What do Malcolm Gladwell, far right propagandists, Democratic politicians, the non-profit Vera Institute for Justice, and “socialists” from Jacobin Magazine have in common?

Why this post is so important to me

I write today’s post because the stakes of how we talk about repression in this moment are high. We must all be fighting the logic, assumptions, infrastructure, and ideologies underlying an increasingly fascist threat, and a number of prominent people associated with the “left” and the “center” are failing us.

There are powerful forces in our culture that have political and economic incentives to mislead us about what kinds of social investments make us safer and to obscure the harms of more investment in corporate-government repression. They are all around us, and they are relentless. In this post, I argue that it is almost never wise or “practical” for any progressive politician, pundit, think-tanker, academic, or non-profit organization to lie to people about safety and repression as a strategy to win. When I am asked for advice on this topic, I always say the same thing: Politicians and advocates should first align themselves with the most vulnerable and stand confident in their values, and then they should treat people like adults by telling them the truth. We can all then organize around those truths using basic evidence and compelling stories that resonate with wider audiences.

Of course we should study hard how to present the truth and how to engage with people from all walks of life. We should be open-hearted and not annoying. We should be welcoming to those who start out with different views. We can be incremental and patient. The fact that “the left” and non-profits have failed at speaking in appealing ways in the past is not reason to lie to people and “move to the right,” it is a reason to interrogate how we can more generously and humbly share the truth as we see it and build community around it.

Promoting ineffective policies that expand corporate-government surveillance and violence—and then telling people it’s good for them—falls well outside the bounds of reasonable massaging of “messaging.” Because once people on the left start repeating the fascist mantra that 2+2=5—in this case that more authoritarian policies, profitable surveillance, militarized policing, targeting of immigrants, etc. will create a safer and better society—it will become difficult or impossible to dislodge that framework in the future. That’s true not only from a communications perspective, but also because that same police and surveillance infrastructure will be used to hobble or eliminate the left in the meantime.

As you read through the examples below from popular pundits to leftist magazines to non-profits organizations to Democratic politicians, keep in mind my ultimate point: There is no progressive victory worth winning if it is grounded in lies about the punishment bureaucracy, what it is, who it serves, and why.

A new push in elite circles to launder pro-police misinformation for people who buy books in the airport

In the last few weeks, Malcolm Gladwell has been all over the media promoting his new book and calling for unprecedented expansion of policing in America.

In interviews with Oprah, The New Yorker, numerous popular podcasts, and other outlets with a mass audience, Gladwell first asserts that the U.S. has way fewer police officers than European countries (which is wrong) and then regurgitates the debunked idea that expanding the total number of armed cops would make us safer. He then further speculates (with no empirical basis) that expanding the number of cops by several hundred thousand armed officers would also, paradoxically, reduce police violence. Here’s the crux of that point as Gladwell explained it to Oprah:

“In fact there’s a brilliant study that was done by these two guys at Harvard, who are the furthest thing from conservatives—they’re in fact self-identified socialists. And they make this argument that, around the world, levels of police brutality are highest in places where police are fewest. . . A fundamental insight that made me really rethink a lot of what I thought about crime.” [In addition to this point being entirely unsubstantiated and factually untrue, Gladwell attempts to explain the false claim with contrarian guesswork, again with no evidence supporting it, about how when there are more cops, perhaps police don’t need to use as much brutality and violence and so are nicer.]

If you’re short on time and want to skip ahead to my critiques of Democrats, certain progressive non-profits, and “pro-police socialists,” here is a brief list of the most important things Gladwell gets wrong:

