Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
The Hoods Are Off
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2017/08/the-hoods-are-off/536694/The Hoods Are Off
The “Unite the Right” gathering wasn’t a Klan rally at all. It was a pride march.
Matt Thompson Aug 12, 2017 U.S.
snip//
The tussle over revealing the identities of long-ago Klansmen in Charlottesville, the potential shame to their living relatives or descendants, feels itself like an artifact of history at this moment, when people unadorned by masks or hoods are marching for white supremacy openly on the city’s streets and lawns. It hearkens back to a time when the likes of the Klan achieved terror partially through a uniform that often obscured the face of its wearer. “Anonymity wasn’t quite the point,” as Alison Kinney pointed out in The New Republic. And indeed, in many places, for much of the Klan's history, members marched openly. “While the hoods could assure their wearers’ personal anonymity, their force came from declaring membership in a safe, privileged identity that was anything but secret.” But where open racism was less acceptable, the hood offered a useful disguise. We could be anywhere, the uniform warned. We could be your neighbors.
But the images we saw in Charlottesville today and yesterday convey an entirely different sort of threat. They draw their menace not from what is there—mostly, young white men in polos and T-shirts goofily brandishing tiki torches—but from what isn’t: the masks, the hoods, the secrecy that could at least imply a sort of shame. We used to whisper these thoughts, the new white supremacists suggest. But now we can say them out loud. The “Unite the Right” rally wasn’t intended to be a Klan rally at all. It was a pride march.
The shameless return of white supremacy into America’s public spaces seems to be happening by degrees, and quickly. It wasn’t until most journalists left the conference of the innocuously named “National Policy Institute” in November that my colleague Daniel Lombroso captured Richard Spencer leading the attendees in open Nazi salutes. Spencer’s intention—to make normal that gesture and all the sentiments that underpin it—is no more secret than the identities of his tiki torch-wielding bannermen. "I don't see myself as a marginal figure who's going to be hated by society,” Spencer said to Daniel. “I see myself as a mainstream figure.”
For the moment, you can still spot the subtle boundaries that will have shifted if Spencer and his fellow-travelers succeed. One appeared, for example, in Graeme Wood’s June 2017 Atlantic story on Spencer, when one of his associates requested anonymity: “I have a ‘normie’ [conventional] job,” the young man said, “and I don’t want to get punished for this.” How soon until that young man no longer fears the consequences of his ideas?
“Norms” is such a bloodless, abstract word, which is a shame, because it describes such a bloody real thing. Norms impose genuine and manifold restraints on human behavior. They undergird all the gentle, civic niceties that make human society possible. Laws can codify and reinforce these norms, but the norms are what keep us from savagery.
It would recently have been normal for a president to condemn in harsh tones the participants in a march for white supremacy on the streets of an American city. Today it is not.
21 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
There have been an increasing number of republican legislators speaking out against Trump on various issues of late. Old orange head has a penchant for attacking his allies as well, which bodes ill for future support from those he betrays.
I see this obviously unfit leader as do you for the most part and believe the GOP is very aware of both the coming mid term elections, with an eye to Trump's abysmal numbers, as well as the looming disclosures from the Mueller investigations. There will almost certainly come a point where survival of the party takes precedence over support for an increasingly appearing disturbed little man.
At least one may hope, while working as best as one can to make his departure a reality.
did those guys get those big dildos? 
and exactly what do they do with them after the march? 
