Let’s steelman the position a bit, because I believe you’re putting “defund” and “abolish” into the same bucket.
I don’t like the cops. But I think—pessimistically—as long as civilization exists, they will have their niche. Humans alive today are neither Homo economicus nor hunter-gatherers (with very few exceptions.) There is a subset of things humans are capable of doing that perhaps cannot be solved any other way without abandoning society as we know it. The hardline abolitionists I know either are okay with abandoning society or believe that that subset is empty. I cannot abandon society without forgoing modern medicine which I need to live, and I doubt the latter position.
Compare veganism, a topic perhaps more grokked by this audience. The analogous, comparative strawman is “abolish animal exploitation entirely.” Yeah, that sure would be nice, and I think that actually defending this view as a bulwark against moderation is laudable, because it represents an ideal utopia—but I don’t see a path to it without first ending scarcity. The position that is actually held in my experience is “fight to minimize animal exploitation as much as possible.” The former goal is acknowledged to be more or less impossible, but it represents a world for us to dream of.
When people say, “abolish the police,” I think they dream—laudably! --- of a post-scarcity utopia in which ethics has been solved, there is functionally infinite care for everyone, etc. I think that’s a world worth dreaming about and fighting for, and part of that means holding the idealist bulwark. But—I am a pessimist—I do not believe we’ll ever get there. But I can still say without self-contradicting that the surface area of things we need the cops for should be aggressively minimized. We don’t need to torture and kill one moral patient per human per month, and we don’t need to send the cops after people dying deaths of despair.
This, despite its recent usage as a thought-terminating cliche, is what I actually believe is meant by DTP; and it sounds an awful lot to me like the view you’re endorsing.
I think they dream—laudably! --- of a post-scarcity utopia in which ethics has been solved, there is functionally infinite care for everyone, etc
IMO the problem is that that is best conveyed by “in an ideal world, we wouldn’t need the police”, which is trivial but also not quite as shocking or snappy a motto. But people are interested in what we should and could do now; and besides, IMO, the socialist/anarchist position that if only we removed injustices like capitalism or whatever suddenly everyone would just be always good and nice is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. As long as there is more than one human on this planet there are chances for conflicts of interests to form and thus crime to be beneficial. This doesn’t mean that the problem can’t be vastly ameliorated, but blaming everything on capitalism or such makes the latter just a kind of religious boogeyman, and is not serious analysis.
Let’s steelman the position a bit, because I believe you’re putting “defund” and “abolish” into the same bucket.
I don’t like the cops. But I think—pessimistically—as long as civilization exists, they will have their niche. Humans alive today are neither Homo economicus nor hunter-gatherers (with very few exceptions.) There is a subset of things humans are capable of doing that perhaps cannot be solved any other way without abandoning society as we know it. The hardline abolitionists I know either are okay with abandoning society or believe that that subset is empty. I cannot abandon society without forgoing modern medicine which I need to live, and I doubt the latter position.
Compare veganism, a topic perhaps more grokked by this audience. The analogous, comparative strawman is “abolish animal exploitation entirely.” Yeah, that sure would be nice, and I think that actually defending this view as a bulwark against moderation is laudable, because it represents an ideal utopia—but I don’t see a path to it without first ending scarcity. The position that is actually held in my experience is “fight to minimize animal exploitation as much as possible.” The former goal is acknowledged to be more or less impossible, but it represents a world for us to dream of.
When people say, “abolish the police,” I think they dream—laudably! --- of a post-scarcity utopia in which ethics has been solved, there is functionally infinite care for everyone, etc. I think that’s a world worth dreaming about and fighting for, and part of that means holding the idealist bulwark. But—I am a pessimist—I do not believe we’ll ever get there. But I can still say without self-contradicting that the surface area of things we need the cops for should be aggressively minimized. We don’t need to torture and kill one moral patient per human per month, and we don’t need to send the cops after people dying deaths of despair.
This, despite its recent usage as a thought-terminating cliche, is what I actually believe is meant by DTP; and it sounds an awful lot to me like the view you’re endorsing.
IMO the problem is that that is best conveyed by “in an ideal world, we wouldn’t need the police”, which is trivial but also not quite as shocking or snappy a motto. But people are interested in what we should and could do now; and besides, IMO, the socialist/anarchist position that if only we removed injustices like capitalism or whatever suddenly everyone would just be always good and nice is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. As long as there is more than one human on this planet there are chances for conflicts of interests to form and thus crime to be beneficial. This doesn’t mean that the problem can’t be vastly ameliorated, but blaming everything on capitalism or such makes the latter just a kind of religious boogeyman, and is not serious analysis.