To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Black Lives Matter activists and police unions are two houses both alike in indignity. Neither truly wants to improve policing in the most necessary ways: the former because it could undermine their view of the world and reduce revenue streams, including billions in donations; the latter for a more mundane reason. Cops, like other street-level bureaucrats, don’t want to change their standard operating procedures and face accountability for screwups. Unfortunately, with Black Lives Matter groups receiving billions in donations and helping increase progressive turnout, media and academia failing to provide accurate information to voters, and police unions enjoying iconic status among conservatives when they are better viewed as armed but equally inefficient teachers’ unions, we don’t see the political incentives for reform any time soon, despite some recent local level successes.
Injustice—How Progressives (and Some Conservatives) Got Us Into This Mess
Professors and other respectables rail against “deplorables,”1 but missing in political discourse is that mass rule, AKA populism, is not a mass pathological delusion. Rather, its appearance is for solid economic and social reasons. When problems that affect regular citizens get ignored by their leaders, people in democratic systems can get revenge at the ballot box. From inflation and foreign policy debacles, to COVID-19 school shutdowns that went on far longer in the U.S. than in Europe at immense and immensely unequal social cost,2 ordinary people sense that the wealthy, bureaucrats, professionals, and professors often advance their own interests and fetishes at the expense of regular folks, and then use mainstream “knowledge producing” institutions, particularly academia and the mainstream news media, to cover up their failings.