Mandela Barnes and the Limits of Post–George Floyd Politics

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

 

Mandela Barnes may become the foremost political victim of the Left’s post–George Floyd politics.

 

The progressive assumption in the aftermath of the killing of Floyd was that once-radical positions were going mainstream, and, given how every major institution in American life instantly began to mouth the shibboleths of Black Lives Matter, it wasn’t a crazy belief. But it underestimated the continued support for law enforcement, and what the reaction would be to riots, calls to cut the budgets of police departments, and a spike in violent crime.

 

That Barnes, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin running for the U.S. Senate against Republican incumbent Ron Johnson, is trying to transform himself from a voice and symbol of post–George Floyd radicalism to a middle-of-the-road, pro-cop Democrat tells you all you need to know about the profound misreading of the moment a few years ago.

 

Barnes has felt compelled to run an ad portraying himself as a normal, grocery-shopping guy who favors funding the police, restoring manufacturing, and cutting middle-class taxes. Any suggestion that he wants to defund the police or abolish ICE is, of course, “a lie.” As CNN pointed out, this is a gross distortion of his record. Barnes held up an “abolish ICE” T-shirt in a photo in 2018, tweeted that he wanted one of the shirts, and liked multiple tweets calling for abolishing the agency.

 

It was after the death of Floyd in May 2020 that Barnes really came into his own, though.

 

In a statement after Floyd’s killing, Barnes asserted that “systemic violence” characterized not just American policing, but all sorts of other aspects of American life: “We must recognize that, especially in our state, acts of systemic violence are happening every day, and they include more than just fatal police violence. The poverty, poor environmental conditions, and inequitable access to health care experienced by Black communities and other communities of color are a form of systemic violence, too.”

 

Protests had already turned violent in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s killing, and Barnes tried to minimize it or even justify it: “Those who are protesting this injustice are doing so in order to save this nation, and they should be protected. To see a city burn on the outside is devastating but hardly compares to the implosion brought by systemic inequity and injustice. Like internal bleeding, you may not see it, but the outcome will be catastrophic if left untreated.”

 

In a radio address, he issued a broad condemnation of the American nation and its history: “We have to reject the idea that this is not who we are, as a society and as a country. Unfortunately, this country was built by stolen labor on stolen land. It’s who we have always been. But, together, we can all work to change that.”

 

He won praise for saying the kinds of things that he’d prefer everyone now to forget.

 

Left-wing writer John Nichols wrote a column headlined, “Mandela Barnes is speaking blunt, necessary truths.” Nichols noted that Barnes was “echoing President John Kennedy’s 1962 observation that ‘those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’”

 

CNN ran a glowing profile of him in September 2020 after Jacob Blake was shot by police in Kenosha, headlined, “Young, Black and in power: Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor steps into national spotlight amid racial reckoning.” The piece gushed, “As a 33-year old Democratic lieutenant governor, he is both politically and generationally more in-line with the activists leading the latest round of protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in May and brought them back with a force after the shooting of Jacob Blake last week in Southeast Wisconsin.”

 

“Some elected officials have struggled amid the country’s reckoning with race,” the piece observed. Not Barnes, though. He “has forcefully stepped into the social and political movement,” while “personalizing the need for coherent statewide leadership at this moment.” Indeed, “Barnes has shown throughout the fallout to the Blake shooting that, unlike other politicians thrust into high profile scenarios involving police, he is comfortable identifying with the protestors in the streets.”

 

Then, CNN favorably quoted a “long hot summer”-type warning from Barnes, a favorite rhetorical tack of left-wing politicians and activists hoping to use violence or potential violence as a point of leverage: “If we fail to correct the mistakes . . . what we are dealing with now is nothing compared to what we will deal with down the line.”

 

Given all this, it’s not surprising that Barnes liked the idea of cutting police budgets. He didn’t directly say “defund the police,” but he made his sympathies unmistakable.

 

By the time Democrats got around to nominating a Senate candidate in August of last year, they should have known that crime was a major political vulnerability for them, and particularly Barnes, yet they cleared the field for him. He had big advantages in terms of his prominence and fundraising. No doubt it was also considered bad form to run against a young African American with all the right progressive views.

 

There might be a little buyer’s remorse now, but it’s much too late.

 

The positive CNN profile from back in 2020 quoted a friend of Barnes’s, Wisconsin state representative Dan Riemer, who averred, “There are moments in public life where the careful, the more diplomatic, statement to an event is appropriate. . . . And then sometimes there is a time where you just have to put your heart out there.” He added, “I think sometimes just keeping it real is what you need from a leader. And Mandela . . . definitely keeps it real.”

 

A couple of years later, Mandela Barnes is keeping it decidedly less real, as he trails Ron Johnson in the polls and the radical moment of 2020 that he symbolized and expressed feels very distant indeed.