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A rhetorical move on “the left” that is anti-dialectical and needs to be excised: citing poll numbers amongst the “working class” to determine whether or not “the left” should embrace a particular policy/issue.
I think this comes out of the fight for M4A, where poll numbers showing it’s wide approval were used as part of the argument for why democrats (who are cowards and opportunists) should embrace it as part of their platform.
The reason it was used is b/c Dems are risk-averse. (See also: the party’s position on gay marriage over the last two decades.) In a pitch to convince them to take on this obviously humane and righteous policy, its advocates felt the need to outline its minimal electoral risk.
The Dem horizon is constrained by material interest, too, of course, which is why the pitch failed. But it’s also severely constrained by the fear of advancing any policy that polls below 50%. The left should not embrace this constraint.
The example that prompted these tweets was someone citing polls (which ones is anyone’s guess, no notion of how the question was framed either) that show working class and poor people actually want “more cops” in their neighborhoods.
Following from that was the argument that abolition is a niche online interest that shouldn’t be taken seriously by the left. B/c it didn’t have “organic” support among working people, supposedly.
Leaving aside the quality or existence of these polls (and other problems too like the commentator’s insistence that abolitionists haven’t articulated alternatives to cops and prisons), the rhetorical function they serve is idiotic and dangerous.
To take a different example, here is an article about opinion polling on the Iraq War: https://www.pewresearch.org/2008/03/19/public-attitudes-toward-the-war-in-iraq-20032008/
When was the right time for the left to oppose it based on polls? February 2005? A little late. But I’m sure a majority of working class people supported it when it began! And we can’t possibly change their minds, right?
So the millions that marched against Iraq two decades ago and the millions that marched for racial justice this year are reduced to niche interest groups that should be taken “seriously” by “leftists.”
This is what happens when you reverse engineer your politics from polling instead of formulating them with moral and dialectical consideration and applying them to material circumstances: you become reactionary.
Instead of caving b/c the “working class” (and who that is or where they are is not specified by this commentator) wants, supposedly, “more cops” (presumably in opposition only to “less cops”) we ought to work to articulate a robust alternative to this false binary.
This is just a return to first principles: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
Anyone who claims to speak for what “the left” should do in this moment that doesn’t understand this stands discredited.
Anyone who claims to speak for what “the left” should do in this moment that doesn’t understand this stands discredited.
