THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 8/16/17

The KKK Comes to Town Edition

Before we start, please take 22 minutes and watch this Vice report from the weekend’s rally. Watch while you make dinner or fold the laundry; you have 22 spare minutes, and you really, really need to see this to understand the ideology behind what happened, and the way it is being framed. And you also need to see it to experience, at a deeply empathetic and visceral level, the terror and horror that was inflicted upon the very brave Charlottesville residents and counter-protesters from all over. Please watch it.

I am at a loss for sufficient words to talk about what happened. So I will link/excerpt some of the best writing I have seen on the subject below, and talk about the political fallout. . But first, a bit about Confederate statues, a sort of hobby horse of mine.

A WORD ON STATUES: The rally was planned for Charlottesville ostensibly in reaction to the City’s decision to remove a big statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback. The Right argues that these statues are about “history.” Trump, in his first statement about the rally, declared that we must “cherish our history.” (Not sure whose history exactly he’s claiming is represented by a violent rebellion waged over chattel slavery and cost 600,000 lives.) But of course, these statues have nothing to do with “history” or even really with the Civil War. They were erected in the early part of the 20th century, when the second iteration of the KKK was flourishing (Version 1.0, led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, waged guerilla campaigns in the years following the surrender at Appomattox). The Lee statue in Charlottesville was commissioned in 1917 and erected in 1924, the same era that Confederate monuments were sprouting all over the South (see this interesting timeline here), as part of the Lost Cause narrative that used the “glory” of the Confederacy to justify Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy. (Here’s Yale historian David Blight: “At the heart of the Lost Cause was the claim that white Southerners never fought for slavery, but only for their home, hearth, and ‘liberty.’ The Lost Cause was a set of beliefs, painful experiences, and sheer grief in search of a past. It evolved into a deep mythic story of loss in search of justification. And it provided a foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”) The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum had a very good piece on this this week: “The myth of reunion was built around this understanding, that the nation should treat both sides in a war that killed three-quarters of a million Americans as equal, or at least not inquire too closely into the merits of each cause. And that unity would come not from honestly grappling with events, but from studiously ignoring injustice, and condemning those who oppose it as hateful.”

So these statues are not just about “history.” If they were, there would be statues to Ulysses S. Grant, to Abe Lincoln, to, you know, slavery. They are about telling a specific story about history, and they reflect a specific historical moment during which it was imperative to cement that story. The hand-wringing about erasing history, or having no place to “draw the line,” as Trump put it, is repulsively dismissive of this history and of the lived experience of those people who have to walk underneath these statues every single day. There is a specific reason the South chose to glorify these men in the early-to-mid 20th century: It was to send a message to black residents that they are and will always be Less Than. (As Kevin Drum writes, these statues were built “to physically symbolise white terror against blacks.”) There is a specific reason that progressives have sought to move these statues to museums in recent years. And there is a specific reason that these statues have proved to be rallying grounds for contemporary fascists, racists, and literal Nazis. So let’s remember that.

OUR DESPICABLE PRESIDENT: First, if you haven’t seen it, here’s Trump’s full, angry, aggressive, unhinged press conference from Tuesday afternoon, explicitly defending the Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville. You should watch all 17 minutes of this horror show. He literally called them “fine people” who, for example, were “protesting very quietly” on Friday night -- when in fact they were marching with lit torches through UVA screaming, among other things, “Jews will not replace us.” (Video at the Vice report.) He also spent minutes proclaiming that he didn’t want to “rush into” making a statement because he really wanted to get the facts right. This, from the man who railed about a terrorist attack in Sweden that never actually happened. He declared repeatedly that the “alt-left” “came charging” at the alt-right with “clubs” and declared they were “very, very violent.” He said that race relations “have been frayed for a long time, and you can ask President Obama about that because he’d make speeches about that.” WTF? “I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it and you don’t have any doubt about it either, and if you reported it accurately, you would say it.” He defended the protest of removing the statue, explaining, “You’re changing history and you’re changing cultures.” It should be beyond clear at this point that Trump is not just cozying up to racists for his political support; he is not simply trying to appease his base. He genuinely believes in a vision of white supremacy. Shall we tick through (just some of) the evidence? His first major foray into politics was to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of the Central Park 5, five young black teens who were wrongfully convicted of rape in 1989. And then when asked about it just weeks before the election last year, he insisted -- despite their exoneration and release from prison -- that the five men were guilty. He rose to modern political prominence by leading, for years, the conspiratorial charge that Barack Obama was an African-born usurper. Declaring his candidacy for president, he called Mexicans “rapists.” He declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a case involving him because “he’s Mexican.” He retweeted a racist, anti-Semitic meme and refused to apologize. When asked about African American voters throughout the campaign, Trump repeatedly (and exclusively) talked about “the inner city.” He refused to disavow the support of David Duke. He called for a ban on Muslims, and then implemented it upon entering office. And then this week he declared that there were “fine people” among the white supremacists and Neo-Nazis who stormed Charlottesville. As Maya Angelou says, “When people show you who they are, believe them.” (If only someone had warned us about this.) What is Trump showing us? “[T]he president told close aides that he felt liberated by his news conference. Aides said he seemed to bask afterward in his remarks, and viewed them as the latest retort to the political establishment that he sees as trying to tame his impulses.”

And five days after her murder at the hands of a white supremacist terrorist, Trump has still not said Heather Heyer’s name--and he hasn’t even called her family. (Also, he apparently has not even called the Mayor of Charlottsville.)

