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Black lives matter, ... or so you say
Radical progressives and law enforcement
Once when I was visiting my brother-in-law in Vietnam, I noticed his six year old son had picked up a stick off the ground and was playing solder with it. The little boy pretended the stick was a pump action shotgun, pointing it at one thing after another: click-clack-BANG... click-clack-BANG. I got his attention and, with my wife as a translator, showed and told him that the correct technique is to cycle the gun while it is in recoil, before acquiring the next target: BANG-click-clack,... BANG-click-clack. He tried it a few times and then looked to me, and I gave him a smile and a thumbs-up.
A few minutes later, the boy's father (my brother-in-law) warned me not to teach him things like that -- because if he repeats them at school, his family might get an unpleasant visit from the police. I apologized for the mistake and made sure not to repeat it. A few minutes later, my brother-in-law mentioned that his motorcycle had been stolen the week before. I asked him if he had reported it to the police and he said no; they wouldn't do anything about it. In a Marxist police state, that's not what the police are for.
In the United States today, a black person is about seven times more likely to be murdered than a white person, and murder is the leading cause of death among black males under 45. The problem of a high murder rate for blacks in the US is not new, but while it has received little media attention, that rate has skyrocketed over the last ten years. The rate of homicide against blacks increased by around 50% from 2014 to 2020 and has remained near the 2020 level up to the time of this writing. This translates to about 19,000 excess black homicide deaths from 2015 to 2023, over and above what would have occurred if the 2014 rate had continued. That is more than the number of black Americans killed in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined, in less time than the total duration of those three wars. Something changed in 2015 that is having the effect of a war on black people in America.
The public conversation about the epidemic of killings of blacks in America looks like something this: some researchers, such as Roland Fryer and Heather Macdonald, along with many if not most conservative thinkers on the subject, have argued that the sudden increase in the rate of black homicide is largely a result of the "Ferguson effect" -- in which police officers are reluctant to patrol and intervene in majority-black neighborhoods because of hostility toward police fomented by "Black Lives Matter" activists. Progressives, in response, say that the causal theory of the Ferguson effect is not true. If we step back and look at the debate, no matter which side one takes, what is striking is that it is generally the conservatives who begin the conversation about the problem. Homicide is the leading cause of death for black males under 45, and has increased dramatically in a short period of time -- and yet the very people who angrily shout that "Black lives matter" have little to say about the issue until they are pinned down on it by people on the other side of the political fence. What gives?
What gives, I believe, is twofold. First, Fryer and Macdonald are obviously correct: what do you expect to happen when you demoralize, and in many cases defund, the police -- and who do you expect it to happen to? Second, I submit that their silence on this issue demonstrates that woke progressives do not actually care about the safety of black people -- any more than Lenin cared about the safety of Russian proletariat. What they care about is the power-gathering narrative that white supremacy is the root of all evil. Black-on-black crime doesn't do much to advance that narrative, and so it is not of much interest to them, no matter how many black lives it takes, or how rapidly the problem grows.
But where did the ridiculous idea of abolishing the police come from in the first place? In fact, the dismantling of law enforcement by radical progressives is nothing new. In the fourth century BC, Plato described a political faction whose agenda included moral relativism, sexual liberation, open borders, treating aliens like citizens, redistribution of wealth, debt cancellation, silencing dissenting speech, the lax enforcement of criminal laws, and, finally, stripping private citizens of the right to bear arms. Sound familiar? Plato's name for this group was demokratiko ántras (Greek: democratic men), and he wrote that when a state is governed by such men, convicted criminals are free to walk the streets. He also wrote that such a state it is on the precipice of tyranny [The Republic, VIII]. In two previous Substack posts (here and here), I have written in more detail about the correspondence between Plato's narrative and the woke agenda.
