OPINION:
Defund the Police: Another bad idea from higher ed
In the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in May
2020, 'Defund the Police' went quickly from theory to reality.
At the core of this school of thought is this concept, according to Hochman, that '[c]rime is the result of social conditioning rather than a permanently flawed human nature.'
Timothy Furnish | Faculty, Reinhardt University
Friday, October 21, 2022 7:08 AM
In the wake of George
Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in May 2020, “Defund the Police” went quickly from
theory to reality. In short order, a number of prominent House Democrats called
for cutting police budgets. At least 13 American cities actually
did so by the summer, which resulted in crime spikes.
That was the
unpleasant reality. But what about the theory behind it? Where did the idea
that reducing spending on police departments would benefit anyone come from?
The answer is higher
education, the source of many of our society’s current woes.
As Nate Hochman detailed in
2020, a “fringe proposal” of university left-wingers gained support among many
in the Democrat party. The moderate version promoted alternatives to armed
cops. The radical one advocated getting rid of police departments altogether.
Hochman stated that
anti-police theory originated in the 1920s with the German Marxist Walter Benjamin,
whose ideas were then taken up by the American Black Nationalist W.E.B. Dubois
in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction.
[RELATED: WATCH: 'Your kids have to be protected. America
doesn't need to be destroyed.']
But it took Black
feminist activists like Angela Davis, who decried the “prison-industrial
complex,” to shape the theory into a form usable by the likes of the Black
Panthers in the 1960 and 70s.
At the core of this
school of thought is this concept, according to Hochman, that “[c]rime is the
result of social conditioning rather than a permanently flawed human nature.”
This perspective is a regular feature of Critical Race Theory (CRT), and “is
entirely removed from the historical facts and functions of human societies.”
Marxism is a root
ideology of CRT, according to academic James Lindsay and my peer Higher
Education Fellow Adam Ellwanger.
Marxism views the police as armed enforcers of the ruling class and its
capitalist system. For the far left, men and
women in blue are “nothing but a tool of an unjust society’s rule” who must be
abolished.
Marxism is a staple of American academia. This is why,
as Angela Morabito pointed out in Campus
Reform last year, so many universities offered classes on defunding
the police and abolishing prisons. University libraries, like the University of
Washington’s, also offered guides to the topic—which presented no dissenting
sources.
Of course, the
primary organization pushing to defund police since 2013 has been Black Lives
Matter. (BLM). Which, despite media attempts to
deny it, is clearly Marxist. So
it should come as no surprise that BLM still promotes cutting resources for
cops on its website.
At least that group
is not openly advocating violence against police, as Antifa has
done.
However, despite
Marxist professors’ provenance and Leftist politicians pushing it, defunding the
police is unpopular with most Americans.
In fact, according to
Pew, far more Americans want
increased police budgets than decreased ones. And even in 2020, when the
defunding fervor was at its height, only 26% of those surveyed actually favored
defunding the police.
The bottom
line? Marxist theory from higher education actually holds little appeal for
most Americans in the real world. For that, we can be thankful.
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