  1. The pro-police “study” by “two socialist Harvard professors” on which Gladwell relied in interviews with Oprah and The New Yorker is actually just an article and not a “study” that does independent empirical research on the effectiveness of police or police violence, was not peer reviewed, and has been debunked in every material detail in the chapter of Copaganda that I have uploaded in full here.
  2. Gladwell bases his claim that the U.S. is vastly “underpoliced” compared with other countries on an incorrect count of “police officers” that leaves out many policing agencies, such as ICE, one million private police that now patrol our cities, and many many many more local, state, and federal police. The foundation of his argument is therefore based on an embarrassing factual error, and the U.S. actually has more police than the median rich country even according to the admission of the very same Harvard professors Gladwell cites. And the U.S. having more police than the median wealthy country they studied is true even if you leave out the privately deputized cops, which would essentially double the number of U.S. police.
  3. Gladwell ignores the social costs of police, including what mass surveillance and militarized police do to the possibility of democracy and how police use their organized political power to block the social investments that actually increase safety and security for ordinary non-wealthy people. He therefore obscures the longer causal chain in which policing as we know it increases violence and makes people less safe. Indeed, coordinated and intentional police surveillance, infiltration, and violence has been used to attempt to crush every major progressive social movement in the last 150 years, including the women’s suffrage, civil rights, labor, disability justice, indigenous rights, reproductive rights, immigrant rights, anti-war, LGBTQ, anti-genocide, and climate justice movements, among many others.
  4. There is no evidence that expanding the number of police would reduce police violence, as Gladwell embarrassingly speculates. This is completely made up, and wrong to the point of erasing millions of additional police sexual and physical assaults.
  5. Gladwell obscures the empirical evidence finding that policing as we practice it in the U.S. does not do a good job preventing or reducing even the narrow range of interpersonal violence Gladwell focuses on, and also that there are other less harmful and more effective social investments we can make to reduce interpersonal violence.
  6. The notion that we could add hundreds of thousands of cops even if we wanted to is a fantasy. Police departments around the country struggle to fill the open positions they already have extra funding for (one reason we see so much money thrown at police tech companies for mass surveillance boondoggles or your local cops being trained by the Israeli military). Even if, contrary to the evidence, police were the answer to, say, taking gun violence or sexual assault in the United States to zero, and even if we ignored the repression of progressive movements, surveillance, mass incarceration, family separation, and violence that come with more armed cops using Flock and Palantir software along with tasers and SWAT teams, it’s irrelevant because hundreds of thousands more people do not want these gun-carrying jobs.

The details of Gladwell’s “underpolicing” fraud

Gladwell’s argument on Oprah and in the New Yorker podcast above is predicated on the same article by two Harvard professors named Adaner Usmani and Christopher Lewis (calling for 500,000 more cops) that I debunk in Copaganda. Aligning himself with fascist sheriff unions, the far-right Manhattan Institute, and the oligarch controlling the editorial board of the Washington Post, Gladwell calls the professors’ proposal “fascinating” and proclaims that the professors “argue very persuasively” that we need half a million more armed cops. As I warned a couple years ago, Gladwell also picks up on the counterinsurgency tactic used by the professors, suggesting that their proposal is more credible because they self-identify as “socialists” and “progressives.” Because it is vital to understanding the charade of elite opinion formation around ideas scientifically akin to climate science denial, I have reproduced the relevant chapter here in its entirety. Every word applies to Gladwell. (I also recommend checking out the following chapter*,* called How Bad Academic Research Becomes News, which is about the flat-earther criminology cliques Gladwell also references in his interviews and explains how faux “science” makes it way from a corrupt cabal of heavily funded pro-police and mass surveillance operatives to journalists like Gladwell and Matt Yglesias.)

One particularly embarrassing thing for longtime The New Yorker editorDavid Remnick and The New Yorker podcast is that no one seems to have fact checked Gladwell’s foundational assertion that Western European countries have way more police and spend relatively more on policing than the U.S. (both untrue). Nor did anyone question Gladwell’s even more foundational assertion that tweaks in police numbers or tactics have ever been shown to have a significant effect on levels of interpersonal violence in a given society. And no one even pointed out that when Gladwell cherry-picked a single European city as if it illustrated some broader point—claiming that Berlin (an outlier and by far the most policed city in Germany) has way more police than Los Angeles (one of the lowest per capita municipal forces among large U.S. cities)—he omitted most of the “law enforcement” officers operating in Los Angeles! It’s troubling that no one was prepared to even ask Gladwell about how he got his numbers or point out basic things like the LAPD is not the only police force operating in Los Angeles: the LA sheriff alone is larger than the LAPD, and there are sprawling overlapping forces (state police, federal agents of many varieties, including ICE and CBP, etc.), dozens of smaller municipal police forces in the Los Angeles area in an interconnected multi-government city-county-state-federal scheme nothing like the city of Berlin, and the fact that, unlike Germany, the U.S. contracts about 1 million privatized police officers (which itself more than doubles the total number of U.S. police even assuming the truth of the sources Gladwell cites).

