(Daily Signal)—Socialists just can’t let the “dream” of prison abolition go until it becomes your nightmare.
Leftist politicians are struggling to handle the crime issue on the campaign trail as the signal has clearly gone out from their top “influencers” to avoid talking about “defund the police.”
Their media allies say that socialist candidates are “recalibrating,” which is an obvious spin to explain the spin.
The American people deserve the truth.
What socialists believe about police and prisons cuts to the heart of their utopian, unhuman belief system. Everything they do flows from a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity.
Much has been made about the zany Democratic Socialists of America platform that promotes such sober-minded policy ideas as eliminating borders, mass amnesty for all illegal aliens, and doing away with the Senate.
But in my mind, none of those ideas are as loony—or as emblematic of their false ideology—than their proposals about crime and prison.
The DSA website has a section devoted to the so-called Abolition Working Group, “formed to create a collective orientation towards abolitionist organizing within DSA and to build meaningful relationships with external organizations committed to the struggle for liberation.”
In other words, they are sending forth their politicians and activists to make sure that the “dream” of prison abolition becomes your nightmare.
Here’s what they demand:
-Defund the police by rejecting any expansion to police budgets or scope of enforcement while cutting budgets annually towards zero
-End the criminalization of working-class survival
-Freedom for all incarcerated people
-Demilitarize the police and end colonial policing of our cities and neighborhoods
-Freedom of working-class self-organization and democratic political action
-Invest in community self-governance and care, not cops
Sure, some of this may seem like pure gobbledygook, but under the hood it’s quite serious.
When they say they want to end criminalizing “working-class survival,” an odd thing for a movement so bereft of actual working-class people, what they mean is that they want to decriminalize theft.
And while their leaders wiggle their way around the subject, they drop hints that these absurd goals are still in sight.
Just listen to the unofficial leader of the socialist surge, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who recently said that “nobody” he knows believes in defunding the police (has he read the DSA website?), but he hopes one day we can abolish prisons.
There is something almost funny about the idea that Sanders and his socialist buddies are totally not for defunding the police, a position pretty much all their candidates and a huge number of Democrats enthusiastically, even rapturously, supported just a few years ago. Oh, but the arguably even more radical position of getting rid of prisons? Yes, let’s do it sometime.
One must also consider this curious incongruity.
Why would we fund the police if nobody could be put in prison? Are police officers just glorified security guards? Are we just paying them for the sake of paying them?
What Sanders’ statement on policing proves is not that socialists have backed away from their worst ideas, it’s simply that they must abide by some rules of politics. They can’t be honest about backing ideas that Americans despise after getting a small taste of the consequences, so they dodge, er, recalibrate.
However, committing to something most normal people probably haven’t even pondered, like getting rid of prisons, can still occasionally be slapped on the table like it’s some dreamy future possibility once all our socialist dreams come true.
It’s amusing, but it’s also terrifying.
They really do believe that their policies will lead to a future in which people will stop committing crimes. Listening to them try to explain exactly how that would all work out can be amusing, but that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in it.
And that’s why this issue matters. Prison abolition is inherently tied to their view of the world.
If you have a wholly materialistic understanding of humanity and don’t believe in the concept of human nature, then it is easy to see the leap to “no prisons.”
In fact, if it isn’t possible to create a society without crime and prisons then their entire theory of the world disintegrates.
Socialists and communists ultimately believe we can achieve a perfectly equal, classless society in which all human material needs are fulfilled, and there will be no more reason for crime.
The idea that crime isn’t driven by poverty, or systemic racism, or that some people may be immoral because they are immoral, or that others may just want to see the world burn, doesn’t fit their idea of what a socialist society ultimately looks like.
Don’t get me wrong, in practice socialists often grow quite fond of sending political enemies to gulags. Punishing thought crimes is always a high priority. But their overall theories about street crime necessitate a belief that someday soon there will no longer be a need to keep people incarcerated.
So, they must remain committed to abolishing prisons because failing to do so means they must admit to their most fervent allies that their entire worldview is fundamentally wrong.
Once in positions of power expect them to work hard to accomplish that goal, results be damned.
