What's in a name?

Republicans delight in name calling. When members of their own party don’t pass a hard right purity test, they call them RINOs, Republicans In Name Only. Mysteriously, there are leading Democrats, most notably Bernie Sanders, who seem to delight in being SINOs, Socialists In Name Only. It’s mysterious, because one thing is perfectly clear: Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. I learned about socialism in the fifth grade, at P.S. 8 in the Bronx. (Yeah, we actually learned this stuff back then.) It’s a system in which the means of production is owned by the state. Has anyone ever heard Bernie advocate for nationalizing U.S. Steel, or Procter & Gamble, or Victoria’s Secret? Bernie is a capitalist who believes in a robust social safety net and government guardrails to prevent abuses by big business. So why does he insist on calling himself a socialist, when he knows that socialists are about as popular in this country as child molesters? (In fact, in 2017 in Alabama, an actual child molester ran for the Senate against a Democrat he’d labeled a socialist and came within a hair’s breadth of winning!) 

Which brings us to “Defund the Police.” All Democrats and most Americans want to reform the police. We’re almost all in favor of revamping the training cops receive and establishing national standards. We want to innovate new technologies to help cops subdue violent people without using lethal force or endangering their own lives. We’d like to see a large number of social workers and psychologists trained to accompany cops on domestic disturbance calls, to help peacefully defuse those conflicts. Clearly, that stuff is going to take more money not less. “Defund the Police” isn’t what progressives mean or want. Yet, they’ve hung the phrase around their own necks like an anchor. Why not call the program “Community Cops,” or “21st Century Policing,” or any of the countless inoffensive names that any half-assed copywriter could come up with between episodes of Schitt’s Creek?

The crux of this discussion hit the fan last week in a leaked conference call among congressional Democrats, in which Abigail Spanberger of Virginia took her fellow caucus members to task for using some of this language to wrest defeat from the jaws of victory. Progressives struck back furiously, claiming that they were the reason Biden won, not the reason their House and Senate candidates lost. Their chief spokesperson, unsurprisingly, was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is, undoubtedly, the most gifted retail politician of her generation. And her personal charisma is such that the details of what she says and does have hardly mattered to voters in her district. But other Democrats who follow her down the “Defund the Police” rabbit hole without actually being her have already begun winding up as losers, which is exactly what Representative Spangenberger was exorcised about. In the recent election, those losers either made a doomed but noble stand for truth, justice, and the American Way; or, they fucked any chance we had at making some progress towards economic, social, and political equality in this country. 

Call it whatever you like.