Five years ago today, George Floyd died. Contrary to many who knew little about issues of police racism, abuse and violence, and criminal law reform, this one death gave rise to a movement that seized the nation as if there were no serious, meaningful, intelligent efforts to make change. Instead, the mantra of Black Lives Matter appeared ubiquitous and progressives in government began reinventing our socio-economic-legal processes around the “marginalized” at the willing expense of the “privileged.”

Before George Floyd was a household name, I spent a good deal of time discussing how the system could be changed to simultaneously reform what was wrong and bad, without causing unnecessary harm to the majority of America that sought to enjoy the blessings of liberty without suffering the ravages of a new world order that left them and their progeny out and put them at risk. It cost me some dear friends, from Radley Balko who drank the woke Kool-Aid to Cato’s Clark Neily who decried my dogmatic support of the Constitution.

And there was my ongoing discussion with Elie Mystal, who rejected the notion that what was needed was a national consensus, one in which all of us could agree to change that didn’t require the protection and elevation of some at the diminution and sacrifice of others, so that we could all be lifted by a rising tide.

Here we are, five years later. A mere blink in cosmic time. Trump is once again president. Wars rage. People suffer. Huge sums of money have been squandered, and continue to be wasted as Trump sells the accoutrements of office to the highest bidder while the plethora of -isms have shifted from intolerable to de rigueur.

What has been accomplished? What has been lost? Five years after the death of George Floyd, after massive protests, after massive political swings, are we any better off than we were before? Or is the net result a society that is even more broken and divided than before?