"Defund the Police" Failed Because We Have No History

You know I wrote and published my 2023 book How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement as a way to express admiration towards the 2020 political moment while subjecting it to careful criticism, which is the heart of political respect. It was then reviewed as a book that throw tomatoes at that moment and dismissed it entirely. In many ways, the book came out at exactly the wrong moment - it was too late to really defy the zeitgeist in a way that would have generated a lot of conversation, but early enough that it received a resentful and frankly dishonest reaction from many reviewers who were defensive of the protest movement. So it goes.

I was thinking of that book when I read Hamilton Nolan’s recent piece arguing that “defund the police” was the right demand for the 2020 moment, and that we failed because too many within the left-of-center refused to take up that banner and defend it strenuously. He’s wrong, and the way that he’s wrong is very important for us to talk about and understand. The lessons of recent history loom.

With hindsight, and with regret, it seems fairly obvious that part of the failure of the radical moment of the 2010s and early 2020s lay in the conditions of its own growth. Large numbers of people encountered radical left politics primarily through online networks like Twitter or Tumblr, spaces optimized for speed, virality, and tribal signaling rather than sustained study or collective discipline. (This may sound shocking to you, but history suggests that networks where people farm “likes” by launching endless dry one-liners and performing an obviously fraudulent stance of studied disaffection are not ideal places for political organizing.) As a result, many sincere converts arrived without a grounding in political theory, historical experience, or organizational practice, gaps that made it harder for the abortive 2020 mass liberatory movement to develop strategy, resolve internal disagreements, or withstand pressure from opponents and institutions. The movement gained visibility and numbers but lacked the shared intellectual and historical foundation needed to turn moral urgency into durable power. “Defund the police,” I will argue, was at the heart of that problem, a slogan without a strategy that was pushed by many people who had no coherent overarching theory of politics.

I think a lot of people with very good intentions were moved to sincerely and meaningfully commit to radical