America has gone backward since George Floyd | Will Bunch Newsletter

August is never really a slow news month. Amid the latest frenzy out of Mar-a-Lago, we’ve barely noticed the story that matters most. The world is drying up, in climate change’s worst year yet. Routine 100-plus-degree days for two months have crippled China. Sunken Nazi warships are exposed in Europe’s dry Danube, and our Colorado River drought is visible from space. Folks will remember this, centuries after Doug Mastriano is erased from memory.

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If you learn a truthful version of American history — the kind that probably gets a teacher in Florida fired these days — then you’ll come to understand the most powerful undercurrent in this nation isn’t freedom or liberty or civil rights. It’s the backlash — the irresistible push to preserve our social hierarchies, especially around race.

The great awakening of the Civil War and Reconstruction was suffocated by Jim Crow segregation, and the upheavals of the 1960s that were supposed to launch the Age of Aquarius instead gave us Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and mass incarceration. More recently, the election of a Black president didn’t initiate a post-racial America — only a Tea Party movement that flowed into Donald Trump. More often than not, the arc of the moral universe ultimately flatlines.

But the next time always feels different — especially when it’s something as powerful and unprecedented as the spring 2020 protests in response to the caught-on-video Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. Those marches calling for police reform and an end to white supremacy — although boosted, it seems clear, by the strangeness of the COVID-19 lockdowns — stunned America in their size (as many as 15 to 26 million participated), their reach into smaller cities and towns, and the large number of white people chanting, “Black Lives Matter!”

And yet even then, the backlash of traditional white privilege has proved so much more powerful. I was brooding about this, and how to turn it into a column, on Sunday night when the nation experienced the déjà vu of a videotaped, prolonged and unrestrained police beating of an unarmed suspect with loud echoes of George Floyd and Rodney King.

In the rural town of Mulberry, Ark. (population 1,586), two sheriff’s deputies and a local cop arrived at a gas station to encounter a 27-year-old man accused of threatening a clerk at a different location. We don’t know what happened initially. Authorities say the suspect in some way tried to attack the lawmen. What we do have is a 34-second video showing two of the officers continuing to pummel a barefoot, helpless man with their fists and knees after he is restrained and not moving. At one harrowing point, an officer lifts the suspect’s head and slams it into the pavement.

To be clear, there are stark differences from George Floyd case. The suspect survived, and he is a white man, taking race out of the equation. But yet the unchecked brutality of these officers and their presumption (albeit false, since they are now suspended and under state and federal investigation) that they could get away with this suggests nothing much has changed in the 25 months since the madness in Minneapolis. Even tens of millions of marchers could not alter the brutal American way of policing.

In Akron, Ohio, 25-year-old Jayland Walker, who fled from a traffic stop, died on June 27 after taking some 60 bullets from police, even though he was found to be unarmed. Videos in Oak Lawn, Ill., of police punching a 17-year-old suspect (who reportedly was armed) and who was hospitalized with brain bleeding, and of Tennessee cops using a baton and a Taser on a 25-year-old man who ran from a traffic encounter have gone viral in recent weeks. The Washington Post says U.S. police have shot and killed 1,056 people in the last 12 months — a rate slightly higher than the period when Floyd was murdered.

Since May 25, 2020, there have been some meaningful police reforms — sending trained responders instead of cops to mental health crises, or reducing traffic stops as happened here in Philadelphia — in some localities. But this has been dwarfed by the backlash, with politicians including Democrats like new NYC Mayor Eric Adams right up to President Biden tripping over each other to throw money at police or hire new cops, so fearful of looking soft on crime. Meanwhile, after the marchers of spring 2020 moved on to the next cause, powerful police unions and their lobbyists worked overtime to kill most reform efforts, including the federal legislation bearing Floyd’s name that would have curbed chokeholds, no-knock raids, and other abuses.

Little more than two years later, the George Floyd murder is beginning to feel much like the aftermath of the Newtown elementary school massacre in 2012 — incidents that shocked the conscience and were supposed to change America for good ... until they didn’t. The reality that America would do nothing about gun control even after 20 kindergartners and first-graders were slaughtered only emboldened the NRA, the AR-15 manufacturers and their political enablers. Now the powerful inertia of police brutality has outlasted America’s supposed racial reckoning, and the fresh blows are beginning to rain down.

