The Battle of Charlottesville
The Battle of Charlottesville
By Jelani Cobb
August 13, 2017
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The white supremacists who descended on Charlottesville are part of a tradition of racist, fascist rallies in America—though Trump’s weak response to Nazism is notable.
Photograph by Glenna Gordon for The New Yorker
Fifty-one years ago this month, George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, addressed a crowd of three thousand sympathizers in Marquette Park, in Chicago. The rally came in the midst of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s fraught northern campaign, in which he sought to point out the ways in which segregation and discrimination were not exclusively the habits of white Southerners. The Nazis seized the opportunity to present themselves as defenders of white communities, preventing the onslaught of violence against whites that integration would surely bring. Writing about the A.N.P.’s activities ahead of the rally, the Times observed, “What confused many who still remember the swastika as the symbol of the concentration camp was the reception they got.” Local whites endorsed Rockwell’s anti-black, anti-Semitic rhetoric in striking numbers. The scene recalled a moment nearly three decades earlier, when Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the Nazi-sympathizing German American Bund, drew twenty thousand people to Madison Square Garden, to hear him present his brief in defense of Adolf Hitler. Kuhn’s 1939 rally proved to be the pinnacle of a fleeting movement, as did Rockwell’s Marquette Park gathering. The point here is that this weekend in Charlottesville was not the first time this country has witnessed the mass mobilization of Nazis. But it is the first time we’ve seen such a feeble response to those gatherings in the upper echelons of American power.
The current occupant of the White House has never distinguished himself for his moral instincts, but those deficits have seldom been more apparent than in the nadir reached in Charlottesville on Saturday. Having failed to address the terrorist attack upon a Minnesota mosque last week, Trump offered blandishments regarding the rising tide of racial contempt that inspired the violence in Charlottesville. When he did speak about the crisis, he denounced bigotry and violence “on many sides,” in a statement that was bizarrely punctuated by references to efforts to reform trade relationships and better conditions for veterans. We have seen a great number of false equivalencies in the past two years, and the most recent Presidential election was defined by them. Yet it remains striking to hear Trump imply that Nazis and the interracial group of demonstrators who gathered to oppose them were, in essence, equally wrong.
It would have been naïve to expect the President to unambiguously condemn neo-Confederates (“Heritage, not hate,” etc.), but Nazis? For reasons that are not hard to discern, the swastika, at least in the United States, has always been more clearly legible as a symbol of racial bigotry than the Confederate flag. This country has countenanced more gatherings of white supremacists than it is possible to count, yet Nazism, precisely because Americans do not feel implicated in its worst predations, has typically been easily recognizable as intolerable. In the wake of Rockwell’s gathering, Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, denounced the group as “thugs and hoodlums.” Following the Bund rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia ordered an investigation into their tax compliance—a move that uncovered embezzlement that proved fatal to the organization. In that context, Trump’s decision in February to remove white supremacists from a federal program to counter violent extremists (while maintaining focus on Muslim terrorists) is telling. This had the effect of emboldening the reactionary legions. It was predictable that Richard Spencer’s coalition of the contemptuous would come together. Rockwell was never more than a fringe character, but Spencer increasingly looks like the vector of a formidable anger—one that needs to be confronted at direct angles, not oblique ones. When questioned about the rationale for Trump’s evenhandedness, the White House clarified that both the protesters and the counter-protesters had resorted to violence. This is notable in that the United States was once a country that did not see Nazis and those willing to fight them as morally equivalent. Aside from that, however, there were no images of anti-fascist protesters mowing down reactionaries with their cars.
Trump obsesses over Barack Obama; the raison d’être of his Presidency has been the elimination of Obama’s legacy. Yet he once again provided evidence of why comparison with his predecessor does not favor him. Obama was serially called upon to speak to the nation in moments of crisis: after Aurora, after Sandy Hook, after Charleston, after Dallas. He conveyed genuine empathy and a willingness to grapple with the moral implications of the flawed decisions we have made as a society. In his latest comments, Trump spoke in platitudes; he was a man looking for gray areas where there were none. Nuance is anathema to his thinking, which is why he can maintain such fidelity to his ideas in a-hundred-and-forty-character bursts. Thus, the needless nuance and imprecision of his comments about Charlottesville smelled of avoidance.
There have been at least thirty (http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/18/white_extremist_murders_killed_at_least_60_in_u_s_since_1995.html?cq_ck=1486485587473) attacks carried out by white terrorists since 9/11; the victims of those attacks constitute the majority of people killed on American soil in acts of terrorism. Two years ago, when Dylann Roof murdered nine people, in the sanctuary of Emanuel A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, he described himself as a kind of rageful prophet, one whose actions would awaken white people to the perils they faced from people of color in the United States. Those forces took Trump as a like-minded figure, and saw in his reluctance to denounce David Duke during the campaign, and his willingness to retweet white-supremacist accounts and parrot their mythical statistics about black crime, a sign that their moment had arrived.
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