been talking about abuses by law enforcement for a long time. I used to believe in police reform, until watching the Seattle experience with it closely changed my mind.

I semi-regularly post articles about this, examples of what and why, re-explaining it, particularly as news events warrant. I have a continuing series of what I call the “yeah, reform this” posts, asking people how this is supposed to be reformed. I know that I’ve moved some people on the topic – they’ve told me so – though not as many people as I’d like.

But we haven’t won that argument. We simply have not won it. That doesn’t mean we’re wrong, it just means that we have not yet convinced the public that more police is not more good.

We have in fact failed to win that argument so completely that even here, in Seattle, where we elect socialists who call themselves socialists, we have not won that argument even amongst Black people, who are generally perceived as being the most supportive and who are without question the hardest-hit targets of abusive police.

Not according to exit polling in the last round of city elections, anyway. It was a big, big loser amongst Black voters, last time around. According to polls, which, yes, could be wrong, but the election results were pretty clear. And it’s not because somehow we have magic good cops, because wow, we do not.

And that simply is what it is. Copaganda is pervasive, starts young, and is hard to overcome. Nobody wants to believe that current police culture can’t be reformed, but I’m afraid you can’t reform that which actively does not want to be reformed, and it doesn’t want to be reformed. It’s so hard to get past that copaganda than it might be harder, even, than it was to convince people that queers like me shouldn’t be shunned, beaten, or just plain locked up on discovery.

This is, by necessity, a long project which will take a long time, regardless of being right or wrong. It’s a project one has to work consistently for years, starting at the bottom, with the people, because it will never start from the top, and it’s dissociated from reality to demand that it do so.

Queer rights didn’t start from the top, either, I should note. A lot of people liked us being illegal, straight up. They get nostalgic about beating up queer children and mourn that they can no longer do it, and no, I’m not exaggerating one little bit, follow that link. I once worked with a campaign in Idaho that successfully blocked an initiative making queer employment illegal in a bunch of fields and requiring schools to teach that LGBT people were illegal, immoral, unnatural, and wrong – but it was oh so close, and part of getting people to agree not to vote for it was assuring old people that “the sodomy laws” would still be on the books if they voted no.

We didn’t get anywhere in the courts until we started winning popular votes, not losing them. We didn’t get anywhere with upper-level politicians, either.

Even people like Barack Obama ran against marriage equality, stating several times he was opposed to legal “gay marriage.” He didn’t turn around on that until the people did so first. Until we had changed the minds of the people, and done so in many states, nobody political moved to our side.

We had to start at the bottom.

With the people.

Isn’t that what leftists are supposed to do? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? I’m not even a leftist and I know that much.

Regardless, until we have that kind of turnaround, demanding support from the top – from candidates for President – is at best demonstrably a fool’s game.

It doesn’t get anything done. It doesn’t make anything better. The people who get elected as a result are demonstrably worse.

But it’s a great way to posture and preen and maybe look good to friends doing it…

…at the same time it’s also a great way to throw some fucking elections in favour of literal fascists, because until the people are on your side, it’s a great way for a politician to lose power, the one thing every politician cares about most. And you’re disqualifying all of them.

The least harm anyone does playing it that way is putting themselves out of the game.

Even more frustrating, most of the lefty folks I see mad at Biden for it right now don’t even seem to be working to win that argument with, again, the people. I want to ask them, “When was the last time you tried to talk about this with someone not already on your side, not already in your club?”

Maybe they are and I’m not seeing it, that’s totally possible. Maybe it’s happening elsewhere. But what I see is the topic used as a bludgeon against Biden when it’s simply and utterly divorced from reality to expect a presidential campaign to come out for something so deeply unpopular, in the midst of a long argument not yet close to won.

It’s maddening, doubly so when the opponent is planning – forthrightly, in public – to flood opposition states with red-state police and national guard as part of a broad and brutal expulsion of 20 million “illegals” and others they’ve deemed undesirable.

Want some goddamn police on the streets, how’s that for police on the streets? Is that better?

How the hell is helping that fascist murderfest get closer to reality supposed to be better?

How is that supposed to be a reasonable choice?

The reality is that it’s simply not. It’s self-destructive and self-defeating. It’s the American Left’s love affair with failure all over again, only this time edging past “love of failure” and into “sure, a lot more people might die, but my hands will be pure and clean, and that’s what matters.”

Maybe I should be asking, “tell me again how you reform” that instead.

So if someone wants to start getting something done about police abuses, they need to start working family and friends, just like we all have to do for the reality of Trump’s plans in this election. Start by trying to change the minds of people on the ground, rather than trying to start at the very top and throwing other people into the woodchipper when it inevitably doesn’t work.

Because until one starts convincing the people, one has done absolutely nothing.

Except maybe make everything worse.

117 days remain.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.