The gutting of pre-existing law enforcement structures was also a common theme in the communist revolutions in both Russia and China -- though in China, the focus was on prosecutors and judges rather than police officers. I will discuss the Russian case in more detail below. In any case, it seems that going back to the time Plato, the playbook of leftist tyranny has included the following essential steps:
The secret of the "secret police" is that they are not really police at all, but a gang of thugs who operate by whatever rules they invent as they go, and whose purpose is to terrorize and silence ideological opponents of the ruling party. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia said that on paper, the Soviet Union had a bill of rights that was better than the American bill of rights, adding "I mean it literally. It was much better" [source]. But the Soviet bill of rights didn't matter, because, in the Soviet Union, there was no de facto remedy for the violation of one's de jure rights. Indeed, a state terror organization like the Cheka or KGB cannot possibly operate alongside an organization that actually enforces the law. Thus, if it isn't really black lives that matter, but establishing a one-party police state, then abolishing the (pre-existing) police is not such a stupid idea after all. On the contrary, it is the first step in a proven plan with a long tradition!
Lenin's Abolition of the Police
Recall that in 1902 Lenin wrote,
In a previous post, I discussed how Lenin urged his followers to blame class exploitation for every problem in the world (and also, to view everything as a problem, even if it was never a problem before). In this article, I would draw the reader's attention to Lenin's description of the enemy that is to blame for all these problems, large and small: a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation. For Lenin, the class enemy of the bourgeoisie was intimately tied with the institutions of law enforcement.
The police forces that existed in Russia before the revolution were under the command of the Tsar, and included a repressive political police force as well as ordinary law enforcement. But in his picture of "police violence and capitalist exploitation", Lenin didn't distinguish between the two. In the Marxist view, ownership of private property was theoretically illegitimate in the first place -- and so the police's role in preventing Bolsheviks and their constituents from stealing money and other valuables that they wanted to steal (or "expropriate", as they put it) was, in their view, a form of oppression. The revolutionaries further regarded laws against assaulting whomever they wanted to assault as a form of oppression: after all their targets were capitalist bourgeoisie exploiters, or alleged to be as part of the justification of the would-be crime, and murder and theft were just what they had coming.
Lenin had advocated open war on the police for years leading up to the 1917 revolution. For example in 1905 he wrote,
Lenin knew that his regime would not be able to operate as planned alongside the existing system of courts and police. On the eve of the October 1917 revolution, he wrote,
But what would function in place the “apparatus of state power”? This would be the subject of a diabolical bait-and-switch. Before coming to power, Lenin called for abolition of the police and their replacement by a collective of armed citizens [Lenin (1917): "Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution"]. Lenin's followers probably imagined something along the lines of the CHAZ autonomous zone created by BLM activists in Seattle in 2020. Lenin probably laughed to himself and imagined the Cheka.
As the revolution unfolded, the Bolsheviks initially delivered on their promise to abolish the police, including both the Okhrana (Tsarist secret police) and regular law enforcement. Not only were the existing police departments wiped out as government agencies; the 1918 Soviet constitution revoked the right to vote for all former police officers -- along with other alleged class exploiters, including clergymen, former business owners, and anyone deemed "selfish or dishonorable" by the Soviet authorities:
The 1918 Soviet constitution further stipulated that "all workers be armed, and that a Socialist Red Army be organized, and the propertied class be disarmed". The collective of armed citizens was off to a good start, at least on paper, but this clause was also the beginning of gun control in the Soviet Union. In the initial phase, the Soviet government only disarmed their intended victims at the time, which consisted of people in categories designated as bourgeois.
Eventually, however, the entire civilian population would be disarmed, and the entire civilian population would also become victims or potential victims -- since anyone, at any time, might do something the authorities deemed "selfish or dishonorable" -- such as say something that the Soviet government did not want other citizens to hear, even if saying it was OK to say and hear the day before. In 1924, all private citizens, bourgeois and proletarian alike, were stripped of the right to own pistols and rifles, and private gun ownership was restricted to shotguns -- which were required to be licensed and registered, and could only be owned for the purpose of hunting. In 1939, the Soviet government confiscated all privately owned firearms. So much for a collective of armed citizens.
The wave of criminal savagery that ensued following the October 1917 revolution was beyond comprehension for most Westerners today. It is difficult to isolate the effect of Lenin's abolition of the police on this crime wave, because a civil war commenced in which atrocities including mass looting and, mass murder, and mass rape were routinely committed on both sides. However, within two months of the Bolshevik coup d'etat in October 1917, Lenin formed the Cheka -- the secret police agency of the Soviet Union that would later evolve into the KGB. So much for abolishing the police.