The truth is, it’s difficult to count the true number of relevant “police” across these countries (let alone the many other countries with lower crime rates and fewer police, which Gladwell strategically omits), and Gladwell certainly has not attempted to do so in a serious way or told The New Yorker audience about all the assumptions and omissions he made. Nor does Gladwell address in these public appearances whether officers are armed, what surveillance technology and budgets they wield, or numerous other relevant factors. Nor does the use of the outlier Berlin example hold with many other European/American cities and countries or explain differences in violence—the U.S. policing footprint exceeds these other places as a general matter and levels of violence are far more determined by other factors according to the scientific consensus Gladwell omits. (For example, Germany has far more egalitarian health care, housing, economic, and educational systems, and very different levels of civic engagement.) The New Yorker’s top editor on its flagship podcast going along with all these wrong numbers and genuflecting before Gladwell’s lack of rigor is even more problematic, and different from my experience working with the magazine on many stories over the last 15 years in which every assertion made by me and my clients is exhaustively scrutinized before it is permitted to be shared with the magazine’s liberal readers.

Gladwell is not just misleading people about the raw number of police though. He has not engaged with the empirical evidence rejecting the supposed benefits he claims come from more cops (empirical research overall shows that more armed police does not make us safer) or social costs of adding more armed police. These social costs include, but are not limited to: the authoritarian escalation we are in; the way big-data policing exemplified by surveillance tech companies like Flock and Axon alters the power wielded by police; the widespread focus of U.S. police on collaboration with ICE and criminalizing things like abortion, dissent, disability, being unhoused, and low-level drug addiction; the connections between police domestically and abroad, such as overlapping training of right-wing secret police and death squads, training of U.S. police by the Israeli military, and shared operations and intelligence aimed at crushing left-wing movements in numerous countries; the political power of police used domestically to crush progressive movements for 150 years; and many of the other prodigious social costs to infant mortality, birthweight, sexual assault, early-childhood education, health, well-being, and safety.

Incredibly, Gladwell skips over the research on the effectiveness of non-police interventions and alternatives. As I explained with the Harvard professors, if you’re going to argue that we need to invest in something, it’s not a persuasive argument if you ignore research showing there are other ways to achieve more benefits that do not bring with them the social costs of the investment you are arguing for. (Oddly, at the crucial moment in Gladwell’s story to The New Yorker podcast about his own example of Baltimore, he sneakily co-mingles non-police community interventions with police, and David Remnick doesn’t point out the contradiction!) The whole thing is an exercise in what my grandmother would call “complete and utter nonsense” dressed up in fancy words designed in a lab like a McDonald’s hamburger for professional class elites who read The New Yorker but who do not want to see themselves as right-wing reactionaries. For some in this crowd, fascist logic, assumptions, policies, infrastructure, surveillance tech, and militarized SWAT team weaponry must be sold by someone who talks to them like Gladwell.

At one point, Gladwell even claims, with no explanation, that the fascist things he’s saying flow directly from “Foucault.” Gladwell didn’t provide a first name, so in fairness to him maybe there is someone named Rick Foucault who spread baseless authoritarian propaganda. He accompanies his reference to Foucault with a conclusion that the widely popular idea of shifting spending from the sprawling, militarized, and surveillance obsessed U.S. policing bureaucracy to other social investments is “an idea so completely at odds with any kind of empirical understanding of what police do, I can’t even… I can’t even utter the phrase ‘defund the police’ without blowing a gasket.” One has to wonder if Gladwell knows “what police do”—for example, that U.S. police are so focused on mass surveillance, debt-collection, traffic citations, civil forfeiture, media public relations, armed response to mental health calls, drug possession arrests, homelessness, eviction, and overtime boondoggles that they only choose to spend 4% of their time on the “violent crime” he claims to be motivated by.

