The United States made the list of the top ten countries with the highest divorce rates. Let’s imagine the religious right outlawed divorce in order to rid America of this shame. People would see the prohibition as a clear attempt to eradicate the problem by erasing the statistics without ever addressing the main cause, just so the religious right could rid themselves of their own sense of shame.
Progressives, on the other hand, frequently engage in this behavior, but they either explain away the repercussions or, worse, accept them as the necessary cost of progress.
For example, in May 2020, Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd. Even though all of the officers involved were fired and charged with second-degree murder, riots broke out across the country, and there was a call to “defund the police.”
The next month, Portland’s city council defunded its police budget for the following year.
“Defund the police” wasn’t intended to cut all of law enforcement’s budget. The concept was to withdraw police funding and redistribute it to non-policing forms of public safety and social initiatives that addressed poverty, homelessness, and mental disorders. However, Portland’s city council was ashamed of “American policing,” and their decision was more about punishing “the police” than assisting social programs.
The next year, PBS News Hour’s website published a story that said: Portland among U.S. cities adding funds back into police departments.
PBS News Hour noted that “defund the police” was a call to action for communities to talk about how they wanted to be policed, but the goals of “defunding the police” were questionable. Some thought it meant abolishing police departments; others thought it meant reducing law enforcement spending; and yet others thought it meant reform and accountability. However, Portland wasn’t the only liberal city that reversed its policy on police funding. In reaction to increased homicides, an officer exodus, and political pressures, police departments from New York to Los Angeles were seeing their funds partially restored.
In 2022, USA Today published a “fact check,” claiming that there was no evidence that “defunding the police” was to blame for the increase in homicides. “Between 2019 and 2020,” the paper said, “the United States recorded its highest increase in the national homicide rate in modern history. And in 2021, 12 cities did break their annual homicide records. However, most of these cities did not substantially cut their 2021 police spending as part of a defunding initiative. While it’s too soon to say for sure, experts believe a combination of social unrest, rising firearm sales, economic stress, and other pandemic-related factors could be behind the spike in homicides.”
While fact checks are useful, the same collection of information might lead to a variety of conclusions. USA Today’s fact-checkers concluded that the significant spike in homicide rates cannot be attributed to “defunding” since police money was not significantly reduced. However, assigning blame is not the issue; rather, it is about determining whether even the smallest adjustment in the police budget is connected to a significant problem.
If progressives acknowledged that small adjustments do lead to significant problems, they might not rush to create policies that would simply relieve their own sense of shame.
For example, the Portland Public Schools recently implemented a new restorative justice model for student discipline. Before disciplining a disruptive student, school administrators must now consider their race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The new policy eliminated mandatory suspensions for students who threatened or hurt others. School officials will only remove those students from their classrooms. When a student engages in “continuous disruptive behavior,” school officials will create a “support plan” for the student, which may include detention. The support plan must take into consideration the impact of issues related to the student’s race, gender, identity, sexual orientation, or disability.
The new policy would get less criticism if it were strictly an individualized model designed to replace an ineffective one-size-fits-all policy that ignored all of the previously identified considerations. Once again, the problem is the progressive goal, which is to rectify the overrepresentation of non-White students in suspension statistics. In other words, the overrepresentation of non-White pupils meant that Portland Public Schools was guilty of systematic racism, and by eliminating suspensions, they eliminated the problem by erasing the statistics and removed their sense of shame.
Michele Exner, senior adviser for Parents Defending Education, said the Porland Public Schools’ new discipline policies are wrong, counterproductive, and will only feed into the divisive climate we see across academic institutions.
But that’s just the cost of progress.
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