Squandering Floyd’s Legacy

This last weekend marked the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. It’s a lesson in how the hard-left hurts its own causes.

Floyd didn’t deserve to be blamed for his own death, as the hard-right is trying to do right now, or canonized, as the hard-left has done ever since his death. The truth about the man is that he had a criminal record, but not a recent one. He had a decade long record of mostly low level crimes — with the exception of one case where he threatened a woman with a gun — all in Houston and all ten years before he was killed. He had no criminal record in Minneapolis.

It’s also true that Floyd was a drug user and he had evidence of fentanyl in his blood stream a the time of his death. But a coroner’s report concluded that he was killed when Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for over nine minutes. The hard-right wants to say that it was the drugs that killed him. That’s not correct.

On the other hand, Floyd was resisting arrest when he died. All of which is to say that Floyd’s legacy is complicated. He was certainly a victim, but he was not a hero. The left wants to cast him with Rosa Parks, but that’s unfair to Parks.

So, that has been the enduring first mistake of the hard-left. Fair-minded people look at this and agree that Floyd should never have been killed and that he was a victim of a police officer who overstepped his authority and, perhaps more broadly, of a police culture in Minneapolis that shaped Chauvin. But they would not agree that Floyd’s victimhood also made him a hero. Renaming the intersection where he was killed as George Floyd Square was a mistake. This is part of a broader problem on the hard-left where victimhood is almost a sacrament.

Then there was the campaign to “defund the police.” For most of us that came out of nowhere. Those signs popped up in protests almost immediately. Again, fair minded people wanted to see Chauvin brought to justice and they wanted to see police departments with a bad culture reformed. But they did not want their local police department to be defunded. That was especially true in Black neighborhoods. It was senseless.

In fact, in Madison protesters didn’t just protest the killing of Floyd in Minneapolis, but attacked the Madison Police Department — for decades one of the most progressive in the country. One evening protesters toppled the statue of Hans Christian Heg, in the Capitol park. They apparently did it because he looked like a white guy. They didn’t know that he was an ardent abolitionist who died on the battlefield in the fight to end slavery. They also toppled the Forward statue, a rallying point for progressive marches and protests for decades, again apparently ignorant of what it meant.

Even life long civil rights activists shook their heads in disbelief. And this all had its predictable results.

According to Pew Research, support for the Black Lives Matter movement was strong immediately after the killing. It was at 67% in June of 2020. But by the end of that summer — thanks to calls to defund the police and lawlessness at some of the protests — it had plummeted to 55%, It dropped further to 51% where it still hovers at today.

The excesses of BLM followed by the over reaching of the Me Too movement (ask former Sen. Al Franken about that) followed by the similar strategies of the transgender rights movement have combined to give us four more years of Donald Trump. And now Trump is taking things way too far in the opposite direction, dismantling even sensible things like the negotiated reforms in the Minneapolis Police Department.

It’s fair to say that the backlash has been stronger than the initial movements.

Still, the long arc of history tends toward justice. Most Americans are fair and sensible. They think that what happened to George Floyd was wrong, but they don’t think he’s a hero. They want police departments reformed where they need to be, but they don’t want them defunded. They think that predators like Harvey Weinstein should be punished, but progressive senators like Franken should be viewed in the context of their own careers and the moment in which the infraction happened. They don’t think transgender people should be discriminated against, but they also don’t think biological men should compete in women’s sports.

There is a sensible center. If the hard-left could ever restrain itself enough to speak to it, they’d make progress instead of fueling a backlash that sets us all back.