I don't think this is true, though you use this as a foundational premise. The conversations just look very different and so you might not recognize them immediately as such. Probably for tactical reasons (not wanting to give ammo to right wingers), it isn't usually highlighted as a problem-alone. There isn't the angst-for-its-own-sake aspect like there is for some other issues (like income inequality). It does actually come up at least sometimes! It's just usually in a hopeful kind of context, paired with a solution. For example, there are still well-publicized pushes for community violence interventions (I've seen them highlighted several times in national, left news outlets). One dimension of the gun control is exactly this. There's also talk about how this kind of violence is the result of the prison and justice system. And as an aside, indeed I am at least a little sympathetic to the particular argument (of many, some of which are bunk) that once you send someone to prison once, they acquire friends and influences that encourage further lawbreaking in the future, including homicide. In other words, there are actual, plausible mechanisms for these beliefs other than a vague
So yeah, they DO talk about this death/crisis. Just not in isolation (not anymore). One of the things that struck me watching the Malcolm X biopic recently was how up-front he was about problems within the black community and taking ownership of the fix (though still he blamed white people for all of this, at least early on in his life). And yeah, that approach you don't see as often (though I can't say I'm like, super plugged in to Black culture and news, so it might show up there) which I do find interesting.
So that's for many modern leftists. I find your talk about earlier revolutionary leftists very interesting. You can definitely see the seeds of later problems in some of what they discuss. Such as the perpetual, mob-conducted non-state violence of the Cultural Revolution in China. Or how untenable abolishing so many groups of people from the vote would be, as per the list you quoted which would eliminate a huge percentage of the population. However, modern US progressives still have much more in common with European social democrats (or democratic socialists) than they do with any form of communism, though they sometimes adopt the same language (the goals are very different).
I think if they cared about what they say they care about, they would be discussing, not just "too much gun crime", but the sudden spike starting in 2015 and what might be behind it, and whether the Ferguson contributed to it. They would be the ones starting that conversation if they cared about the lives of black people. They would be discussing that more than they discuss alleged police racism, or at least in the ballpark of as much.
They do care about the lives of black people. But they also care about not being seen to be racist and paternalistic to black communities. So they will defer solutions and conversations in that space to black people. White people telling black people that black on black crime is a problem absolutely stinks of neo-colonialism to progressives. They can talk about police brutality because black people have raised that as an issue and suggested solutions through the BLM movement et al, (though of course black people not being a monolith the solution space progressives are seeing is a necessarily constrained subset, but that police violence is a problem has more widespread acceptance in black communities than what to do about black on black violence).
Remember progressives just like everyone else have a whole competing stack of interests, and priorities. They have wanting for fewer black people to be killed AND wanting to defer to black voices on black problems. If black communities can agree on a solution to black on black violence and push that up the progressive stack then progressives will start to talk about it.
I think the problem is that your model of progressives is incorrect. They aren't life saving maximizing machines, if they were it would make sense for them to push that conversation. But they aren't so your understanding of WHY they don't do what you think they should do if they hold the values you think they do is incorrect.
Progressives care about lots of things, and those competing desires explain their behaviors. Just like how progressives talk about people who think abortion is murder. "If you really thought that abortion was murder and hundreds of thousands of innocent babies were tortured and killed each year you would do much more about it". And the same answer is the one here. They really do believe that, but they also have a bunch of other things they care about which constrains the solution spaces they can explore. For pro-life people, that might be a belief in law and order, moral precepts that murder is wrong, so killing abortionists is not an acceptable solution, and the belief that the alternatives to democratic options are worse.
For progressives here the answer is that their moral precepts that they should not be enforcing solutions on black communities (that they don't think black communities have asked for) means that is not an acceptable approach to black on black violence.
And part of the problem with that is that black communities are deeply divided themselves, on this. There is wariness about how their communities have been treated in the past, degraded trust levels, and much much more.
TLDR Progressives are not just black life utility maximizing machines, so when they don't do the exact things you think they should do, it doesn't mean they don't care, it means they have a whole stack of other moral precepts and beliefs to balance. Just like how pro-lifers are not all single issue voters.
I can't tell whether you are saying that (A) this is what's going through their woke minds, or (B) this response has objective merit, so I will respond to both.
