“People Don’t Believe In This Lefty Slogan Because They Have Been Manipulated By Elites” Is A Dumb Conspiracy Theory, Part 1

“The world would be ours if not for The Atlantic.”

The People’s Front of Judea is SEETHING over all of this

These Bluesky posts from Michael Hobbes jumped out at me:

Hobbes is. . . let’s just go with annoying for now. But he’s expressing a pretty common view on the online left: that those damn squishy mainstream outlets, particularly your Atlantics and New York Timeses and the hacks who write for them, are constantly tricking people into falling for centrist and right-wing framings, steering them away from the truth. (I don’t want to drown myself by fretting over whether I’m using precise enough terminology here. By “online left” I basically just mean people who post a lot, have good-size platforms, and are into lefty causes.)

Before I dive into that, let’s linger for a moment on the breeziness with which Hobbes defends his chosen policies. It’s “reasonable and correct on the merits” and “not remotely radical” to “shift[ ] resources from police to social services[.]”

I mean. . . maybe? Wouldn’t this depend a great deal on what sort of policing is being defunded and what sort of mental-health work is being funded in its stead? Presumably Hobbes isn’t thinking of a model like San Francisco’s, where tens of millions of dollars, or more, disappear into the pockets of unaccountable NGOs, some of them with legal problems, but that’s the problem with vague mantras! Plus, “defund the police” doesn’t even say anything about what the money should be used for instead. I love the idea of staunchly defending a slogan while at the same time having to engage in follow-up explaining so that people can understand what you mean by the slogan. Maybe it’s not a great slogan, then? No, that couldn’t be it. . .

Hobbes blames “elites” for the unpopularity of these slogans. In other words, if not for a small group of powerful individuals, the masses would accept defunding the police and abolishing ICE. If Hobbes doesn’t mean this, what does he mean? This is a pretty wild claim given the available polling. For example, polling conducted by Gallup in late July 2020, which was more or less the peak of the national outcry over racist policing, showed that black Americans overwhelmingly wanted police to spend more time (20%) or the same amount of time (61%) as they currently were (that’s 81% overall), as compared to just 19% who wanted a reduction in police presence.

Even black Americans who already said they saw the police “a lot” broadly disfavored having them spend “less time” in their neighborhood, with this option garnering only 34% approval among that subset:

Obviously — obviously! — relations between black Americans and the police aren’t all rainbows and sunshine, and the respondents highlighted concerns about their interactions with cops. But it’s just very, very hard to look at these numbers and conclude that Americans have any significant interest in “defunding the police.” One possibility is that they have been hoodwinked by “elites” into believing there’s a benefit to the police being in their neighborhoods, and that Michael Hobbes knows better than them. Another, less condescending possibility is that they believe police are, on net, good to have around. (If we want to be a bit spicier and more obnoxious, we might be tempted to call the claim “The reason [defund the police is] unpopular is that progressive elites presented [its] least popular version[ ] to the public!” a conspiracy theory, but I would never do that.)

As for “defund ICE,” you may recall that the last time Trump was elected, when he was engaging in a (significantly more legal) crackdown on undocumented immigrants, some on the left began bandying this about as a catchphrase. I’ve been pretty open about my disgust with Trump 2.0’s immigration policies and think that any accusations of ICE lawlessness should be thoroughly investigated (which, ha!). In short, I doubt I disagree all that much with Hobbes, in a zoomed-out sense.

But does it make sense to start screaming about “defund[ing] ICE?” There are obvious counterarguments, and again, there’s a certain breeziness to his argument that suggests he hasn’t thought this through. First, the claim that ICE is a “made-up agency” is hard to respond to because it is completely contentless. Second, when you think through the political implications of adopting “defund ICE” as a slogan or even an individual candidate’s platform, it quickly becomes clear that things aren’t as simple as Hobbes believes.

