Francis Fukuyama – Against Identity Politics

"Abolish the police" is pretty much right out of Kropotkin, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with that (perhaps rightly). "Abolish" as opposed to "disband" is a deliberate nod to "abolition", as in slavery abolition. See also: the meme about how modern policing is descended from slave patrols in the Antebellum South (based on my non-professional reading, this seems to be half-true, and it looks more like modern policing developed in 18th-century England).

ACAB... meh. Because of the power dynamics involved, I see nothing wrong with assuming that any police officer is hostile and a threat to your life and liberty. Police departments generally seem incapable of regulating themselves effectively and seem mostly immune to civilian oversight. Maybe there are exceptions in certain parts of the world.

I do agree that some people take "defund" further than others. I also think that a lot of people are "defund revisionists" to some extent, who are squeamish about really aggressively defunding in starve-the-beast fashion, much like how people are squeamish about "abolishing" the police. But I don't think it's a bad thing that any given crowd doesn't agree on what exactly it means. Politicians seem to be more or less uniformly interpreting it in the way I described it.

This is a false equivalence.

On the one hand, the Democratic party has unequivocally rejected “defund the police” on multiple occasions. First in the 2020 primary by electing a presidential candidate who explicitly rejected the slogan, and continues to do so as president; then by excluding it from its platform altogether; and most recently by a nearly unanimous bipartisan vote in the senate to denounce the slogan. So the record is quite clear that Democrats do not in fact stand for “defund the police” beyond a loud minority.

On the other hand, Republican senators have unanimously refused to renew the Voting Rights Act, which until 2006 enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support. The VRA is one of the enduring legacies of the civil rights movement and has been a bulwark in protecting Black citizens in particular from disenfranchisement in the southern states. This is evidenced by the fact that, since the VRA has lapsed, virtually all Republican-controlled states have resurrected the same sweeping restrictions on the right to vote that MLK and others marched against. Let’s not even get into the January 6 attack on the capitol which was instigated and carried out by openly white supremacist organizations and which, to this day, the Republican party refuses to denounce, probably because so many of its own leadership is directly implicated.

So, yes, the Republican party is now defined by white nationalism. This is an established fact, and you being uncomfortable with it does not make it less true.

Anyway it's not "character assassination" if it's true. I don't know enough about this person's work over time but.

> always defending imperialism and the current power structure as the correct, natural and inevitable course of events, with no other alternative possible

That does describe some people I can think of, so it's at least possible this is a fair description of his position.

This is demonstrably untrue though. There's no conspiracy, intersectionality is growing, because it's a useful framework for finding similarity and solidarity across boundaries that used to be sharper like race, language, disability, religion.

The claim makes no sense, this is not how attention works. If more people are thinking and talking about something there will be more energy and attention on it for that time, not less.