Better in their words…

‘Defund the police’ is their motto and mission

Source: California’s aristocracy of lunatics – UnHerd

The standard TV image of a district attorney — or, prosecuting attorney — in the US is of a tough government lawyer passionate about putting bad guys behind bars. Or maybe the “DA” is a cynical, striving politician willing to bend or break the law to get a high-profile conviction on a guy who isn’t bad at all. Either way, DAs on TV like to finish the process that begins with the police arresting someone by getting a conviction, setting bars between society and a guy, usually but not always bad. The reality is very different in the smaller details, but fairly similar in the larger ones. Reality has far fewer dramatic trials than TV, for example, and much more plea-bargaining, but on the main thing — prosecutors tending to prosecute people — TV and reality are in rough agreement.

Except where I live. Where I live, in Alameda County, California, the DA is Pamela Price, who says she sees herself as “minister of justice”, not “prosecutor”. Fair enough. America’s DAs could maybe exhibit less single-minded focus on winning convictions (and blocking bad convictions from being overturned), and more interest in simple justice. But Price has made her sharp turn away from prosecuting criminal offenders when crime is making a sharp turn upwards, especially in the county’s largest city, Oakland. For this reason, local groups are working to force a “recall” election, hopeful that crime-weary Oaklanders will vote her out.

This recall threat may have been why she staged a public event called “Know Your District Attorney” in late November. If so, how she staged this is extremely interesting. You’d think a DA under pressure for being soft on crime would make some gesture in the other direction, reassure her constituents that she does care about rising crime and its growing population of victims. Perhaps she’d have a high-ranking police officer on stage with her, a handful of crime victims supporting her as she empathises with them, an American flag somewhere in the background, because doesn’t everyone respect the flag, deep down?

But Price had no police officer enhancing her aura of toughness, nor victims on stage with her. Crime victims were in the building, but they were in the audience, and frowning. Two of them, whom Price made a point of ignoring, wore hoodies bearing an iron-on picture of a young relative who’d been murdered. Nor was there an American flag anywhere visible, which is notable, as American police and prosecutors traditionally have a flag in the frame when they face the public. Instead, as a photographer named Thomas Hawk documented on X: “The event started out with a cultural dance presentation and then a prayer to our ancestors where for some reason a Poinsettia plant was watered in front of the crowd while we bowed our heads in prayer.” Following this, according to Hawk: “We got a panel lecture from some of the non-profits advocating for her brand of progressiveness while complaining about more moderate district attorney’s [sic] in the past.”

This latter detail calls to mind the Oakland teacher’s strike I wrote about last June, when, in a high-stakes political moment, the teachers’ union’s progressive leadership pressed a seemingly impolitic slate of extreme demands having little to do with teacher pay or working conditions. This posture sent a revealing mix of signals into the political environment — close affinity with other progressive organisations and a sort of bold indifference toward school parents, traditionally a key constituency. Like the radical leaders of the teachers’ union, Pamela Price is responding to a moment of political challenge not by looking to the broader electorate for support but by turning to the activist NGOs that sit with her on the ideological fringe.

These cases are symptoms of a political phenomenon that my fellow Californian Matthew Crawford calls the “Party State”, which he describes in a pair of typically trenchant essays from last August. California is a Party State in that it is so dominated by the Democratic Party that political actors worry less about the mass of voters, who will vote Democratic even if they’re ideologically moderate themselves, and more about nodes of influence within the Democratic Party. These tend to be highly organised and ideologically extreme NGOs, issue groups that also exert a mimetic influence on each other that makes them both more similar and more radical. This logic is doubly powerful in those parts of the state — such as Alameda County — where Democratic dominance is even more lopsided and the activist NGOs even more extreme. If officials in a city like Oakland can seem strangely indifferent towards voters, in other words, that’s because they are. Their most valued constituents aren’t voters. They’re well-organised ideologues who staff and lead activist organisations, whose most valued constituents, in turn, are each other, the bunch of them locked in a bidding war of moral purity.

The Party State is a powerful concept. It helps explain why not just conservative but moderate and merely liberal Californians sometimes feel like they’re governed by a tuned-out aristocracy of lunatics. It’s no small thing to gain some insight into such a predicament, but I’d like to examine another aspect of the theatrics of the Pamela Price event — the odd ceremony by which it was baptised, via a a potted pointsettia, from a plastic bottle.

This sort of ad hoc ceremony has become a staple of political theatre in progressive circles in North America.