Slavery is Freedom: The New ‘Abolitionists’ Want Us To Be Their Slaves

What’s really behind abolishing the police, borders and the constitution.

The old Communists, Marxists and Socialists at least called themselves what they were while the new radicals shoplifted a term from American history and style themselves as ‘abolitionists’.

Initially the term was misused by pro-crime activists who wanted to abolish police, prisons and the justice system, claiming that these were racist and were rooted in the institution of slavery. They used social media and academia to popularize the false claim that the police had started out as slavery patrols and argued that the prison system was just another form of slavery.

This flattening of meaning cynically equated public safety, a system which protects black people who are statistically the most likely victims of crime, with racial slavery. The efforts to ‘abolish’ it with race riots, delegitimization and defunding led to an unprecedented crime wave that cost the lives of thousands of black men and whose consequences are still being felt even today.

The pro-crime ‘abolitionists’ did not succeed in abolishing the police or prisons, but they managed to abolish thousands of black lives in the name of black lives mattering.

Law enforcement did not emerge out of slavery, but removing law enforcement ushered in an even more barbaric form of slavery in which the weak, whatever their ethics, talents and resources, were the prey of the strong, replacing the law with the tyranny of the ruthless.

When the Trump administration scrambled to roll back the catastrophic effects of mass migration by millions of illegal aliens who were able to freely cross the border under the Biden administration and overwhelm cities like Chicago, Denver and New York, open borders activists rebranded their call for mass migration as ‘abolition’ and campaigned to “Abolish ICE”.

Even though Mexican illegal aliens were never slaves, leftist activists began arguing that border patrols and immigration were rooted in racism and therefore also, in some sense, slavery. In reality, the earliest naval patrols had protected America’s borders by keeping slavers out.

And African-Americans were some of the biggest victims of open borders and mass migration.

But the term “abolition” had become so useful that it was freely deployed for eliminating the senate and with it the constitutional form of government because that too was somehow rooted in slavery. “Abolish the Senate” and the distinct identity of America as a union of states rather than an undifferentiated populace in which California ballot harvesters can rig national elections made it all the more obvious that ‘abolitionism’ was just another rebrand of ‘Communism’.

‘Abolishing’ the Constitution, the border, and the justice system is abolishing America.

Borders define nations and representative governments. Without them nations and elections don’t exist and neither do individual rights or liberties. Without law enforcement and a justice system, private property and physical freedom cease to be relevant factors in the lives of men.

Abolish them and you also abolish the only basis on which individuals have any rights.

To make this possible, abolition had to be put through the academic wringer, transformed from a specific objection to slavery to a general objection to everything outside its ideology so that it went from a call to remove an oppressive system to redefining all of America as an oppressive system to be removed. And when the specific gives way to the general, the specific disappears.

Modern ‘abolitionists’ can see traces of slavery in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, highways, milk, and the senate, but none in the modern slave trade most often found in the countries of their newfound Muslim allies. Slavery as an academic philosophical metaphor for the social condition eclipses the inconvenient reality of actual slavery.

The Bolsheviks started out promising to abolish serfdom only to replace it with a far more oppressive serfdom backed up by mass murder and applied pervasively across Russia. The new abolitionists aren’t libertarians, when they campaign for abolishing the police and prisons, they are proposing to replace a justice system that punishes crimes against individual persons and private property with one that punishes political crimes with mobs and kangaroo courts.

The new ‘abolitionists’ don’t object to the concept of crime, only to defining it in terms of muggings and rapes by the ‘oppressed’ and then punishing the muggers and rapists with prison sentences. The same activists and Soros prosecutors who championed ‘criminal justice reform’ gleefully threw the book at anyone who fell afoul of the BLM mobs from police officers to private citizens. While cancel culture destroyed lives, and mobs intimidated ordinary people, ‘abolitionists’ showed that they were quite willing to arrest and imprison their opponents.

And if prison is indeed slavery, then the new abolitions are actually the new slavers.

But abolitionists don’t actually want to abolish practices, they want to abolish systems, and nothing would then stop them from replacing them with far more oppressive systems that engage in practices such as policing and prisons once they’ve conceptually redefined them.

By shifting the focus from a physical act to an academic evaluation of the contextual historical roots, economic evaluations and philosophical understanding of the act, that very same act once considered oppressive becomes pure when its implementers have the right ideology. They define a capitalist prison as oppressive, not because of its actual conditions, but because capitalism is oppressive, while a socialist prison is reinterpreted as a form of liberation.

That’s why George Orwell gave us “freedom is slavery.” Referencing that is not just a glib line. Today, academics can be found in the country’s top campuses who explain how modern life in America is a form of slavery, while slavery in the Muslim world or in the labor brigades of the USSR were actually forms of liberation.

To the new ‘abolitionists’, slavery is just another one of many metaphors for capitalism, western civilization and America, and anything opposed to it, no matter how cruel and brutal, is a form of liberation. Murderers and rapists, terrorism and mass migration, even slavery can be forms of liberation, not because they set anyone free, but because they destroy western civilization.

What they are set on abolishing is the same order that liberated millions of people around the world by creating the modern nation state, representative government and law and order, while replacing it with the feudal ideological tyrannies that they call liberation.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.