“Defund the police” was a terrible movement, but some mainstream Democrats have a tendency to blame defunders for their own political problems, so I’d hoped to leave the question alone for a while.

But the line in Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address where he said that we should address public safety concerns by funding the police rather than defunding them prompted enough backlash that I do think it’s worth discussing. I don’t know what the political consequences of the defund movement are given that virtually no elected officials embrace it. But the paucity of defunders among elected officials does understate its intellectual influence.

I personally am not a fan of the Sunrise Movement, but they are often given a lot of credit in mainstream progressive politics and are financed by mainstream progressive donors. Gara LaMarche embraced it when he ran the Democracy Alliance, one of the most important progressive donor networks. Andrew Marantz published a long story in The New Yorker t…