National Review Online
Sunday, August 13, 2017
When he was running for president, Donald Trump often
dinged his opponent for her failure to forthrightly name the preeminent threat
to our national security: Islamic terrorists. Now that he is president and has
been confronted with a different variety of terrorism in Charlottesville,
President Trump has become vague and equivocal. His original statement
deploring “violence on many sides” was weak, and the halfhearted expansion of
that statement — from an anonymous White House aide, not from the president —
is insufficient.
Of course President Trump is correct that there has been
violence on both sides during the current season of protest theater, from the
black-shirted rioters and arsonists in Berkeley to the white-shirted white
supremacists in Charlottesville. In the latter case, the president’s
denunciation of hatred and bigotry, while welcome, fell short. It is important
that he join Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, et al., and call this what it is: an act of
terrorism conducted under the auspices of a white-supremacist movement that has
embraced terrorism and political violence.
This is somewhat awkward for President Trump because the
cracked and malevolent young men raging about “white genocide” are his people,
whether he wants them or not. Let us be clear about what we mean by that:
President Trump obviously has defects and shortcomings as a political leader,
but we do not believe for a second that those failures include a sneaking
anti-Semitism or a secret taste for neo-Confederate revanchism. At the same
time, he has made common cause with those who have flirted with those elements
for political and financial gain.
His adviser Steve Bannon boasted of having turned the
website bearing the name of the late Andrew Breitbart into a platform for the
so-called alt-right, and Trump-aligned alt-right elements have taken a more
than indulgent attitude toward the Jew-haters, racists, and
white-grievance-mongers whose true nature was on such dramatic display in
Charlottesville. Steve Bannon does not work out of a Starbucks in Burbank — he
works in the White House. Just as leaders on the left have a special
responsibility to acknowledge and publicly reject the armed violence of the
so-called antifa — who did indeed commit their own share of violence in
Charlottesville — those on the right who are touched and sullied by factional
overlap with the white-power ranters owe it to themselves, and to the
principles they purport to advocate, to make it entirely clear where they
stand.
And Republicans, for the most part, have done exactly
that after Charlottesville. But as we have seen in the reaction from the Nazis
and their allies, they do not much care about the denunciations coming from
mainstream Republican figures and conservatives. They are keenly interested in
what President Trump has to say, and they have taken his thus-far mealy-mouthed
“both sides do it” — his refusal to reject them specifically, strongly, and by
name — as tacit indulgence, as the closest thing to a public embrace that realpolitik
will allow. We do not believe that they are correct about that, but President
Trump nonetheless should treat the Charlottesville Nazis with the same
specificity with which he denounces the New
York Times, John McCain, or Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel. The president has a
great gift for ridicule, and the Charlottesville Nazis are ridiculous.
They are also murderous. The car attack on the
counter-protesters has all the hallmarks of a by-now-familiar act of terrorism,
of a piece with similar attacks we have seen from Nice to London.
We categorically repudiate not only the specific acts of
violence but also the broader cause in which this violence was deployed. The
rally in question was advertised as a project to “Unite the Right.” We flatter
ourselves that we have a little something to say about that, and our answer is:
No. We do not wish to be united with Jew-haters, bigots, racists, and the
morally and intellectually defective specimens on such sad display in
Charlottesville, waving their Nazi banners and Confederate flags.
We, too, thrill to the sight of a rebel banner: the one
raised by George Washington, the one that stands for the most subversive
revolutionary creed the world has ever seen — that all men are created equal
and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. The pimply-faced
tiki-torch gang and their media enablers have from time to time denounced this
brand of conservatism as passé, and we thank them for their denunciation. You
can have the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, or you can have
your ridiculous race cult. We are confident that the lunatics in
Charlottesville are not very numerous.
But they are not entirely insignificant, either. Armed
brawls between neo-Nazi gangs and their left-wing equivalents are, for the
moment, an ordinary part of our politics. That might get worse before it gets
better. Responsible parties on both sides — which, in spite of what you may see
on television, still exist — can at the very least be honest about what is
happening and unequivocal in their condemnation of it. The president has a
special responsibility to set an example here, and we urge him to live up to
it.
No comments:
Post a Comment