No one wants to abolish the police, not even the people who say they do

Why is it that people on the left insist on describing sensible programs with slogans that make those programs look crazy?. It’s fallacious to attack someone else with a strawman argument, but it’s just silly to try to defend yourself with one. And yet people on the left keep doing this. Bernie Sanders offers programs that would strengthen the safety net already present in our capitalist society, making changes that are differences in degree, and not in kind. And yet he insists on calling himself a socialist, thus losing the vote of every Cuban and Venezuelan in Florida. Sanders also claims that he wants to abolish all private health insurance, even though the bill he wrote abolishes only private primary insurance, and specifically protects private supplementary insurance. Both the media and the candidates ignored this distinction, and the result was the destruction of both Warren’s and Sanders’ candidacies. And now we have demands to “abolish” and “defund” the police, allegedly “supported” by arguments that demand something very different once you read the fine print.

https://www.nytimes.com/…/…/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html

“Mariame Kaba’s New York Times Op-Ed was titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”. The article itself contains numerous examples of police abuse of power, but no explanations of how innocent people are to be protected from theft and murder if there were no police at all. instead, the article points out that it is important to…