Ultimately, protest leaders are building their goals and demands on the storied tradition of radical economic-political thought (more specifically anarchist and communist, to give credit where credit is due) and naturally the language they are using, like “community-led public safety”, is drawn from these international streams and their academic equivalents. Both anarchist and communist thought sees societal development as a science that can be predicted. They match moments of change (eg, the Industrial Revolution) to a linear (so-to-speak) slope, believing the future world that they have conceived of is certain to eventually come about.

Why is this so relevant now? We all see technology making advancements that are beginning to eliminate the need of human labor, a development that is majorly significant for those who subscribe to these theories. Recently, Andrew Yang's campaign focused on this merely factual development, bringing the idea to the forefront as a national discussion (this was extremely prescient and needed). Anarchists and communists start from this observation and conclude that eventually mankind's needs will be met without man himself exerting any labor.

In this view, once technology ensures all of mankind's material needs are satisfied, man will be left to engage in leisure and the creation and enjoyment of culture, art and literature, in a final utopian mode of life called "Full Communism". In this final state, the theorists envision no nations, no borders, no private property, no needed labor, and no "tyranny" of any man over another. That is, the goal of this final state is that no one individual will have any authority over another individual: here no man is a king and every man is a king. This is their conception of "freedom" and thus anything apart from this is "tyranny".

The theory is rooted in idealism, refusing to settle for the world as it is, but insisting on the world as it, in their view, could or should be. Subscribers to these theories adopt almost these exact words for themselves as a badge of honor or rallying cry. The practical problem with all of this is the inconvenient fact that, no matter the year and no matter the environment, man collectively refuses to act as they imagine he does. There remains perpetually some variable the theory cannot account for.

The theoretical problem with all this is an incorrect conception of authority. Nature abhors a vacuum; it happens to be likewise with authority. Eliminating the police does not eliminate authority. Because man seeks power, there is always someone who will take charge; the only question is whether those not in power have any right to recourse. Without an organisation that has a monopoly on the legitimate employment of violence (ie, the police), whichever group (in their terminology: "affinity group") is the most violent is the de facto authority. The theorists involved see nothing about the current system distinct from Hobbes' suggestion regarding pre-society, "In the state of nature profit is the measure of right". They think we are in that state of nature and the status quo forces have just happened to have, as a gang, clawed their way to the top. Believing the current system is nothing more than the outworking of an arbitrary thrashing-about, meant to impose arbitrary will, they see nothing wrong with eliminating it and beginning an even more scrappy and perpetually incomplete process.