And that is only the half of it.

For the powerful forces of reaction, it wasn’t enough for the police to show their continued dominance. Conservatives in places like Mount Vernon, Ohio, or Havre, Mont., or Sioux Falls, S.D., were horrified to see Black Lives Matter marches in their hometowns, typically led by the teens and young adults of their communities. Clearly these kids were not learning to embrace diversity and tolerance at home. The culprit had to be the schools.

The George Floyd protests created a new bugaboo on the far right — the notion that K-12 students were now being indoctrinated with teachings about America’s racial history that they branded, inaccurately, as “critical race theory.” Before long, the fighting had spread to discussions of gender, and to the school library shelves. In a recent interview, the movement’s chief architect, Christopher Rufo, admitted this was all a backlash to that tumultuous spring of 2020.

Rufo recently told interviewer Jordan Peterson that conservative fears about indoctrination were once confined to elite college campuses, but that “after the death of George Floyd in 2020, it seemed like all of our institutions suddenly shifted overnight” — prompting him to raise a ruckus about diversity training for government workers and anti-racism education in K-12 schools.

But it’s really the same immoral panic that led to 19th century slave patrols — the roots of American policing to this day — or the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws or the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. The fear that the rotting foundation of a society rooted in systemic forms of oppression is on the brink of collapse. The fear that snuffed out hope in 1877, and in 1980, and in 2009.

But history is not fate. We can still rekindle the spirit of that George Floyd spring and try to bend that arc of the moral universe back toward justice — although it’s 10-times more difficult once that initial momentum has been lost. The sad alternative is to see the hope of American renewal get slammed into the hot asphalt of an Arkansas gas station, again and again.

Question: Will, would love to know if you think there’s any path to keeping the House majority in November, and what it would be — Via Molly Gordy (@mollygordy) on Twitter

Answer: Molly, those are great questions. That’s because there’s been so much attention on the battleground Senate races like Fetterman-Oz here in Pa. that only the hardest-core political fans are tracking the fight for the House, even though — with the Democrats currently holding a slim 220-210 edge (with five vacancies) — this is where the fate of 2023 government lies in the balance. The GOP started this election season holding all the cards, including a built-in edge from gerrymandering and an expected backlash against President Joe Biden. But since the Supreme Court overturned Roe on June 24, Democratic voter registration has surged and the party has caught up to the GOP in both the so-called “generic polls” and in measures of enthusiasm. The key may be whether some Republican extremists spouting the Big Lie of election fraud are more vulnerable than the moderates they’ve replaced. Nov. 8 is going to be a long night.

As state Sen. Doug Mastriano surged toward the GOP gubernatorial nomination this spring, two questions swirled around the Christian nationalist’s last-minute rallies. One of them was simply: Why did the retired Army colonel surround himself with a loose team of bodyguards whose main job seemed to be keeping journalists away from the candidate and keeping out reporters judged to be unfriendly? But also, just who exactly comprised this political goon squad, and how were they connected to Mastriano? When one name was floated on social media — a member of a conservative Christian congregation in the Susquehanna River burg of Elizabethtown — investigative reporter Carter Walker of the nearby Lancaster, Pa., newspaper, LNP, went to work.

Walker’s scoop, published this weekend, outlined close ties between the Mastriano campaign and the LifeGate Church, where five members were identified as part of the candidate’s security team. The connection aligns closely with Mastriano’s embrace of Christian nationalism; church pastors speak of the importance of Christians winning political offices and judgeships. But Walker also found troubling links between a couple of the bodyguards and militia-type groups; one of the bodyguards, Scott Nagle, was a longtime regional leader with the radical Oath Keepers. Walker’s reporting added to the rising concerns about Mastriano’s radical associations — and in doing so he achieved something else. He dramatized the power of local reporting, right at the moment that national chains like Gannett that run so many of America’s smaller-town newspapers are making steep job cuts. Reporters like Walker know their communities — the history and the behind-the-scenes players — and that knowledge benefits voters across Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, we may not fully appreciate the Carter Walkers of the world until they’re all gone.