For one, Trump was elected in part out of some voters’ frustrations with a sense that the border situation was out of control. For what it’s worth, this was not a fringe, far-right belief — in fact, a number of Democratic mayors and governors protested loudly when large numbers of migrants ended up in their cities, and it caused significant internecine tension within the party. Since Trump started his second, significantly more ghoulish mass deportation go-round, his approval rating on this issue has dipped considerably, according to multiple polls.

My theory has long been that the average Trump-supporting or Trump-curious voter 1) wants to feel like the border is under control and that whoever is running the country cares about the distinction between citizens and noncitizens, but 2) is not a monster, and would be made a bit woozy by the hard-line policy foreshadowed by Trump’s stated (ridiculous) desire to deport a million immigrants. I’m not usually good at political analysis, but I’d argue that I’m basically right here, and that the polls bear this out: The subset of voters whose views of Trump are at all flexible probably neither want to feel like the border is out of control or that hastily executed mass deportations are going on with little regard for human rights. They probably want something in the middle.

If this is correct — and again, I’m openly acknowledging that my theory is circumstantial — what would “abolish ICE” do? It would immediately take what is quickly becoming a Trump and GOP weakness and turn it into a strength, again: Republicans could claim that Democrats are so in favor of border dysfunction they’re literally opposed to an agency that has enforcement right in its name! Who knows if this would work or not, but what would be the gain of taking that risk, especially given that actually abolishing ICE would require passing a bill that, frankly, would never pass?

There’s also the not small fact that there’s no evidence this is a politically useful slogan. As Elaine Godfrey wrote in The Atlantic in 2018, back when the hashtag had gained enough steam to be adopted as an actual policy proposal by AOC, Kirsten Gillibrand, and others:

Whether Democratic lawmakers are pushing to eliminate the agency completely or simply restructure it still appears to be up for debate. But the big thing, activists told me, is that people are talking about it. Saikat Chakrabarti, president of Justice Democrats and an adviser to Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, summed up the young movement this way: “Usually in America when there’s some system or something inflicting great amounts of damage and pain, I think the reasonable thing to do is say, ‘Okay, hold it, let’s stop what we’re doing,’ ” he said. “Everyone has a different idea of what happens after [the agency is abolished] but at least we’ve got everybody on the same page [that] this is wrong.”

How can anyone think about what has happened since then and believe “abolish ICE” makes tactical sense? Shortly after this article, Democrats performed well in the midterms largely because of moderate, purple-ish candidates winning over suburban voters outraged by Trump. Then Trump lost to a very moderate Joe Biden in 2020, who didn’t come anywhere close to calling for the abolition of ICE, and then Joe Biden lost to Trump in part because voters were unhappy about border security.

Look, all stories about American political outcomes are to a certain extent made up. It’s all just too complicated. But to claim, in 2025, that people have turned away from “abolish ICE” because of “elites” rather than certain well-supported bare realities about American views on immigration seems — okay, I’m going to say it without the parenthetical — like a conspiracy theory.

One counter I want to address: “Oh, so you want to let ICE keep operating because you’re worried about the politics of it all? You wretch! You monster!”

You see this a lot but it’s dumb. The question of whether a slogan is remotely popular and achievable is totally separate from the question of whether the slogan would lead to morally desirable outcomes. Notwithstanding the above uncertainty about what, exactly, “abolish ICE” means, it could be the case that it’s an unnecessary agency and that it would do moral good, on net, to abolish it. But if in the course of attempting to achieve this end, you make political life easier for the party sending random migrants to a Salvadoran torture prison, causing more random migrants to be sent to a Salvadoran torture prison, “But I chanted the good slogan!” isn’t going to provide you or your comrades with much comfort down the road.

And you know who else won’t derive any comfort from the slogan? The migrants.

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In Part 2, I’ll zoom out and talk a bit more about this style of argument and try to explain what motivates it.

Questions? Comments? Cool new slogans like Defund the Zoo or Refund Antarctica? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on X at @jessesingal.