New York magazine published a piece by Eric Levitz today in which he argues that Republicans and even some liberals just aren’t being fair to Democrats. It’s headlined, “Ibram X. Kendi Does Not Run the Democratic Party,” a statement that is both self-evident and silly. Not only does Kendi not run the Democratic Party he hasn’t been elected to anything so far as I know. The advantage of setting the bar this low is that it should be pretty easy to clear it and Levitz does manage it.

The Democratic Party’s agenda is not universally beloved, and some of the GOP’s policy ideas poll well. But Biden’s actual policy positions are much more popular than the grab bag of far-left sentiments Republicans have ascribed to him. Democrats’ internal polling has reportedly found that attacks on the party for supporting “defund the police,” “open borders,” and “critical race theory” are “alarmingly potent.” So it makes sense for GOP apparatchiks to pretend the Democratic Party is run by a politburo of DEI consultants and antifa super-soldiers…

“Woke” progressives may have some influence in blue America. But they are scarcely the dominant force in Democratic politics. On Tuesday night, San Francisco residents voted overwhelmingly to recall members of a school board that had gained national attention for pushing to remove Abraham Lincoln’s name from one of the city’s high schools. New York City, meanwhile, is governed by an ex-cop who champions solitary confinement and stop and frisk.

It’s true of course that Joe Biden has explicitly (even recently in New York City) said he’s against defunding the police. It’s also true that there’s been some significant pushback to woke excess in places like San Francisco and New York. But Levitz skips over the fact that even in those cases the backlash is being framed as racist and reactionary by some on the left. And that’s even more true in places where the voters aren’t on the left to begin with.

More to the point, a little more than a year ago the left wing of the Democratic party was very openly enthusiastic about support for Black Lives Matter at a time when activists in the street were making “defund the police” the central focus of their movement. Since I think people have conveniently forgotten this, here’s a sample of what it sounded like in June 2020 from an article written by an ACLU policy adviser titled, “Defunding the Police Will Actually Make Us Safer.”

The idea of defunding, or divestment, is new to some folks, but the basic premise is simple: We must cut the astronomical amount of money that our governments spend on law enforcement and give that money to more helpful services like job training, counseling, and violence-prevention programs. Each year, state and local governments spend upward of $100 billion dollars on law enforcement—and that’s excluding billions more in federal grants and resources…

For too long, the focus on police reform has been dominated by reforms that try to reduce the harms of policing rather than rethink the overall role of police in society. But six years after the Black Lives Matter movement rose to national attention, activists across the country are coming together to demand what many have known has been the solution all along: defund the police.

It’s certainly true that the ACLU isn’t Joe Biden and doesn’t run the Democratic Party any more than Ibram Kendi does. But the ACLU isn’t exactly a fringe element in the Party either. And neither is Kendi at this point. He and fellow anti-racists like Robin DiAngelo are best-selling authors whose ideas about race have been widely accepted on the left, especially on college campuses where anti-racist lectures are often mandatory and employing a small army of DEI staffers really has become the norm.

The results in terms of policy haven’t been as clear. The idea of defunding did have enough Democratic support in several major cities (Portland, New York, etc.) that budget cuts were implemented but in many cases those cuts were quickly restored as violent crime shot up nationally and elected officials had second thoughts.

You might sum this up by saying that not all Democrats are defund supporters but all defund supporters are Democrats. And while it’s true that Ibram Kendi doesn’t run the party, it’s also fair to notice that Kendi would have been a fringe figure just a few years ago instead of a celebrated one. Given how quickly the Democratic Party has change in the past five years, is it really outrageous to suggest the party could look a lot more like Kendi than it does 79-year-old Joe Biden in another five? If you’re wondering why Republican pushback on left-wing extremism is working so well, it’s because lots of people of all races think the Democratic Party is moving too far left, too fast.