Not to worry though, Gladwell’s invocation of “Foucault” can reassure The New Yorker podcast listeners that the legendary French critical social theorists who they sort of remember reading about in college would endorse Gladwell’s contemporary boot-licking. In fact, given Gladwell’s re-imagining of leftist critical French theory, it seems likely that Foucault himself would have been, along with the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, one of the early investors in the police surveillance corporation Palantir, which has profited so much from rising police budgets Gladwell favors.

Laundering these lies for the broader left

It’s not just Gladwell. In the last few months, a growing chorus of people who self-define as being on various parts of the left have attempted to manufacture a new consensus that progressives must support police more. All of them are lying to us.

In one recent week, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani all said pro-police things that differ from things they said in the past. The gist is that they are now claiming to believe that we will all be better off with existing levels of spending on policing and that the contemporary surveillance/militarized policing bureaucracy is, fundamentally, about keeping people safe. (Mamdani has gone so far as to take a position akin to climate science denial by several times falsely crediting NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch with crime declines even though crime declines are nationwide, less good in New York than some other cities, and unrelated to any policy tweak Tisch has made or conceivably could make based on any conception of the available empirical research.) Popular Obama-connected pundit Jon Favreau also said silly things, such as that calling for a world without the modern militarized nation-state border or the torturous prison system as we know it are so beyond the pale that those views are “abhorrent” and “moronic.” Someone named Eric Blanc, claiming to be a leading figure on the “right wing” within the Democratic Socialists of America, went on a popular radio program and said even sillier pro-police things (in addition to trying to gaslight listeners into accepting as a progressive solution what is basically Benjamin Netanyahu’s position on weapons to Israel), such as that calling to "defund the police” has “no practical upshot right now” and constitutes “taking an ideological position for the sake of it” and is “a reflection of a lack of experience and a lack of engagement in mass politics.” Jacobin magazine’s editors are urging fellow “socialists” to abandon calls to reduce the size, profit, and power of the policing industry, and a Jacobin-affiliated “think tank” called the Center for Working Politics published a report recommending that the left support more police and militarized border enforcement.

Most surprisingly, the establishment non-profit Vera Institute for Justice’s aligned political arm (called Vera Action)—which is ostensibly dedicated to fighting mass incarceration—has been organizing leading Democrats publicly and aggressively behind the scenes to adopt pro-police positions. Vera Action just released a “Messaging Guide” for Democrats heading into the midterm elections about how Democrats must unleash a barrage of pro-police “messaging” on their electorate. (Of course, while framed as “messaging,” Vera Action is also, in effect, promoting and discouraging certain policies.) The theme of Vera’s strategy for Democrats, set forth most nakedly on Page 4 of its Guide and in a recent op-ed, is to disseminate what they know to be misinformation, such as: (1) that something called “effective and accountable policing” exists and (2) that the left should “support” contemporary police budgets and forms of militarized policing/surveillance/procurement—supplemented, we are assured, with calls for some investments in alternatives to police—because policing as we know it is part of a “proven” approach to make us safer by “decades of evidence.”

Nobody at Vera or otherwise has any clue what “effective and accountable policing” means or can point to a single U.S. city or state or federal policing agency that is currently “effective and accountable.” I certainly cannot. There is not a single moment in U.S. history where the policing bureaucracy has been a democratically “accountable” institution or an “effective” driver of lower levels of interpersonal harm.1 Vera has not attempted to identify a police agency doing this or a moment in history when it happened, and in private Vera staff understands that there are no such examples. And this is the point of the propaganda: vague fantasies that sound like good short-term “messaging” but have no tangible substance that would force Democrats to propose anything that would actually constrain the size, power, profit, or authoritarian anti-democratic functioning of the repressive bureaucracies.

