Whatever It Is, I'm Against It

What is progressive activism? What does it mean to be progressive?

As I’ve said many times, and as I’m going to say many times, the progressive activists of the early 20th century set out in an extremely conscious and aggressive way to desexualize childhood; then the progressive activists of the 21st century set about to sexualize the shit out of it, with no apparent limit. On the floor of the California Senate last week, a progressive senator who is also a pediatrician said with a shrug that of course he treats 12 year-olds for STDs and sexual assault injuries without telling their parents. What are you, some prude who thinks parents should know when their tweens get raped? (Go back to your church, Nazi!)

Mmm, look at that sexy eight year-old.

So which progressive activism was progressive activism, the progressive desexualization of childhood or the progressive hypersexualization of childhood? Which one gets points on the scoreboard of true progressivism? Should we regard the age of consent campaign as right-wing activism that accidentally stumbled into the Progressive Era, where it didn’t really belong?

This is a story you can tell in a nearly infinite number of ways.

The 1950s-era Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker was appreciated by civic leaders because he made policing cheaper in a sprawling metropolis, freeing up tax money for other things. East Coast cities had cops who walked the beat in a neighborhood, but L.A. was too big and spread out to pay for that. So Parker famously developed a model of policing that was paramilitary and highly mobile: cops in cars who showed up when they were called, kicked somebody’s ass, hauled ‘em to jail, and got back in the car to wait for the next call. Better yet, in a city that had struggled with corrupt policing, cops who ran from call to call didn’t have the time to get comfortable enough with people to develop close ties to them; severed from local connections, they would be cut off from, you know, local connections.

Whatever you desire, detective

In a city where policing was driving around and knocking heads, the progressive reform of the post-Rodney King 1990s was a transition to community policing — with, explicitly, more cops, so they could slow down and become a local presence. Community policing emphasized a model of police as problem-solvers, addressing social pathologies and working with neighbors. The new LAPD had (and still has) a senior lead officer in your neighborhood who had coffee with the HOA and went door-to-door to local businesses to talk through their problems; a patrol cop was supposed to know some names when he passed people on the sidewalk.

Still pursuing a version of that idea twenty years later, Mayor Eric Garcetti created a Comprehensive Homeless Strategy that included a “no wrong door” policy — that is, a policy declaring that a homeless person needing help couldn’t go to the wrong place in city government to get it, because everyone would help if asked: cops, librarians, firefighters, park employees. First responders were caseworkers — they were helpers.

Putting that approach into daily practice, the LAPD created outreach teams that sought out the homeless entirely for the purpose of offering them services. The local NPR station covered that development like this:

If you click on that last link, you’ll see that the idea contained some under-examined pieces, and LAPD officers went around offering cash assistance to meth addicts — no way for that to go wrong. But for twenty years, the progressive reform of policing was consistent in its premises and practices: less force, more problem-solving, more community engagement, cops in neighborhoods talking to people.

Then came George Floyd, and the progressive argument for defunding the police — that is, for redirecting a significant portion of police budgets to other services:

Spend less on police so you can spend more elsewhere — William Parker’s model of the LAPD, with a soupçon of the helping professions. We’ll just have a few cops, and they’ll mostly stick to their cars except to arrest people when they’re called for something serious. So 2022 is 1955, but progressive 1955.

Pulling police back from communities for the sake of progressive reform, cities also pulled the police away from the homeless. (“San Francisco has an initiative to take police out of the response to the crisis of homelessness altogether.”) Here’s the premise behind California’s AB 2054, which funds non-police responses to crises involving the homeless and other “vulnerable populations” like the mentally ill:

Furthermore, young people of color, people with disabilities, people who are gender nonconforming, people who are formerly incarcerated, people with immigration status issues, and people who are unhoused or homeless, face significant barriers to engaging with law enforcement and other first responder personnel. Data demonstrates that these populations often do not reach out for needed help when dealing with crises in their communities because of their fear and challenges with engaging law enforcement, which puts lives and families at risk for continued harm and trauma. Community organizations that specialize in working with these populations, understanding their issues, and maintaining deep relationships in their communities have a more successful track record of engaging and supporting them.

So the progressive reforms of 2016-2019, cops are caseworkers and should be available to help anyone who asks for help, became the progressive reform of 2020-2021, keep cops away from everyone. Without starting the second conversation about which approach has more merit, here’s the first question: Which one of those mutually exclusive progressive reforms was the progressive reform? Which one reflects progressive principles, and which one didn’t really?

In 2016, what progressives knew about the idea of Russia being a significant strategic opponent of the United States was that “the eighties called, and they want their foreign policy back.” Then, four years later and ever since, they knew that Russia is the Great Global Satan, and all disagreement on Twitter is OMFG RUSSIAN BOTS. What’s the principle?

And so, it seems to me, we don’t have any progressive activism; rather, we have a free-floating cultural oppositionalism, a reflexive distaste for whatever exists to be opposed. If X prevails in society, then X is flyover country fascism, and we have to transition to Y, but if Y prevails in society, then Y is flyover country fascism, and we have to transition to X. Whatever we’re doing, we have to do the other thing.

Is there anything left to the entire cultural formation of progressive thought beyond pwning the cons?