In short, Hawley is conflating the moderate position – “defund the police” – with the more radical position of “abolish the police.” These two policy positions are different, and while a number of police abolitionists view defunding as a good first step, there are also many people who support defunding without supporting abolition. Conflating the two is thus a way of discrediting the moderate position.
Read MoreThe cause – and the historic root of the lion’s share, if not all, problems with America – is white supremacy. The belief in some essential hierarchy of human worth is obviously the problem. It’s why White Europeans stole land from Native Americans. It’s why we imported slave labor from Africa.
Read MoreBefore I really get going on the speculation, though, I want to talk about the end-of-history fallacy. There is a tendency to assume that the present state of affairs is somehow the final form of the world, that history is the story of how this current moment emerged. But the monstrosity of our current moment is making this harder and harder to swallow: the covers have been ripped off and we can see the poorly-made Rube Goldberg machine of history for what it is.
Read MoreThis concept, virtue signaling, then leached out of this column written by a mid-rate British columnist like heavy metals leaching into the soil. This term has become a common accusation of people on the right against people on the left, and the general message is quite simple: why are you pretending to believe in something?
Read MoreThis is leading me back to a line of thinking that has occurred to me over and over again: there is this brain bug, among those people insulated by wealth and other forms of class privilege, that service workers are, in some way, not full people. We’re categorized in their minds as children, or as students, or as congenital f*ck-ups not worth consideration in the calculus of how to run a society. Ultimately we are categorized as acceptable casualties.
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