Regarding (A):
Telling blacks what what their problems are and how to solve them is the modus operandi of white radical progressives. "When a basic definition of each policy was provided [to 1300 blacks polled], 79% of Black parents supported vouchers, 74% supported charter schools, and 78% supported open enrollment." [source], but Democrats oppose school choice, and oppose it more the more woke they are, saying that they hurt black students [for example here]. Thomas Sowell's book Charter Schools and their Enemies establishes this pattern on charter schools beyond reasonable doubt IMO. I submit this is representative of the bigger picture of white progressives shoving problems and solutions down the throats of the black population. Progs claim that climate change disproportionately impacts disaffected minorities and push for "climate justice"; disaffected minorities want cheaper power bills and don't give an ass rats about climate change. This phenomenon also extends to the issue at hand. "Among those polled, 47% [of black Democrats] say federal budget spending should be “increased a lot” to deal with crime, compared to just 17% of white Democrats" source. It's disproportionately white woke liberals who call to defund the police on behalf of blacks, not blacks who want it.
Regarding (B):
The truth? There is no "black community". There is a shared community in which murder rates are skyrocketing, and skyrocketing disproportionately for our black neighbors -- and sitting on your hands about it because it is "their problem" and not "our problem" is depraved.
Aside from a few outspoken radicals, most blacks want more funding for the police, and almost half of them want "a lot more" (see above). So how, again, are white college girls holding up signs to "defund the police" because "black lives matter" not telling blacks how to solve their problems?
The average white progressive doesn't know many, if any people in black urban communities. So they are reliant on what movements like BLM say.
Now there's an internal contradiction as I mentioned. BLM still has 80% support among black people, but the defund the police option is much less popular but you wouldn't necessarily know that if BLM was your source. In other words whatever movement is the one that was riding the zeitgeist at the time is the one that got to set the narrative.
They would know better if they cared more. In fact, they would know better if they cared much at all. This isn't something that a person has to figure out for themselves; you just have to know somebody who knows somebody that heard about it on a podcast (or read it on a message board), and all three of you (you, the person you know, and the person they know) care about it enough to pass it on. And the podcasters and pundits themselves, whose job it is to know this and inform their audience, certainly cannot plead innocent ignorance.
This is an important theorem. It is the convergence theorem for so-called geometric series, and, to a first approximation, it describes how interesting information items spread in a community. Basically, if everyone who hears about the thing, on average, shares it with r other people, and r > 1, then it will spread until the community is saturated and r effectively becomes less than one (because a high proportion of people in the community have already heard it). That geometric growth to saturation is colloquially known as "going viral". The r-value for a certain piece of information, or video, or whatever has in a given community depends on how well that item resonates with the interests of the community. Long story short, what goes viral is what people find interesting. (Thanks for the tip. right?)
If black lives really mattered in woke culture, the discussion about the epidemic of black homicide would go viral faster than "Hands up don't shoot" -- and if they really didn't want to be patriarchal white saviors, so would the fact that white Democrats are the only group that wants to defund the police.
The average person simply does not invest much time in investigating causes beyond what their immediate social circle is doing. If you are using that to say progressives don't care, then pretty much nobody cares about anything. We are the outliers here, not them.
That's right. Hence, what goes viral in a community depends on it being interesting enough to share with an average of at least 1.001 other people in your immediate social circle. What goes viral in a community tells you what really matters to people in that community. SJW's know about "Hands up don't shoot". They know about January 6. They know about Russian collusion. They know about the hockey stick graph of climate change -- but what they don't know about is the hockey stick graph of murder of blacks -- because, even if it comes to the attention of a random SJW in some dark corner of the internet, that is not important enough to share with at least 1 other SJW on average. Look at what they do have bandwidth for, and look at what they don't, and it tells you what they care about.
It is true that the average SJW doesn't know the facts of the matter we are discussing. It is also true that the reason he does not know those facts is that it is a group characteristic of his community not to care about those particular facts. The ones to who are not hypocritical on this issue are the ones who would be amplifying the issue if they knew about it, and of course there are some of those, but they must be a small minority (or else it would actually be getting amplified). You know what happens to those people? They grow up to be Michael Shellenberger, Thomas Sowell, and Amala Ekpunobi.
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