The Anti-Anarchist Cookbook

Lupus, this is well-intentioned but tactically naive. What it misses is that if you offer your message in more technical language - demilitarize or deunionize - to avoid culture-porn reductionism, the people whose interests will suffer under that proposal will just come out with a pornographic caricature of it and oppose that.

A good example of this is the moral panic over transgender people in public restrooms. In practice this is a non-issue, I think the number of related criminal cases in the last decade could be counted on one hand, maybe one finger. But it has generated a huge amount of bottom-up opposition (a mix of organic and astroturf) and resulted in a large number of top-down legislative proposals. Of course that has a lot to do with the fact that sex and gender is a hyper-emotive subject that quickly arouses emotional passions.

But so is policing, and where something is not obviously a loaded topic it's just a matter of putting the required narrative frame around it to get people mad. Healthcare policy? They're after your tax money or they'll let you die on the floor. Cosmetic licensing? it's a scam to keep people in debt or your hair will be burned off your head with acid. There's an industry of people willing to do that, and to the extent that you don't want to be defined by your opponents, it's better to put out the strongest version of your proposal first rather than have to engage in a denial game which hands the initiative back to an antagonist.

Sure, that leads to intractable-seeming conflicts where one side lays out a hard line like 'defund the police' and police supporters are 'lol no', but while they're pinned down in that argument flank arguments about police corruption or criminality become far more impactful.