First, the Dem Party can shut up about bad slogans. The party isn’t terrible at at tactics, but they haven’t had a good strategic political idea in 50 years.

The last strategic idea they had at all was to “triangulate,” AKA be more republican.

And though “economic anxiety” as an explanation is bs, it remains that the Dem party has largely failed to mention much less address decades of wage stagnation and diminishing power for workers.

Lacking a vision, Dems left a segment of the population to marinate in racism.

On all fronts where there has been actual progress (eg, marriage equality), the battles have been won by activists and organizers, with the party trailing behind, often reluctantly.

Certainly now, but really since the disasters of the W admin, a halfway competent party could have utterly destroyed the GOP.

Instead, Dems are desperately trying to prop up a center that has already collapsed

And the center dogma that has most obviously collapsed is the assimilationist consensus on race that placed its hopes in the healing power of hypocrisy.

Racism and anti racism are the only choices now.

Which isn’t to say that the Left is particularly brilliant at politics either. The 2020 Bernie campaign gave voters the choice of either supporting Bernie or being a bad person.

Obviously, many more voters were willing to risk being bad people.

Bernie’s campaign failed to see the difference between activist tactics and the tactics required in a campaign for office.

So what about “Defund the police”? First, as @JuliusGoat points out, it’s a direction. And it’s the right direction. And if we follow that direction even a little way, people will see real benefits and want to go further in that direction.

And tho he was linking it to argue against what I was saying, this is a really good thread on choosing a direction and moving toward it. https://twitter.com/juliusgoat/status/1334844633197764609