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Notes -
Does progressivism structurally perpetuate the very identity-based prejudice it's supposed to combat?
First off, I'm sure someone smarter has written about this hypothesis, though I'm fairly certain Scott's too polite to verbalize it. Here's my low-effort take.
Imagine you live in a midsized city and are one of about a dozen fashionable owners of a pink VW Beetle. One day, you're on the highway, and suddenly you see the traffic alert display an AMBER alert for a pink VW Beetle. Thankfully, the plate number is very distinct from yours, but you sure wish you had a generic white Camry or F-150 then.
Sadly, the missing child, who turns out to be a super adorable five year old girl with blond hair, remains missing 48 hours later and has captured the national attention. The only lead is an elderly neighbor who swears that she saw a pink VW Beetle leave the cul-de-sac. Friends tease you, and you even make a preemptive joke about your car at a drivethrough. One day after work, you find "pedo" keyed on your car door.
Unfortunately for you, you can't afford to trade in for a different car. Do you 1) pray that the feds catch the predator asap, or 2) organize with the other 11 pink VW Beetle owners to start an activist campaign to combat bigotry against something you have no control over?
It then turns out that your city has an obscure and highly peculiar ordinance that offers extremely strong privacy protection over car ownership. So even after cops find Ring footage that shows a pink VW Beetle did in fact leave the cul-de-sac at around the time of kidnapping, the authorities are powerless to subpoena the DMV for identities of the owners to investigate further. There is public outcry and the city council gathers for an emergency meeting. Do you go to the public hearing to protest the inequity of treating all pink VW Beetle owners as suspects, or do you support getting rid of the law to maximize the likelihood of catching the perp so your life can go back to normal?
I recognize this is an inelegant and reductionist analogy, but it seems to me that the result of progressive policy, broadly speaking, perpetuates all kinds of -isms and -phobias. Take two identical islands: on one, the legislators, cops, and DAs are extremely progressive and go all-in on decarceration and decriminalizing shoplifting etc.; on the other, it's the opposite, with stop and frisks and three strike mandatory sentencing etc. It seems to me that a pink VW Beetle owner who goes shopping or takes a stroll at night in the park on the first island would experience far more unspoken suspicion by fellow citizens than the same teen on the second island. Similarly, a minority new hire at a private company on island two would feel much less imposter syndrome or be treated like a token hire than one on island one (though to be fair, perhaps said minority wouldn't be hired in the first place on island two, with its lack of affirmative action).
Rationally, an actual child predator or shoplifter is incentivized to support laws and policies that make it harder to apprehend and incarcerate them. But shouldn't everyone else oppose them? The sooner the public can trust that all the pink VW Beetles on the road are proven to not be kidnappers, the better! All that gets accomplished by making my car's make/model/color into some kind of protected class is that a) we make it harder to apprehend the bad apples that give the rest of us a bad rep, and b) result in everyone who pays any attention to subtly but resolutely give us a wide berth, especially if they have young children.
What am I missing? Why don't strong majorities of non-predator pink VW Beetle owners vote for policies that make them, as a class, structurally understood to be good citizens?
And if I may put on a conspiracy hat, it seems to me that one of the best ways for the prejudiced white F-150s to ensure that there is a perpetual underclass of pink VW Beetles is to donate to city councilmen to preserve the peculiar privacy ordinance while paying activist white Camrys to sport bumper stickers that insist that they love pink VW Beetles.
See though, the reason political compasses are a (imperfect but) useful thing is that they allow you to do some disambiguation that's important here. There's actually a few not necessarily linked concepts in play here. You've got the notion of privacy as a right vs "I have nothing to hide"; you have an education-first justice philosophy vs a punishment-first one; you have a low-government approach vs a heavy-handed one; you have default community trust model vs a default suspicion model; and probably at least one other axis. Reducing the two islands to vague caricatures of culture-war "sides" isn't just inelegant, it's not representative of true opinion diversity and groupings in the population. For example, I often like to harp on the Pew Political Typology all the time which indicates that yes, divisions exist, but no, the broad groupings aren't rock solid on all issues. For crime specifically, a good third of the Dem voter base are not fully on board with progressive ideas (more or less depending on how you slice it or which aspect comes up). And it's not that each nonstandard opinion is clustered by individual. No, the chances are good that any specific given voter holds a nonstandard view on at least one if not more major, major party planks. Ditto for GOP voters.
Also, as clarification, do you mean that Pink VW Owner on island 1 is the recipient of more suspicion generally, including unspoken, or just unspoken suspicion? Is the implication that Island 2 trusts the police more thus has no reason to voice suspicion, or just that they have the same suspicion just are more vocal about it, or some other conclusion that I didn't specify?
Anyways. Frankly, I think the whole idea that criminals vote to make crime not pay is irrelevant both in scale and actual real-world practice. Career criminals, and even most casual ones, don't vote as often as citizens who, by definition, buy into the system more. See for example abysmal voting rates from prisons even in states where felons can vote.
I also think it's important to note that although you're coming at this whole thing from a sort of abstract, political theory kind of angle, that's not actually very compatible with the actual US situation. Because there's a lot of context and history that needs to be addressed. Liberals in aggregate like affirmative action because there was actual harm done historically to certain minority groups. And that value to some extent resonates with similar values and also partisan voting trends. But it's not because, broadly speaking, there's a fundamental philosophical harmony with other liberal values. See the commenter above w/r/t blank slatism who probably put it better.
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