This time, as Americans watched with horror the killing of a black man in police custody in Minneapolis, it seemed as if something had changed. Polls backed up that intuition: Fully 69% of Americans said they thought George Floyd's death represented a broader problem, as opposed to an isolated incident. In contrast, just six years ago, only 43% of Americans expressed that view after shootings in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City left unarmed black men dead.
The sense among Americans that this was "our" problem and not just a problem for black people was reminiscent of Bloody Sunday 55 years earlier, when Alabama state troopers descended with dogs and water cannons on peaceful protesters marching in Selma. Then, as now, the opportunity emerged for more transformative change, and Democrats seized the moment.
President Donald Trump made the Democrats' task easier, pouring gasoline on the fire with his calls for "law and order" and with a Bible-brandishing photo op that required tear-gassing peaceful protesters — a crude impersonation of Richard M. Nixon without the gravitas and Billy Graham without the faith. Unlike the president, who was busy inspecting his bunker, fearful of all of those dark faces marching near his gated community, the rest of the country was no longer living in 1968.
But while commentators across the spectrum, and many Democratic leaders, have spoken with tremendous eloquence about the problems with policing and potential solutions, others have found just the right way to turn off just the wrong voters. A veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council quickly embraced the protesters' demand to "defund the police," for example. One member said the goal was "dismantling policing as we know it." U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., endorsed the resolution, saying the current police structure "should not exist anymore." The idea is spreading: Los Angeles is discussing steering $150 million away from its police department to mental health programs and other city services. Protesters can and should chant what they want, and their demands, like those during the Occupy Wall Street movement, can shine a spotlight on injustices that were previously taken for granted. But the job of transformative political leaders is to turn what are often inchoate ideas not only into policies that make sense but into words that make sense to the broader public.
And "defunding the police" does not make sense to the broader public. Just 1 in 3 Americans supports "defunding the police," according to an ABC News-Ipsos poll. That number rises to 39% only when the question specifies that any reduction in funding go toward mental health programs, housing or other social programs. (If you have to explain a slogan, it isn't conveying what you mean.)
Trump and Republicans wasted no time branding the movement to defund police departments as "consuming" the Democratic Party. They will no doubt turn this into a central campaign meme in swing states that neighbor Minnesota, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which gave Trump his narrow electoral college victory in 2016 and are crucial to defeating him in 2020.
Democrats' tendency to embrace self-defeating rhetoric is not new. If the goal is to win elections, beat Trump and address social problems such as bias and racism, Democratic leaders and political commentators need to address what might be called systemic linguistic egocentrism — the tendency to use words without considering their meaning to people outside an in-group. You don't want to use unfamiliar terms in unfamiliar ways. Still less do you want to use off-putting language to describe policies that people might find appealing, if framed differently.
When Democrats aren't adopting the language of the opposition — for example, "Obamacare," which Republicans coined as a term of abuse — they often draw their language from academia or the world of activism. I am both an academic and an activist, yet frankly, those are the last places I would look for language that strikes a chord with people. In discussions of climate change, Democrats too often pepper their speeches with arid talk of "CO2 emissions," which may evoke hazy memories of high school chemistry classes, rather than condemning "pollution" or speaking of, say, "billions of tons of black soot pouring into the atmosphere." Rather than the bland term "campaign finance reform," why not talk about what we really mean (which I can say with certainty polls much better, having tested it): fair elections?