Vera’s conjuring the mythology of “effective and accountable” policing is similar to the propaganda corporate-backed pro-police Democrats employed following the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. Leading Democrats refused to question unprecedented ICE budgets and instead called for more money to be given to DHS for “accountability and transparency” by increasing their surveillance camera contracts with AI and police tech companies and expanding “training” budgets for right-wing militarized police consultants. (Those proposals were then happily seized upon by fascist DHS leadership.) And, of course, the entire point of the body of scientific literature on the topic is that policing as we know it is not an “effective” public safety strategy compared to other popular investments and policies, has nothing to do with solving the root causes of interpersonal violence, and actually decreases overall safety through long-term causal mechanisms I elaborate on here.

This non-profit “messaging” campaign is taking place in the context of growing authoritarian rhetoric from establishment Democratic politicians. While many of these politicians are not following some of Vera’s advice to pair pro-police messaging with nice-sounding falsities about “accountability,” they all share the core lie that existing or expanded levels of militarized, violent, brutal policing, surveillance, and incarceration is a reasonable, evidence-based solution to “public safety.” Many of these candidates are getting more specific than Vera’s advice would prefer, but in the process the candidates are taking Vera’s dangerous support for the lie of the “proven” “effectiveness” of policing to its logical conclusion: suggesting that more armed policing is a solution to fears of “safety” around drugs, homelessness, sexual assault, domestic violence, murder, and more. As always with copaganda, all of this relies on strategically omitting from public discourse what police actually do with most of their time and money.

One representative example that has garnered praise from those advocating that Democrats “move to the right” on repression is Governor Roy Cooper, who is running for Senate in North Carolina. On issues of “crime,” Cooper is running to the right of 1990s-era Bill Clinton, recycling 1970s-1980s right-wing “War on Drugs” fearmongering and, incredibly, bragging about promoting unconstitutional wealth-based pretrial detention using the for-profit bail bond industry. Cooper is putting up dramatic new television ads saying things like: “Keep your family safe and lock up criminals… I put drug dealers, rapists and murderers in prison and kept them there.” Having brought a successful constitutional civil rights case challenging abhorrent and ineffective mass detention of poor people using cash bail in North Carolina, I was alarmed to see this in a recent Cooper ad: “he bucked his party to oppose defunding the police, worked with Republicans to strengthen bail laws and partnered with President Trump to crack down on fentanyl.”

Lying about the police is not just wrong, it is also bad strategy

According to an October 14 local public news story, the North Carolina polls surrounding Cooper’s race show:

  • “voters are leaning toward Democrats in many statehouse races. It cites a connection between the leftward shift and the decline in President Donald Trump’s job approval ratings.”
  • “voters are worried about the lack of affordability above all else”
  • “Aside from political races, the poll also shows high levels of concern about healthcare access, energy costs, mass surveillance and corruption.”

Thus, many candidates not adopting Cooper’s pro-police rhetoric are also winning, and voters in North Carolina and across the country are clear that other issues on which the left has a demonstrated advantage are more salient to them right now. This is also consistent with 40 years of polling that super majorities would prefer shifting money from the punishment bureaucracy to other social investments.

We also know that this strategy of adopting right-wing framing, talking points, and lies about what makes us safe is not even effective on its own short-sighted terms. Research shows how the center-left in Europe found out that changing their messaging to adopt right-wing framing on matters like immigration enforcement, actually backfires politically in the face of far-right advances.

Thus, given what the public says it cares about the most and recent experiences with center-left parties “moving to the right,” Democrats are nonetheless being urged to demand that we need more cops who collaborate with ICE? Rake in record overtime cash? Blanket society with license plate readers? Lock people up before trial if their families lack cash? This is the strategic message we are being asked to center on the left at a time of unprecedented fascist threat and public backlash to corruption and inequality across a variety of economic and political issues?

