Progressive politics and “defunding the police”

While outside the area of climate change policy, the concept and slogan of “defunding the police” is revealing about important dynamics between progressive activist politics and policy-making by those who actually win power.

As The Economist reported in 2021:

The critical division is over whether or not the plan is a pretext to “defund the police”. Opponents insist it is sloganeering masquerading as policy. Shortly after Floyd’s murder, a majority of the city council appeared at a rally at Powderhorn Park on a stage in front of which “DEFUND POLICE” appeared in gigantic block letters. “The narrative all along until maybe five months ago, six months ago, was that they would be defunding the police and allocating the money elsewhere. The only thing that’s changed is the political winds,” says Mr Frey. He insists that alternatives to policing can still be funded without modifying the city charter, and that, if anything, more funding for the police is needed: “Right now, in Minneapolis, we have fewer officers per capita than just about every major city in the entire country.”

Advocates for reform have adjusted their language. As with the civil-rights movement, “those farthest on the left are what pushed the movement…we shifted the narrative from reform to defund,” says Sheila Nezhad, a community organiser running for mayor who is posing a stiff challenge to Mr Frey. Having contributed to a report on policing that argued that “abolition is the only way forward”, Ms Nezhad now avoids such rhetoric on the campaign trail, preferring words like “reinvest”. Kate Knuth, another candidate for mayor who supports the reform, says: “My vision of a department of public safety absolutely includes police,” funded at the same levels as today.

…

Public opinion in favour of “defunding” police departments was never high. The increase in violent crime has made it even less so.

In June 2020, 41% of Democrats told survey-takers for the Pew Research Centre that they wished to reduce local police budgets. By September 2021 that had shrunk to 25%. Among the general public, support declined from 25% to 15%.

I would say the dynamics of this movement mirror many of those in the progressive, intersectional, anti-capitalist climate justice movement. People who are sympathetic to the kind of analysis and solutions within the movement embrace them enthusiastically and selectively surround themselves to people who agree, losing touch with public opinion and losing the ability to influence people who don’t mostly agree with them already. This leads to policy proposals that over-reach what is politically plausible (abolish global capitalism!) but, because they feel swollen with moral superiority about their analysis and policy preferences, activists reject the public rather than revise their proposals. They end up powerless and isolated, but feeling like the moral lords of the universe. Because they see their opponents as so contemptible, the idea of developing an approach with broader electoral support is rejected both pragmatically and emotionally, in the first case because they can’t see how cooperating with such awful people will lead to an outcome they want, and in the second case because their revulsion and contempt makes them reject cooperation before even considering what it would involve.

The biggest thing we need to achieve to have a chance against climate change is to split the conservative side of the population between those with respect for empirical truth who won’t dismantle climate change protections to try to win popularity and the fantasists who either deny the reality of climate change altogether or dismiss the need to act on it. The latter would then hopefully be a small enough rump to be politically marginal. Something comparable on the left may be a helpful parallel development, characterized by the rejection of the idea that everyone who disagrees with progressivism can be ignored or converted. Recognizing that multiple political perspectives can be simultaneously valid is the basis of pluralism and the foundation of the central democratic concept that the defeated must acknowledge the legitimacy of the victors. Without that, politics becomes an anarchic ideological contest in which any tactic can be justified and where a coherent and effective agenda serving the public interest cannot arise.

Related:

The fine points of minuting meetings

The British comedic TV series’ Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister — as well as being extremely funny — make some acute and accurate points about politics. One quote from the episode “The Quality of Life” is an arguably cynical, arguably tragically accurate summary of the relationship between civil servants and politicians.

Today, while pondering how to interpret some specific bits of activist decision-making and analysis, I was reminded of another gem from series 2 of YPM: “Official Secrets:”

Bernard Woolley: The problem is, the prime minister did try to suppress the chapter, didn’t he?

Sir Humphrey Appleby: I don’t know. Did he?

BW: Well, didn’t he? Don’t you remember?

HA: What I remember is irrelevant Bernard. If the minutes don’t say that he did, then he didn’t.

BW: So you want me to falsify the minutes?

HA: I want nothing of the sort! It’s up to you Bernard, what do you want?

