All Cops Are Bastards and Abolish the Police Are the Two Dumbest Slogans of All Time

It’s Hard To Take You Seriously When You Say You Want To Defund the Police and Then by That You Mean You Support Something Other Than Defunding the Police

Imagine someone gave a winning political slogan: defund the schools! When you asked them what they meant by that, they told you—when we say defund the schools, we don’t mean literally defund them. We just mean, you know, get rid of the bad stuff that we fund in schools. Now, the merits of their proposal could be debated, but there’s a glaring problem; their slogan is not what they advocate. If your slogan is “defund schools,” then you should support actually defunding schools.

Imagine if the school reformers had the slogan “all teachers are bastards.” When asked what they meant, they muttered some half-baked platitude about how teachers were, while not individually bad people, part of the institutional system of capital and whiteness that disenfranchises minorities. Now, what they were saying would of course be wrong—but even if it were right, they should pick a better slogan. Your slogan should not be the exact opposite of what you mean. When you say “all members of some group are bastards,” you should mean that all members of that group are bastards. I think that eating from factory farms is completely immoral, but I wouldn’t say that all meat eaters are bastards, because being part of some bad system does not a bastard make. If your slogan was “abolish schools,” and you did not want to abolish schools, that would be a pretty big problem.

Generally, the idea of a slogan is that it sounds better than your ideas actually are. Being pro-life sounds great, as does pro-choice—most people like both life and choice. If you’re going to design a slogan, you should not have the slogan sound much more radical and crazy than the idea—that’s why it would be foolish for the pro-choice movement to call themselves the “anti some lives movement,” and foolish for the slogan of libertarians who want to end the drug war be “give cocaine to five year olds,” which of course doesn’t actually mean giving cocaine to five year olds, just that the war on drugs is bad.

And yet it seems like progressives do the opposite. They make their slogans as vile, repulsive, and off-putting as they can, such that they’re even willing to sacrifice accuracy. Victoria Gagliardo-Silver, an advocate of both abolishing the police and the notion that all cops are bastards, helpfully explains that she doesn’t really mean what she says and that when she says all cops are bastards, she is not speaking English but instead speaking some strange secret code

Something is very, very wrong in American police culture. This is why the saying “ACAB” — or “All cops are b*****ds” — has become a popular rallying cry. It doesn’t actually mean every single cop is a bad cop, just like saying Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean white lives don’t. “ACAB” means every single police officer is complicit in a system that actively devalues the lives of people of color. Bad cops are encouraged in their harm by the silence of the ones who see themselves as “good.”

Generally, when one says that all members of some group have some property they mean that that property is had by every single member of the group. This is in fact what all means. But apparently, when progressives say all Xs are Y, they really mean that there’s a big problem with many X’s being Y. “All rooms of the house are on fire,” the progressive declares, which effectively conveys that, though only the two bedrooms are on fire, something has gone very wrong with the house in regards to fires, and so this is a serious problem. Additionally, she reports that when she says all rooms of the house are on fire, she does not mean that other rooms in other houses are not on fire.

The analogy to black lives matter is particularly funny and just seems to be based on a basic error in reasoning. When you say “all Xs are Y” that does not mean “non Xs aren’t Y.” All people in California are in the United States, but many people in the United States aren’t in Calofornia, just as black lives mattering does not mean non-black lives don’t matter. But when you say “all Xs are Y” you mean that all Xs are Y, not that there are big systemic problems with too many Xs being Y, and if all you mean is that there are big systemic problems, then you really should say that. If a third of your children are missing toes because you cut them off, there might be a big institutional problem with you cutting off your children’s toes, but it would be inaccurate to say “all my children are missing toes.” This is a point of elementary logic.

James Poulter declares “The pithy phrase "all coppers are bastards" is a systemic critique of the role of the police.” No, the phrase all cops are bastards has a meaning, namely, that all cops are bastards. If you want to say the police are systemically flawed, say that—don’t just say something that is not what you mean. People in published papers are even analyzing things through the frame of ACAB—despite it being total nonsense.

Rawshawn Ray explains that none of the words in progressive sloganeering mean what one thinks they mean.

“Defund the police” means reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality. That’s it. It’s that simple. Defund does not mean abolish policing. And, even some who say abolish, do not necessarily mean to do away with law enforcement altogether.

Defund does not mean get rid of the funds, just make there be a bit less funding. Perhaps debeaking chickens just gets rid of part of their beaks and dethrone means to take away part of a throne. Google defines defund as “prevent (a group or organization) from continuing to receive funds,” but no matter—defunding the police just means reducing police funds by some amount. And abolish doesn’t mean abolish either—it just means to make big reforms. Thus, when a person says “abolish the fillibuster,” they really mean it should be reformed a lot and “abolish abortion” just means reform it a lot.

Those of us who did not live under a rock in 2020 remember just how ubiquitous these slogans were. Every white girl on Instagram had #ACAB in her bio, and half of them were posting on social media about how overwhelming the moral imperative is to abolish the police.

Why is this? Why is it that progressives want to make their slogans so utterly off-putting that they’re only attractive to nine people in the continental United States, each of whom are Marxist professors at elite universities? Is Karl Rove secretly writing the progressive slogans to make them maximally terrible?

I think that part of the answer is that progressives disproportionately want to appeal to radicals while non-progressives disproportionately want to appeal to moderates. The Bernie Bros see the conservatives and centrists as their enemies and communists as, while perhaps going a bit too far, fundamentally on their team. So even though they realize that actually abolishing the police would be a disaster, they want to maintain the support of the people who actually want to abolish the police. So they say what they don’t mean.

Politics is a team sport. And progressives tend to see the left-wingers as fundamentally on their team, even if they go a bit too far. That’s why, though my Democratic mother would prefer a Desantis presidency to a communist takeover, she cannot muster up anywhere near as much outrage towards communists as Desantis. Because the communists, while nuts, are basically on the same team.

It also allows them to dogwhistle. Now, the term dowhistle is clearly overused, but when people use a slogan to convey a secret hidden meaning which they claim to explicitly deny, that is textbook dog-whistling. It is the kind of dogwhistling that George Bush uses when he quotes a bible verse—the people who it’s really for know what it means, and other people don’t mind. When you say something with a vague meaning specifically to appeal to radicals who almost everyone opposes, that is dog whistling. It would be dog-whistling if right-wing politicians had pernicious, pro KKK messages, and it’s also dog-whistling when left-wing politicians, behind a veneer of moderacy, are trying to appeal to people who think that there should be no police, that when people call the cops as someone breaks into their home, nothing should happen.

But doing this is strategically disastrous. If you want to win elections, if you want to appeal to actual moderates, then it makes sense not to sound like you support things that are wildly unpopular and terrible ideas, just to pander to the people who hold the wildly unpopular and terrible ideas. If progressives actually care about winning rather than appealing to a small gaggle of crazed radicals, they should support things that are actually popular, rather than crazy and fringe. If progressives want to win and do well, they should see themselves on the same team as most of the country, rather than a small number of insular academics.