The evidence does not support “socialist” think tanks and progressive national non-profits and Democratic candidates promoting authoritarian messaging as the only way the left must “message” to win elections, even setting aside the long term moral and strategic problems with that approach.

Not all of these candidates, non-profit groups, and “socialist” institutions have the same intentions and incentives—but it’s important to have a conversation about the strategies and motives behind this coordinated push on “the left” to expand militarized policing, surveillance, and immigration enforcement. Setting aside various grifting, counterinsurgency, and corrupt financial incentives among some of the people pushing for more repression, at least some of the people involved in boosting the police and prison industry as a good solution to “safety” right now are well-meaning, and their argument boils down to: “we have to move to the right on crime and immigration to defeat the fascists electorally. If we don’t, the left won’t win this immediate election in front of us.”

Some of these people call this form of intentionally misrepresenting both the empirical evidence on safety and their own moral values on state violence engaging in “mass politics” or “being practical.” They argue that it is possible to base a winning leftist coalition by strategically compromising on empirical truth and morality relating to central facts about corporate-government repression. In their eyes, the public is so fanatical about supporting militarized policing, giving money to surveillance corporations, caging the kinds of poor people that police and prosecutors almost exclusively target while ignoring the crimes of the powerful, and deporting immigrants that instead of drawing people’s attention to all of this stuff and speaking clearly against it we must lie to people about what the empirical evidence says so that people will take the rest of a left agenda seriously. Then, they say, once the left takes power, we can undo all the attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, emotions, infrastructure, and mythologies we helped to forge in the fires of moral panic. This is pure folly.

I’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks and months, but I want to make a few points right now.

These individuals and groups are choosing to lie to the public based on a short-term calculation of what they think is currently popular

First, it is important to understand that most of these people and their staffs believe that the thrust of their message to the public is untrue: these progressive groups do not believe subjectively that maintaining existing levels of investment or making more investments in the authoritarian punishment bureaucracy is good for overall safety. For their own different reasons, these pundits, politicians, “socialist” think-tankers, and advocates are making a strategic calculation that involves misleading people about what keeps them safe in order to advance their other political goals.

Having spoken to people behind the scenes in most of the situations above, here’s a crude summary of what is going on. These people on the left largely know:

  • about the scientific consensus that tweaks in policing strategy and numbers have little to do with societal levels of interpersonal harm;
  • that more police don’t make society safer, that other progressive interventions (housing, healthcare, education, etc.) are much more empirically connected to public safety;
  • that police are drivers and protectors of inequality (and therefore violence and premature death generally);
  • that there exist no meaningful mechanisms of civilian control over police in any major American jurisdiction such that none of the proposed “reforms” promoted by establishment Democrats (like body cameras and “training” for ICE and out-of-control local police violence) have any chance of making police more “accountable” or “transparent;”
  • that no U.S. jurisdiction has meaningful oversight or control over how police use surveillance and technology and that the public is largely unaware of the giant web of surveillance arrayed at them by police and the tech industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars;
  • that police across the country are collaborating with ICE and the surveillance industry on things that would horrify the vast supermajority of the public if known—growing outrage over Flock is just the tip of the iceberg;
  • that almost the entirety of the policing bureaucracy in the U.S. is and always has been arrayed against poor people and progressive social movements despite rampant corruption and criminality of elites;
  • that, as the recent Cornell University sexual assault scandal highlights, in practice the policing bureaucracy does not devote significant attention or play any meaningful role in reducing the main interpersonal crimes people care about and, indeed, “law enforcement” officers themselves commit hundreds of thousands of sexual assaults and domestic assaults at rates that dwarf the general population;
  • and that expanded policing and surveillance presents a key threat to the possibility of democratic participation in this moment of authoritarian escalation.

Unlike Gladwell, the progressives involved in these lies largely believe the things I just listed. I’ve discussed it with many of them and also worked on various things with many of them and their staffs over the years. However, each of these left-leaning individuals and groups has made a decision to mislead people based on calculations about what they think is currently popular.