BW: I want to have a clear conscience.

HA: A clear conscience?

BW: Yes!

HA: When did you acquire this taste for luxuries? Consciences are for politicians, Bernard! We are humble functionaries whose duty it is to implement the commands of our democratically elected representatives. How could we possibly be doing anything wrong if it has been commanded by those who represent the people?

BW: Well, I can’t accept that, Sir Humphrey, “No man is an island.”

HA: I agree Bernard! No man is an island, entire of itself. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee, Bernard!

BW: So what do you suggest, Sir Humphrey?

HA: Bernard, the minutes do not record everything that was said at a meeting do they?

BW: Well, no, of course not.

HA: And people change their minds during a meeting, don’t they?

BW: Well, yes.

HA: So the actual meeting is a mass of ingredients for you to choose from.

BW: Oh, like cooking.

HA: Like, no, not like cooking. Better not to use that word in connection with books or minutes. You choose from a jumble of ill-digested ideas a version which represents the prime minister’s views as he would, on reflection, have liked them to emerge.

BW: But if it’s not a true record…

HA: The purpose of minutes is not to record events, it is to protect people. You do not take notes if the prime minister says something he did not mean to say — particularly if it contradicts something he has said publicly. You try to improve on what has been said, put it in a better order. You are tactful.

BW: But how do I justify that?

HA: You are his servant.

BW: Oh, yes.

HA: A minute is a note for the records and a statement of action if any that was agreed upon. Now, what happened at the meeting in question?

BW: Well, the book was discussed and the solicitor general advised there were no legal grounds for suppressing it.

HA: And did the prime minister accept what the solicitor general had said?

BW: Well, he accepted the fact that there were no legal grounds for suppression… but

HA: He accepted the fact that there were no legal grounds for suppression. You see?

BW: Oh!

HA: Is that a lie?

BW: No

HA: Can you write it in the minutes?

BW: Yes

HA: How’s your conscience?

BW: Much better! Thank you Sir Humphrey.

Or, as put later by Linton Barwick in the 2009 satirical film “In the Loop“:

Linton Barwick: Get a hold of those minutes. I have to correct the record.

Bob Adriano: We can do that?

LB: Yes, we can. Those minutes are an aide-mémoire for us. They should not be a reductive record of what happened to have been said, but they should be more a full record of what was intended to have been said. I think that’s the more accurate version, don’t you?

Obviously in these cases there is a clear political purpose being served in presenting the minutes a particular way, but the problem of interpretation is intractable even with no such agenda. Humphrey is quite right to say that minutes which are not verbatim require decisions from the person writing them, and it is as true in political conversations as in talks between friends or lovers that people who take part in the same conversation can come away from it with quite different recollections about what each party tried to say and what was decided.

And this is not even mentioning Ukraine…

The news nowadays is awfully hard to handle. Tolerance and democracy are at risk in the United States, which poses a grave threat to Canada. The global population is revealing how little it is willing to compromise on basic precautions to protect the vulnerable from COVID and keep the pandemic as managed as possible. In addition, we’re basically doing everything wrong on climate change: allowing increased fossil fuel production in rich states with high per capita pollution and poor states alike, while a horrifying rate of deforestation makes an absolute mockery of our PR-driven efforts to lessen the problem by planting trees. Our political systems keep responding to stress with deepening pathology.

Based on the degree of empathy, prudence, and self-protection humanity is demonstrating, the future will be a horrifying place to live.

Thoughts on my PhD in 2022

Amid all the struggle with trying to get my dissertation done, I have frequently thought about the sunk cost fallacy: basically the idea that because you have invested a lot in something, you need to keep going. It’s called a fallacy because we can’t change the past and need to decide whether any undertaking is worthwhile at every moment in time. Just because you have devoted time, money, or resources to something in the past doesn’t mean you should continue to do so if the additional commitment needed isn’t justified by the outcome you get.

