When someone says that Democrats are afraid of their base, Black women, because of disputes over the slogan "defund the police", they're saying that this slogan is universally supported by Black women. I would suggest that this is not actually true.

I believe that this isn't true because I've seen polling on that slogan, and it turns out that that slogan does not have anywhere near the levels of support among Black women you might expect to classify it as effectively universal or even majoritarian.

Fundamentally, there are three reasons why someone might promote this belief against the facts: ignorance, malice, and what Marxists call "ideology".

A lot of people will look at progressives promoting this belief, against the facts, and assume that where it's not ignorance that it's primarily malice. I would disagree with that and say that the primary driver is, in fact, ideology.

The ideology, in the Marxist sense, is primarily built on this loop:

-The police are intrinsically bad
-Black women's political consciousness is high
-Therefore, Black women recognize that the police are bad
-Therefore, they support eliminating, and thus defunding, police.

And as a consequence, opinion polling must necessarily be inaccurate, because in order for it to be accurate, you need to contradict the axioms.

And the axioms are not necessarily contradictable. The reasons why police engage in racist violence are fairly embedded into the police at a structural level. Black women do have high political consciousness.

(A fair number of people do end up going with racism, alas.)

The main issue here is that what's needed is a kind of additive approach which inputs a few more axioms. But that's not quite how ideology works, in the Marxian sense. You can't just add things to it, you need to break it down and rebuild it to incorporate them.

But breaking that ideology is a very difficult task, especially for someone who's clever and fairly educated, because they have a broad toolset for reconciling their beliefs when confronted with contradictory evidence.

Generally, it happens (personal experience and secondhand statements from other people) via (to make a somewhat inappropriate analogy) kenshou. Momentary flashes of insight that don't directly challenge the ideology but force acknowledgement of things beyond its grasp.

And this is not actually within anyone's power to make happen. What you can do is provide an environment where it's encouraged to happen.

Which is to say, this gap is going to continue to exist. But it's not unbridgeable.