They are wrong about what is popular

Second, as I explained in a previous essay on liberal propaganda surrounding the concept of “popularity,” a lot of these people are simply wrong about where the public actually stands when you ask poll questions with appropriate context. For example, although both Vera Action and the Center for Working Class Politics are steering policymakers and journalists towards more policing based on various privately funded polls as the basis for their strategy, those polls are misleading and unserious.

In fact, it’s alarming how flimsy their polling is. Both groups’ small number of polls consist of entirely manipulated and manipulable non-scientific survey questions designed by those groups to achieve certain results. They don’t test many obvious alternative “messages,” which should alone disqualify them. They also don’t provide essential context, don’t test competing messages along with strategies for public education, don’t control for biased and manipulated questions, and then inappropriately purport to extrapolate authoritative and quasi-scientific lessons for Democrats and “the left.” On the contrary, consistent mainstream polling shows that reducing the funding and power of police is actually one of the most popular public policies consistently polled by Gallup for 40 years. I urge you to read the last section of my linked essay on “popularity” about how contemporary political polling really works and how manipulable it is. It’s also crucial for more people to understand how fundamental progressive social change actually happens throughout history—in short: it has little to do with what professional class elites who consume mainstream news think is contemporaneously “popular.”

Relying on short-term polling to determine the strategy of progressive movements is not a good strategy.

Third, and more deeply, snapshot polling should never be the main determinant of a political strategy for people on the left. The proposals of Vera Action and the Center for Working Class Politics suffer from all of the more profound strategic pitfalls plaguing modern Democrats and center-left groups who rely too much on short-term polling: they ignore how social psychology, social movements, propaganda, and organizing actually work. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, was viewed in superficial polls conducted by elites as extremely unpopular during the civil rights movement up until his assassination, as were many of the demands made by the civil rights movement. Few of these groups would now argue that Dr. King should have “moved to the right” on issues of, say, segregation.

The commitment to selective weaponization of shoddy polls reveals that these groups are insufficiently committed to the larger strategic project of holding certain moral and scientific lines as a precondition to any political work worth doing and any political work that could possibly form the foundation of a genuinely liberatory mass movement. This is a problem because it is only that kind of latter phenomenon that could make the changes these very same groups purport to want. Chasing polls to determine one’s position on key empirical and moral truths is not a way to effectively organize and build movements even if the poll questions were more rigorously crafted, and even if arguing that more investment in lucrative repression did work better than all other strategies to win votes in the short term. Such a strategy means committing to positions and investments that make any future electoral victories almost impossible to turn into genuinely liberatory policy outcomes.

Taking power is not that helpful if you’ve committed yourself to not doing the things that make power worth taking or to reinforcing the attitudes and institutions that will stop you from doing anything significant with your power.

Lying to people is independently bad short-term and long-term strategy for the left

Strategic buffoonery of this kind based on polls that lack rigor is particularly alarming in this moment because it’s dangerous to boost fascist logic and infrastructure through lies at a time when the fascists hold so much power. I am reminded of Daniel Guerin’s 1936 masterwork Fascism and Big Business about the role of the professional class liberal elite in driving Italy and Germany toward fascism using similar strategic tactics and ill-fated moral compromises. Or Stuart Hall’s landmark 1988 work The Hard Road to Renewal,which charts the role of poorly-conceived strategies to abandon basic truths on the center-left in England, which led to the rise of Thatcherism.

In a nutshell, the lesson from this history is that the Vera Action, Center for Working Class Politics, and Democratic party strategy builds and reinforces ideology, culture, and factual beliefs that are hard to undo and that end up validating the fascists, leading many people to whom they appeal to support the fascists instead because, having been convinced by the propaganda, people prefer the genuine article of “law and order” over the imitation knockoff. And, from a political-economy perspective, this strategy results in the creation of organized special interests, bureaucracies, binding contracts, consultants, technologies, procurement infrastructure, cycles of harm, paths of least resistance, and political coalitions that are nearly impossible to unwind.

