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Is the Left Going Too Far?

Dr. Munr Kazmir
5 min readJul 9, 2020

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Calls to defund the police have escalated into calls to abolish policing and dismantle parts of the U.S. government and its economy. Will swing-voters approve?

Graffiti, George Floyd protest, Minneapolis, MN, June, 2020. (photo: iamrenny)

One-upmanship in mainstream journalism, cheered on by liberal echo chambers and Twitter, is resulting in a race to see who can take progressive platforms to the next level:

Reform the police! No; defund the police. No; dismantle the police.

No: Abolish the police. No, defund the U.S. military.

No; dismantle the U.S. government and all its institutions from U.S. Customs and Border Protection to the Pentagon. And let’s dismantle the U.S. economy while we’re at it.

In this race to see who can go the furthest left, fastest, does the resultant cacophony appeal to moderates and swing voters?

Voters, however liberal their ideology, could be forgiven for being a bit stunned at how quickly the demands of progressives have escalated in the past weeks.

Are the journalists cavalierly proposing these policies, which in no way have been accepted by a majority of the public of either party, really in earnest?

Pieces like “Defund the Pentagon, Too,” and “How I Became a Police Abolitionist; are they merely trying to sway public opinion? It is difficult to imagine the Overton…

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