Like so many, I’m saddened and deeply troubled by what happened in Charlottesville this past weekend, and its aftermath. And I also worry that more argument about it at this point is unlikely to do much good and may even do harm. Yet silence, somehow, feels cowardly.
Let’s review the basic story to date. An innocent woman lies dead, murdered. Far-right hate groups, for decades essentially exiled from anything but the most marginal participation in our public life, are now being discussed around the world (whether accurately or not) as a viable and perhaps growing presence among us. And the polarization of our society, much of it stoked by our market-share obsessed media—the rancor, the bitterness, the frantic hyperbole, the relentless either/or framing of issues, our fear of and anger at each other—appears only to have been increased by Charlottesville and its aftermath.
I agree with, or at least can understand with some sympathy, many things President Trump said. Left-wing provocateurs do exist; and they, too, use telegenic violence to recruit new members and raise money. Labels such as “alt-right” or “neo-Nazi” probably don’t describe everyone who showed up for the rally. There is more than one side to the issue of the Confederate statues and monuments; indeed there are at least three sides, since some African-American members of a Charlottesville city commission formed by the Mayor to consider the issue favored keeping the statues partly as “teaching moments” for the future.
The President also said yesterday that neo-Nazis and white nationalists “should be condemned totally,” a sentiment for which I’m grateful and with which I fully agree—but which also seems both forced and late.
But here’s the heart of the matter, for me. The great majority of Americans on both sides of the political aisle recognize that, in this land we all love and want to make better, racism exists. It’s deep and it’s serious. It dishonors us, and we need to do everything we can to erase it and put it behind us.
In that light consider: The rally in Charlottesville was planned and carried out by openly racist groups in pursuit of openly racist objectives. These facts should and do cause the great majority of Americans to feel distress, embarrassment, regret, shame, remorse, anger, and a renewed determination to do all that we can to minimize this terrible thing that crawled out of the fever swamps this past weekend to highjack our attention. Almost all of us—liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats—know this and feel this in our bones.
Yet President Trump seems neither to know it nor to feel it. This or that occasional and usually elliptical remark (such as the one cited above) notwithstanding, he seems to have almost no willingness or ability to speak to this topic. Most of the time, he seems almost proud to display what appears to be a kind of insouciance, or willful ignorance, about it. It’s as if, for him, for the world he lives in and envisions, the topic doesn’t truly exist.
Why this is, I can’t say. Perhaps it’s because he’s not very interested in any topic other than himself. Perhaps he believes that addressing the issue forthrightly isn’t smart politics—better to appear always to be on top, always a “winner.” Perhaps he worries about upsetting some who voted for him. Or perhaps he’s simply a racist. I think a credible case can be made for each of these hypotheses.
I do know that, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review and for many years a leading light of the American conservative movement, made a determined and largely successful effort to expel from the ranks of American conservatives the very type of pathetic, fringe, hate groups that organized the Charlottesville rally this past weekend, and which the current leader of the American conservative movement, who is also the President of the United States, seems fundamentally willing to tolerate and perhaps even welcome back into the fold.
An innocent woman is dead and some hate groups got our attention. And thanks in large measure to President Trump’s behavior since Saturday, our public discussion of these already-difficult issues is becoming shriller and more hysterical each day, the polarization among us continues to grow, the hate groups appear to be feeling pretty good, and the specter of yet more politically motivated violence haunts us.