The Men They Couldn't Hang, Stepped To The Mic And Sang

Both Sides Now

There's been a lot of work parsing Trump's unwillingness to single-out the white supremacist groups in Charlottesville.  Most of the focus I've seen is on his administration's long history of playing footsie with the far-right.  But I think that's misguided.  Trump isn't trying to reach out to Neo-Nazis; he's trying to appeal to the people who don't really like the KKK and friends, but are also really uncomfortable with Black Lives Matter and many other activist groups. In short, they don't like people disrupting the status quo .

In A Mirror, Darkly

Trump did his best to establish false-equivalence between heavily armed fascists and those protesting them. Some in the media fell for it, replaying his press conference antics without noting whether his claims were true.  But I think journalists are slowly getting wise.  Or at least, they've started running with the "Trump is nuts" narrative instead of the usual "one side against the other" narrative.

But what really worries me is a relatively small part of the press conference.  Trump didn't merely draw a parallel between the side, but he labeled the counter protesters, giving them the name that seemed the natural counterpart to the so-called "Alt Right." It's a name no one was actually using, and doesn't really make sense, since there isn't really any new force on the left, just the usual groups working harder when fighting the new efforts associated with the Alt Right.

You notice I'm not saying the new name?  That's because I think it's going to be the most dangerous thing to come out of this whole event.  A lot of people are laughing at the name; after all, it's defined as anyone who opposes Nazis, so that would seem to be most of humanity. But the problem is, it's an invitation for false-equivalence.  It invites people to group those countering hate together as though it was one group with its own agenda, rather than what it is: people acting on what most of our society believes in. It makes it sound like they are as much a separate group outside the mainstream as the hat groups themselves are.  In short, it invites the sort of world view I described Trump encouraging in the first section. So I cringe every time I here someone repeat it, even if it is to ridicule it.  It's such a dangerous idea that you shouldn't be giving it any publicity.

Working For The Clampdown

One strange aspect of Charlottesville was the focus of the anger.  Throughout most of my life, whenever bigotry has bubbled to the surface in America, it's generally been pointed at Hispanics, Blacks, or Muslims.  Yes, I know, there's more to it than that, but those are the big targets that you hear about from race-baiting politicians and conservative media.

And yet, when you wade through the ground-level coverage of the hate groups present, they frequently jumped straight to Jews as their hated group of choice.  I really didn't see that coming, since the march was supposedly about a Civil War statue, and their hero in the White House has generally left them alone.  During the campaign, I mentioned that Jews were staying away from Trump, and one explanation given was that they understood that they would inevitably be targeted by the movement.  They sure called that right.

But why are the haters so angry at Jews, despite no coaching from the media or politicians? Recently, an explanation was proposed in the Washington Post: Because they have the privilege to fight back.

Say, remember when "haters" just meant people who were really negative?  Taylor Swift used to sing about them?  Innocent times.

This Used To Be My Playground

There's a dispute going on about how to see Charlottesville. On one side, you have (mostly white) people saying things like "everything has changed" or "this isn't America." On the other side, you have (mostly black) people saying, "this is nothing new."

To some extent, this is a misunderstanding of nuance.  If a person says, "this isn't my America," it's not clear whether they mean, "I refuse to believe this hatred exists here," or, "my vision of this country is a society that's better than this."  The first interpretation is naive and ignorant, while the second is just very idealized rhetoric, and not really a problem.

The trouble is that in recent years, a lot of the most egregious incidents of racism in the U.S. have been disguised within government and corporate policies, hidden in societal norms, or covered over by the justice system.  So activists have gotten used to pointing out that there have long been problems that most of the population just isn't seeing.  That's become enough of an instinctive reaction that even after an incident that seems like a game changer, they're still telling everyone that it wasn't that big of a deal.  I can understand why they would feel that way, but I don't think that's the best message to be putting out there right now.  At a time when white America is finally ready to believe that racism is a problem, you don't want to be telling them that no, it's business as usual.