I probably didn’t get into a PhD program for a terribly good reason. I was never aspiring to be an academic, which is the one career where you actually need one (and arguably the only one where you wouldn’t be better off with the same number of years of job experience). I had determined that it would be impossible for me to stay in the federal government, condemned to helping implement disastrous climate change policies and prohibited under their view of professional ethics from engaging in the public conversation on how to get out of this mess. While trying to find a way out that would allow me to do something positive and meaningful on climate change, I applied for a slew of jobs and didn’t get interviewed for any. Then, with Rebeka applying to master’s programs, we came up with an idea to apply to the same places and hopefully end up studying at the same school. She went to Yale, I went to U of T, essentially for lack of better options at the time.

I think if I could send what I know now about how the PhD program has gone so far back in time to myself in 2011 or 2012, that version of me would choose to do something else. At the same time, I feel like these years have been some of the most important and productive in my life, albeit not particularly in the academic sense. One reason grad school was appealing was as a platform to do activist work that I wasn’t allowed to in government. While both helping establish and run Toronto350.org and the U of T divestment campaign involved a lot of suffering, frustration, despair, and heartache, they also made me learn a great deal about activism and clarify my own thinking about how to drive political change to avoid catastrophic climate change.

The chance to be part of the Massey College community, as a resident for three years and subsequently as a non-resident and alumnus, has undoubtedly been a major boon of these past ten years. People joke that “youth is wasted on the young” and in some ways the positives of being at university are wasted on those who haven’t been in the working world. All through my time at Massey, and through the PhD generally, I have felt fortunate for being able to appreciate the contrast between employment and education and the rich social and intellectual life at universities. If people ever ask me now about whether to do a PhD, I tell them that the only reason to do it is because you enjoy being in university so much that you are willing to sacrifice a great deal of lifetime income, career progression, and retirement security to have the chance to spend more time in school. I haven’t the slightest idea where the rest of my life will take me, but at least I did cherish and value my extended exposure to the scholarly environment, even though my actual PhD work was often frustrating and less rewarding. The photography I did at Massey has also undoubtedly been the most extensive and successful project I have undertaken in that craft.

The academic progression from undergrad to M.Phil to PhD is based on the idea that a high degree of academic success in the prior program demonstrates your suitability for the latter. At no stage does the application and acceptance program consider your personal and emotional maturity, and thus ability to endure in something as lonely and unforgiving as a PhD. In retrospect, I definitely didn’t have the emotional skills to thrive as a PhD student in 2012 — just as I didn’t have the emotional security and skills to make a real success of my M.Phil thesis in 2007. I didn’t have the self-assurance to push through the ego defence reflex to criticism of my work, and therefore I couldn’t really be helped to make it better. To a lesser degree I still don’t, which is doubtless part of why writing up has been so painful.

I don’t want to get into the details here, but I feel at this point that the most valuable thing that has happened to me during the PhD program has been the way exposure to the acute and intolerable suffering of others — and my powerlessness to intervene and stop it — has forced me to take responsibility for my own life as the only thing I can control. Again I don’t want to get into details, but there have been immature forms of self-destructive behaviour that exposure to that suffering has burned away for me, and I think that will endure for the rest of my life. Metaphorically, I feel like I will never need a tattoo because my scars are already all the permanent and individualized marking I need. As assessed by my present-day self, achieving that (though it was totally impossible to predict beforehand) is itself sufficient to justify everything that I have put into this doctorate.

There are still three big reasons I want to finish my dissertation and the program. I think that I have collected information and analysis which would be of value to both the academic and activist community, and it will get more credibility and attention as a successfully defended PhD thesis than as anything I publish independently or elsewhere. The only real benefit I could promise to my research participants is that they would get to see the results, so I feel an obligation to them to get this material out into the world. Even if I am totally wrong, I will hopefully give others something productive to argue against. Finally, even though it has taken ten years I feel like it will be a whole lot easier for the rest of my life to explain to potential employers how I had a long and difficult, but ultimately successful, experience in the PhD, as opposed to one that ended after so much time and effort with no degree. There may be elements of sunk cost fallacy in that, but it doesn’t seem irrational to me.

P.S. In another example of how hard it is to judge whether an outcome is good or bad at the time it happens, I am now glad that I wasn’t accepted to any of the top-tier US schools where I applied, though it felt a bitter blow then. With the Trump election and its terrifying consequences, I’m very hesitant about the idea of even visiting the US and glad that I spent these years building up knowledge and personal connections within Canada.