By Ben Shapiro
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
America has cancer.
On Saturday, a crowd of alt-right white supremacists,
neo-confederates, and Nazi sympathizers marched in Charlottesville, Va.; they
were confronted by a large group of protesters including members of the Marxist
Antifa — a group that has time and again plunged volatile situations into
violence, from Sacramento to Berkeley. There’s still no certain knowledge of
who began the violence, but before long, the sides had broken into the sort of
brutal scrum that used to characterize Weimer-era Germany. The two sides then
carried the red banner and the swastika; so did the combatants on Saturday.
Then a Nazi-sympathizing alt-right 20-year-old Ohioan
plowed his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring 19. The
president of the United States promptly failed egregiously to condemn alt-right
racism; instead, he opted for a milquetoast statement condemning “hatred,
bigotry, and violence on many sides.”
The Left leapt into action, declaring Trump’s statement
utterly insufficient — which, of course, it was. But they then went further,
declaring that Antifa was entirely innocent, despite Antifa’s launching into
violence against pro-Trump marchers in Seattle over the weekend, as they have
in Sacramento and Berkeley; berating New
York Times journalist Sheryl Gay Stolberg for having the temerity to report
that “the hard left seemed as hate-filled as the alt-right”; and suggesting
that all conservatives were, at root, sympathizers with the Nazi-friendly
alt-right.
And so here we stand: On the one side, a racist,
identity-politics Left dedicated to the proposition that white people are
innate beneficiaries of privilege and therefore must be excised from political
power; on the other side, a reactionary, racist, identity-politics alt-right
dedicated to the proposition that white people are innate victims of the
social-justice class and therefore must regain political power through
race-group solidarity.
None of this is new, of course. The Left has engaged in
identity politics since the 1960s and engaged in heavy violence in the late
1960s and early 1970s. The white-supremacist movement has been with us since
the founding of the republic. But both movements had been steadily shrinking
until the last few years.
Now they’re growing. And they’re largely growing in
opposition to one another. In fact, the growth of each side reinforces the
growth of the other: The mainstream Left, convinced that the enemies of social-justice
warriors are all alt-right Nazis, winks and nods at left-wing violence; the
right, convinced that its SJW enemies are focused on racial polarization,
embraces the alt-right as a form of resistance. Antifa becomes merely a radical
adjunct to traditional Democratic-party politics; the alt-right becomes merely
a useful tool for scurrilous Republican politicians and media figures.
Three factors led to this self-reinforcing growth loop.
First, increasing political polarization.
President Obama allowed the politics of racial
fragmentation to fester on his watch; he repeatedly trafficked in broad
generalities about American racism. Obama focused incessantly on the specter of
white bigotry: “the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every
institution of our lives,” embedded in our collective DNA. In response, an
identity politics began creepily infusing the Right, with some white people
embracing the mold cast upon them by the Left, creating a soft racial
solidarity in backlash. This, of course, only strengthened the Left’s views of
white privilege, which in turn strengthened the Right’s views of white
victimhood.
The second factor was media malfeasance.
Left-wing media — and “objective” media — saw an
advantage in highlighting the antics of racists such as Richard Spencer and
David Duke. Focusing on the racist alt-right allowed the media to draw the
convenient conclusion that the alt-right was a growing force in Republican
politics that had to be fought through support for Democrats. Meanwhile, the
media cast a blind eye toward Antifa’s violent Weimer-style rioting in
Sacramento and Berkeley.
In response, right-wing media began tut-tutting the
alt-right as victims of Antifa and focused exclusively on Antifa as a nefarious
force; they also responded to the Left’s disgusting attempts to lump in the
Right with the alt-right by accepting a broader, false definition of the
alt-right that could include traditional conservatism. They even bought into
the shameful rebranding of the alt-right as defenders of Western civilization
by shills such as Milo Yiannopoulos. That rebranding provided a convenient way
of fighting the Left: “If the Left is calling us alt-right, that’s just because
they hate that we stand for Western civilization!”
Finally, there’s political convenience.
Obama’s repeated references to American racism weren’t
his only sin. He repeatedly shunned opportunities to tamp down leftist racial
radicalism. He made excuses for riots in Ferguson and Baltimore. He used the
shooting of Dallas police officers by a radical black activist as an
opportunity to lecture Americans about the evils of racist policing. He knew
that his political support came in large measure from SJWs, and he cultivated
them.
Meanwhile, on the right, Trump did the same. During the
campaign, he ignored opportunity after opportunity to break with the alt-right.
He refused to condemn the KKK on national television; he refused to condemn his
supporters’ sending anti-Semitic messages to journalists; he hired as his
campaign strategist Steve Bannon, a man who openly celebrated turning Breitbart
into a “platform for the alt-right.” Trump saw the alt-right as convenient
allies, his meme-making “deplorable” friends on the Internet. They reveled in
both his unwillingness to condemn them and his willingness to share their work.
And so here we are. The mainstream Left has been
increasingly suckered into walking hand-in-hand with the SJWs while ignoring
the most egregious activities of Antifa; the mainstream Right has been
increasingly seduced into footsie with alt-right associates while feigning
ignorance at the alt-right itself.
That’s why Charlottesville matters: not only because we
saw destruction and terror, but because if all Americans of good conscience
won’t do some soul-searching and move to excise the evil in their midst, that
evil will metastasize. There is a cancer in the body politic. We must cut it
out, or be destroyed.
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