On Sunday, ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., to weigh in on how Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong — a fellow democratic socialist who was leading the polls ahead of Tuesday’s Democratic primary — might struggle to “get around” some of her past progressive positions on abolishing policing and canceling Thanksgiving.
Ocasio-Cortez’s response was both surprising and opaque. She noted that Hong has moved away from those positions before saying, “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke one was crazy’” — and let out a hearty laugh.
Karl followed up, “Did the movement go too far, with some of those positions? You briefly supported the idea of defunding the police.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s response is worth quoting at length:
During this time and especially during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns, and I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place, and I actually think that the discussions that had that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right? And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that you know during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.
The congresswoman’s longer response is less dismissive, but still she is essentially trying to cordon off some of the woke era from the contemporary socialist left by describing it as the product of a peculiar time that generated some peculiar ideas, almost the way one might say, “Ignore what I said when I got too drunk at the party last night.”
Even at the peak of the criminal justice reform movement’s power in 2020, abolishing police departments was politically toxic.
Ocasio-Cortez’s insinuation that some of the language of that era can be discarded on the basis that it succeeded is far-fetched, given that, aside from some local and state-level wins, much of the police reform movement eventually petered out, progressive prosecutors faced fierce backlash and the federal government failed to deliver systemic change. But nonetheless the effort to leave at least some of the 2020 language behind is judicious — specifically, Hong’s decision to reverse her position on abolishing police and her quasi-walk back of her view that Thanksgiving ought to be canceled are the right moves, politically.
Police abolition is ultimately an anarchist idea and it should never have been adopted by parts of the democratic socialist left. It has no serious answer to the questions of how to protect society from dangerous people or people who refuse to follow rules — a problem that no society can escape. One can believe, as I do, that the existing American criminal justice system is atrocious, requires radical reform and that addressing the root causes of violence and material deprivation through social programs is vital to keeping the prison population lower. But ultimately it makes sense for socialists — believers in a strong state and regulating human behavior to achieve freedom and justice — to call for a far better policing system rather than a nonexistent one.
Politically it’s also a no-brainer. Even at the peak of the criminal justice reform movement’s power in 2020, abolishing police departments was politically toxic and received support from some 15% of the population. Even before Ocasio-Cortez made her statement it’s clear socialists started picking up on this; it’s almost impossible to imagine Zohran Mamdani winning the mayorship of New York, a city whose political life is heavily defined by debates over public safety, without him backing away from calls to defund the police. Calls to defund the police programs are well-intentioned and not the same as calling for police abolition — because it can mean calling for replacing some of a police budget with, for example, special services for responding people with mental health crises — but I think Mamdani accurately sensed that the slogan was alienating because it had become associated with abolitionism.
Mamdani may have observed teachable moments such as progressive Buffalo mayoral candidate India Walton’s election loss in 2021. During that race, Walton, a police reform firebrand, initially embraced defund-the-police rhetoric but then distanced herself from it after she found it gave the wrong people idea about her actual policy proposals.
“You cannot encapsulate [her proposals for reallocating police budgets] in one word and expect people in the general electorate to understand what that means,”she told me in the final stretch of her campaign.
Hong’s decision to pivot on celebrating Thanksgiving is considerably lighter fare, but it’s still a good idea. She deleted a 2020 post on X saying that Thanksgiving should be canceled, as it means “celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx and women so be it.” The statement, that she made after having been elected to the Wisconsin Assembly, typified the nuance-obliterating public moralism that was in vogue at the time. It also captures how much of what passed for politics at the time was big on polarizing symbolic stands, but did little to affect concrete social change.
Two things can be true at the same time: that the story of Thanksgiving as commonly told in American schools is an insidious myth, and that Thanksgiving as celebrated by many Americans today, many of them progressive, is an incredibly meaningful occasion that has little to do with believing in that myth. In a recent interview with CNN, Hong maintained the view that Thanksgiving is “incredibly painful for many people” but also noted that “views can evolve” and that “bringing folks around the table to share conversation and build community is always a good thing.” Amen.
As the democratic socialist left becomes a bigger player in American politics, this is a welcome evolution. It is admirable for movements and politicians to critically evaluate the merits and efficacy of ideas and change in response to what they think they got wrong. The fight against bigotry in our institutions continues — but one must pick the right fights and come up with the right fixes.
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