And perhaps most fundamentally, because these increases in repression do not actually solve the problems or make people’s lives better—as progressives acknowledge the scientific evidence showed us in advance—they end up creating deep cycles of cynicism and ultimately destroying the credibility of the professional class liberal establishment, leading many disaffected people to various opportunistic promises of far right demagogues who promise anything but the status quo elite liberal consensus.

But sure enough, Vera Action and the Center for Working Class Politics have proposed a comprehensive strategy for the entire left—again, at odds with the scientific consensus and what they themselves believe to be the truth, and at odds with their own moral values—based on a few poorly designed survey questions!

These ostensibly progressive groups who fancy themselves as part of an anti-fascist coalition thus propose strengthening and growing the key infrastructure under-girding fascist control at a time of acute fascist threat. And following the head-in-the-sand example set by these “progressive” groups, I haven’t even touched on the scandalous levels of Trump-era corrupt impunity for police and the merger of policing with a techno-surveillance industry run amok. We must ask: What’s the result of this absurd “progressive” bargain with police to win the hearts of the public at a time like this? A DHS empire so gargantuan that its detention budget alone for sprawling concentration camps is now 62% larger than the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons, while police officers across the U.S. stalk their exes using Flock, track down people seeking reproductive healthcare, and gleefully work with the feds to crush resistance to massively illegal immigration crackdowns. This hearty endorsement of more policing is an endorsement of growing authoritarianism, police infiltration of groups trying to combat climate crisis, police crackdowns on people trying to stop genocide, the greatest concentration of wealth in modern history, mind-numbing impunity for public corruption, and so on.

A true “mass politics” strategy for the left

A true “mass politics” approach for people with progressive values shouldn’t mean a search for the lowest common denominator of currently propagandized survey responses no matter what their connection to science or shared moral values. Instead, it should be a project to understand people’s material concerns and to organize around a morally and empirically sound vision that speaks to them.

Such an approach yields what I call my cardinal rule for progressive political strategy: the burden is always on people seeking to knowingly deviate from the available empirical evidence and their own moral convictions to meet a high bar that the ugly tradeoffs associated with lying to the public are required by some concrete countervailing benefit that could not be otherwise obtained by telling the truth.

Here, for example, if the overwhelming scientific evidence shows that crime and safety are much more connected to root causes like inequality, poverty, housing, healthcare, education, addiction, loneliness and human connection, toxic masculinity, environmental toxins, and deeper cultural trends, then there should be a high bar for lying to people that tweaks in police numbers and policies or the length of prison sentences are major factors in how safe they are. And if the evidence shows that more investment in the repressive surveillance and punishment bureaucracies actually hinders the push for progressive changes in those other areas, it would take a lot to justify telling the public that these repressive investments are costless.

Regarding the morality that must under-gird any widely popular progressive social movement, if your own values are opposed to the selective violence and brutality of this repression, then there should be a high bar in which overwhelming evidence supports that there are overriding benefits to advocating for such state violence, family separation, destruction of privacy, and repression of social movements. The little distorted poll questions tested by these organizations come nowhere close to justifying a society-wide embrace of corporate-government repression as we know it.

Happily, many leftist policies are extremely popular and also happen to relate to the issues people most care about right now. And, fortunately, there are also a lot of ways of telling the truth about safety and repression that meet people where they are without lying to them—I wrote about some of them in my linked “popularity” post above, and I do this every day in my work across the U.S. with people from across the political spectrum. Let’s hope that the anti-fascist coalition can have an internal reckoning without getting defensive and shift course before it’s too late.

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If you are interested in the chapter debunking the research relied on by those calling for more police, you can find it here. And please consider forwarding this newsletter to someone in your life who might be interested in it. Everything is always free, and any optional donations go to our work fighting systemic repression at Civil Rights Corps. (Also, I hope you like my new wax painting pictured above!)

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For an accessible comprehensive history of U.S. police, start with the book Our Enemies in Blue by Kristian Williams. You may also enjoy the work of Naomi Murakawa, Alex Vitale, Stuart Schrader, and Mark Neocleous.

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