‘Defund the Police’ Does Not Mean Defund the Police. Unless It Does.

Read: America Is Already Different Than It Was Two Weeks Ago

Lopez’s premise is one with which I’m sure lots of police officers agree: We ask cops to do too much. They’re expected, Lopez writes, to resolve “verbal squabbles between family members” (in another rhetorical mode a law professor might call such squabbles “domestic violence”), move the homeless “from corners and doorsteps” (to clear public rights of way), and solve “school disciplinary issues” (many of which schools can’t).

“For most proponents, ‘defunding the police’ does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety,” Lopez writes, “and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight—or perhaps ever.”

These are reassuring words until you dwell on them. That ever rings an unsettling little bell. So the ultimate goal is for police to disappear, “perhaps” at some moment in the future? And note that “defunding” might very well zero out budgets for police, just not for “public safety”—a field that will come to include, by Lopez’s telling, therapists, medics, social workers, addiction counselors, and many other traditionally irenic trades. But … any cops in there? That is, the kind of public employees who arrest bad guys? Lopez is hazy on the point. Maybe bad guys will be zeroed out too.

So fear not: “Defund the police” does not mean defunding the police, except when it does, whether next week or in the next decade. One observer who insists on taking the phrase both seriously and literally is Joe Biden. On Monday the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee hastened to let American voters know that he doesn’t like the idea, whatever it is.

“No, I don’t support defunding the police,” he told CBS News, thereby saving his candidacy. Maybe he had to say it: A poll this week showed that just 16 percent of Americans support cuts to police funding.  And last year Biden’s campaign released a proposal to increase federal funding for local police by $300 million, for measures that were once noncontroversial—for example, hiring more cops. With no more police to spend it on, Biden might not get to spend the $300 million at all. No politician will stand for that.

The literally/seriously conundrum is hard to avoid as the power of radicals increases on both ends of the political teeter-totter. When mainstream Democrats such as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren embraced the catchphrase “Abolish ICE” (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency), they insisted the idea should be taken seriously, if not literally. They didn’t mean they wanted to literally abolish enforcement of customs and immigration laws, just to get rid of the agency that does the enforcing.

And Biden himself was recently tripped up by a literal reading of the slogan “Believe women.” Many of his supporters joined him in insisting the words be taken merely seriously, to mean “Believe women, but not Tara Reade.”

The number of activists, partisans, and politicians who hop back and forth across the literal/serious divide—saying something with no expectation they will be taken at their word—will only grow this season. The spectacle raises the obvious question of how we should take them: seriously, or literally? The answer, of course, is neither.