HATE IN AMERICA
Will the Nation Succeed After Charlottesville Where Donald Trump Failed?
eThe divisions are now as physical as they
are emotional and intellectualf
Just after midnight on Nov. 4, 2008, the
U.S.fs first African-American President-elect stood in Chicagofs Grant Park
with a challenge to the country: gIf there is anyone out there,h Barack Obama
said, gwho still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who
still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.h
But it was just one answer, to be followed
by many more from all quarters, including precincts that once kept their
poisons private. This is a story as old as America itself, this serial
reckoning with the dreams of our founders, and our record in living up to them.
Ours is still an imperfect union, bound by the belief that we can always do
better.
Those who lit the torches in
Charlottesville reject both voters and Presidents of all shades other than
white, and so they came to gtake our country back.h This was not the first
violent nationalist clash, but it was destructive and deadly, widely seen and
shared, and it comes at a moment when you can practically feel underfoot the
hardening soil of our common ground. The motley fascists and their extended klan could hardly have picked a
more storied stage than Thomas Jeffersonfs temple of enlightenment, the
University of Virginia, nor a more perfect sword than flagpoles, weaponizing the very pillars that hold up our national
ideals. And even as activists looked for more Confederate statues to pull down,
and the so-called alt-right promised more torches, more marches, more mayhem,
it felt like an awakening, and a time for everyone to take a side.
Having long petted and pampered the demons
of racial politics, President Trump should have known his response would get
maximum attention. Most successful leaders, certainly most Presidents, preach
an American gospel about freedom, justice, imagination, ambition. They invoke
enduring values in the service of both achieving goals and healing wounds. But
that is not this Presidentfs liturgy. Instead of summoning our better angels,
he strums deep chords of grievance and resentment: The world is not a
community; itfs a business. If youfre not winning, youfre losing. And anyone
who invests in a common good or a shared sacrifice is a sucker.
Trump delights in deriding those who
displease him; he can hurl lightning bolts with a single tweet. Yet the wan
flickers of disapproval he expressed from his golf club over the weekend
signaled the opposite of outrage, and his rebuke on Aug. 14 of the KKK and
neo-fascists looked like a hostage video. On Aug. 15, he appeared more
authentically appalled by the counterprotesters, more
concerned about the gvery fine peopleh objecting to statues being removed than
the woman who was killed. Past Presidents risked everything to fight the Nazis;
this one provided them cover.
The country would have to look elsewhere for
moral leadership and practical guidance. Both the event and the Presidentfs
response brought swift and sharp reactions from right and left, from Republican
leaders and lawmakers, from clerics and scholars and CEOs. On the Monday after
the Charlottesville violence, a crowd in Durham, N.C., toppled the bronze
Confederate Soldiers Monument in what they called an gemergency protest.h The
mayor of Baltimore ordered that Confederate monuments disappear overnight,
while statues were vandalized in cities from Louisville, Ky., to Tampa. As
photos of the Charlottesville violence spread on social media, families erupted
in their own civil wars: a North Dakota father said his youngest son,
identified as a white nationalist, gis not welcome at our family gatherings any
longer.h Facebook deleted Unite the Rightfs event page.
Across the divide, white nationalist leader
Richard Spencer vowed to return to Charlottesville — gThere is no way in hell
that I am not going back,h he said — while former Klan leader David Duke praised
Trump for his ghonesty & courage.h A White Lives Matter rally scheduled for
Texas A&M was canceled out of concern for the safety of the community, but
a group called Patriot Prayer has a permit for a protest in San Francisco on
Aug. 26, a No to Marxism in America rally is planned in Berkeley, Calif., and
other groups promised more and bigger gatherings to come. One Florida lawyer
who attended the Charlottesville rally says he plans to run for U.S. Senate.
That much of the battle is focused on the
past is fitting, even though this fight is about the future. Throughout our
history, America has run on the voltage generated by competing ideas, the
enduring debate over the proper balance between liberty and security, equality
and opportunity, individual rights and the common good. No king, no council of
elders, dictated an American belief system: we are united by our right to
pursue happiness in every manner that does not get in each otherfs way. That
raucous American argument has been eagerly joined by generations of immigrants
seeking the freedom to carve their own destiny, sharpened by the ideas of
rebels and visionaries and misfits who have Made America Great, over and over
again.
But all that fervor and friction, even as
they lifted America from a clumsy collection of mismatched colonies to a global
political and economic superpower, still required a shared embrace of those
inalienable rights, above all the sanctity of freedom and ideal of equality.
Thatfs the power and the price of being a country defined not by a faith or a
race or an ethnic heritage but by an idea. And it is fundamental American ideas
that Trump has ducked from the start, tapping instead the tribal power of the
arrogant and the aggrieved, emboldening racists who want to claim him as their
champion and activating a resistance that sees him giving cover to a rising
threat from those who aspire to gtake our country back.h
The divisions are now as physical as they
are emotional and intellectual: in the 2016 election, of Americafs 3,113
counties, just 303 went to either candidate by 10 points or fewer; 1,196 saw
landslides of 50 points or more. We have self-sorted into private pockets of
affirmation, and where we live shapes what we believe. gThese days, Democrats
and Republicans no longer stop at disagreeing with each otherfs ideas,h argues
Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center. gMany in each party now deny the
otherfs facts, disapprove of each otherfs lifestyles, avoid each otherfs
neighborhoods, impugn each otherfs motives, doubt each otherfs patriotism,
canft stomach each otherfs news sources and bring different value systems to
such core social institutions as religion, marriage and parenthood. Itfs as if
they belong not to rival parties but alien tribes.h
During his campaign, Trump engaged and inspired millions of voters who had given up on government and were desperate for a new vision, a new voice. Their needs are real and urgent, and have been largely ignored as the President reduced the office to a vanity plate. He has shown how little loyalty he feels to friends and allies who honor some principle higher than his self-interest. In the aftermath of Charlottesville, we saw the reverse: we saw his reluctance to turn away from people who admire him, claim him, even if they do so in the name of beliefs that Americans have died fighting to defeat. There will be more marches, more clashes and, if the white supremacist leaders are right, more lives lost before this latest battle for the nationfs soul resolves. But it is a historic shame and sorrow that so few Americans can come to that struggle with the faith that their President is on their side.