Former President Barack Obama has been in the headlines recently with a publicity tour for his newest book. In an interview with a Snapchat political show this week, Obama said,
“I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘defund the police,’ but you know you’ve lost a big audience the moment you say it… the key is deciding do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?”
This is a change of pace from comments Obama made during a town hall just six months ago, when he encouraged protesters to “make people in power uncomfortable” and acknowledged that the mindsets around racism and policing in this country are shifting as a “direct result of the activities and organizing and mobilization and engagement of so many young people across the country.” Such opportunism and lack of political conviction is characteristic of Obama’s role in the ruling class establishment.
Obama consistently wields his brief experience as a “community organizer” over 30 years ago as a bludgeon against today’s activists. He presents himself as an authority figure on activism, when in reality he has been an opponent of social movements.
Under his administration, the Occupy Movement was brutally crushed in a nationally coordinated attack by the FBI. Uprisings against police brutality in Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities were repressed in coordination with federal agencies. Obama signed a four-year renewal of the Patriot Act in 2011, which gives the government near unlimited power to surveil U.S. citizens — which he had previously condemned in 2005.
There is no reason for organizers to heed any advice from Barack Obama.
Polls from over the summer indicate that about one-third of people in the U.S. support the demand to defund the police, while another 10 percent are not sure whether or not they support this slogan. Before the national uprising that was set off by the brutal killing of George Floyd, the conversation about defunding the police was not even a blip in the national conversation.
Now it is a demand that tens of millions in the U.S. — maybe even 100 million — support, so much so that ruling class politicians and corporate media outlets feel compelled to deride and patronize the activists who have popularized the slogan.
Organizers in several major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Philadelphia have won cuts to local police budgets. These cuts, as small as many of them are, would have been unimaginable in last year’s political climate, where annual increases to policing budgets were the national norm.
For politicians like Barack Obama, vague slogans like “hope and change” and “reform the police” are ideal because they obscure the true nature of the U.S. empire. In contrast, the demand to defund the police speaks to the heart of policing in this country: that the police are a force to repress and control — not protect — working-class people.
The hundreds of billions of dollars that local, state and federal governments spend on policing and mass incarceration every year would be better spent on housing, healthcare, education and other basic needs. The demand to “defund the police” opens the door to conversations about the role of police in the United States as not only an institution that commits hundreds of racist murders every year, but is also weaponized to harass and incarcerate people of color, repress protests and evict families who cannot afford their rent.
Of course it is polarizing to demand that the police be defunded, and millions more people will need to be won over. But the same could be said about the demand to abolish chattel slavery in the 1830s or the demand to end Jim Crow in the early 1900s when lynchings were rampant.
Movements of oppressed people have never won because they put forward tepid, watered down slogans. Movements win when they put forward slogans that raise mass consciousness and bring millions of people into the streets to exercise their collective power.
The slogan may be “snappy,” but the demand to defund the police is being fueled by a people’s movement that is determined to “get something done.”