THE ONLY SLIGHTLY LESS DESPICABLE GOP/OTHER ENABLERS: Nearly every week, I find myself saying, “Well this is surely a turning point!” But this week, it felt/feels like it might actually maybe be some sort of turning point. After Trump’s Saturday statement, in which he ad-libbed his denunciation of “many sides” responsible for violence and bigotry, and especially after his Tuesday double-down crazy-train press conference, Republicans started speaking out far more openly than I had seen before. On Saturday, Colorado’s Cory Gardner explicitly called on Trump to denounce white supremacists: “Mr. President – we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism.” CNN pulled together some other examples: Jeff Flake put out a statement saying, “We cannot accept excuses for white supremacy and acts of domestic terrorism. We must condemn them. Period.” McCain tweeted, “There's no moral equivalency between racists & Americans standing up to defy hate& bigotry. The President of the United States should say so.” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, tweeted: "Blaming ‘both sides’ for #Charlottesville?! No. Back to relativism when dealing with KKK, Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists? Just no.” Even spineless Marco Rubio tweeted that the far-right planners of the rally were “100% to blame” for what he called the “terrorist attack” in Charlottesville.

In the business world, multiple CEOs stepped down from various presidential advisory councils in response to Trump’s statements on Charlottesville, starting with the CEOs of Merck, Intel, and Under Armour on Monday. By Wednesday morning, the leaders of America’s biggest companies and banks had decided to dismantle Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum -- but they were beat to the punch by Trump, who essentially dumped them before they could dump him. (To be clear, though, they had collectively made the decision to walk away before Trump’s move.) And, as the Times notes, even military leaders sought to put clear distance between themselves and Trump’s position -- a remarkable breach of the chain of command.

And yet, and yet: No one has resigned from Trump’s White House or his cabinet, despite lots of reports about how “dismayed” they feel or whatever. There are basically no black people around Trump, but there are a number of Jews, and they appear to be standing by the man who excused a group that literally terrorized a synagogue in Charlottesville (read that account; it’s truly chilling) and chanted “Jews will not replace us” and that old Nazi favorite, “Blood and soil.” Jamelle Bouie points out polling showing that nearly half of GOP voters sympathize with the white supremacist marchers. “[T]hat is the product of a Republican Party that, for decades, has either tolerated racism or stoked white resentment for its own electoral gain—a Republican Party that wouldn’t push back when its base adopted birtherism and that doesn’t challenge the racist fearmongering from its interlocutors in conservative media.” While their rhetoric may be turning in the right direction, they continue to push for actual policies that dramatically disadvantage nonwhites in the real world.

A FEW GOOD READS:

• On Sunday, Charles Pierce published searing reflections on the weekend’s events and how we got here and it’s really worth reading. We all saw this coming, he writes: “Every Trump rally came with an implied promise of some kind of violence. Sometimes, the promise was fulfilled. Sometimes it wasn't. But it was the dark energy behind that whole campaign.” He notes that multiple GOP legislatures across the U.S. had, in the wake of anti-Trump protests, passed laws authorizing motorists to hit protesters with their cars without legal penalty. And he argues that we should expect Trump to marshal these paramilitary forces to his side if and when Americans/the GOP/Mueller/etc try to push him out of power.
• One of the best things I read was this twitter thread posted by @JuliusGoat (no idea who that is) on Friday night, after the torch-lit Neo-Nazy rally. It is really, really good. Read it!
• Jelani Cobb explores the South’s historical and continuing power over American culture and politics: “[O]nly by the most specific, immediate definition can we consider the Confederacy to have lost the Civil War, and its legacy has defined a great deal of our history since then.”
• Jamelle Bouie discusses how the weekend was a show of strength for the white pride movement: “Yes, the proximate reason for Unite the Right was to defend the city’s Confederate memorials, but the actual reason was for the marchers to show their strength as a movement.” After killing a woman and getting the support of the president, Bouie argues, they clearly succeeded.
• Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explore the interplay between the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment, asking whether there is really a right to speak freely if the speaker has to stare down the barrel of a semi-automatic rifle in the hands of his opponents.
• Dahlia also assembles tesitmony from faith leaders and others on the ground to ask what the “alt-left,” as Trump calls them (sometimes referred to as “antifa” and/or anarchists), were actually doing on Saturday. Note: “Antifa” means antifacist; here’s a basic explanation of who they are.

There were many, many other articles and reflections that were powerful and true. What did you read that you liked? Send them my way.

A FEW NON-CVILLE STORIES:

• There is a very good chance that radical right-winger Roy Moore will be the next Senator from Alabama. Here he is this week telling Vox that “there’s Sharia law, as I understand it, in Illinois, Indiana — up there.”    
• Steve Bannon pulled a Scaramucci: He called a reporter and, on the record, trashed Trump’s North Korea policy, cast himself as the primary mover and shaker of foreign policy in the White House, and castigated his White House colleagues by name. If he still has a job within a week, we’ll know that he truly is running the show.
• Trump’s private lawyer John Dowd, thought to be a relatively mainstream Republican, “forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter ‘has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.’” This email was written personally to him by Jerome Almon, who “runs several websites alleging government conspiracies and arguing that the F.B.I. has been infiltrated by Islamic terrorists.” Among other insane things the email said -- that Dowd took the time to send on to dozens of other human beings, including government officials -- the email declared that “there literally is no difference” between George Washington and Robert E. Lee, stating, for example, that “both saved America.”

Endorsements:

• I am re-endorsing Adam Serwer’s truly superb article on Robert E. Lee. If you didn’t read it the last time around, you really should now.
• The Economist imagines what a letter from Google’s Larry Page to now-right-wing-hero James Damore (who was fired after circulating a memo saying, in effect, that his female colleagues were less qualified for their jobs and biologically unsuited to coding) should have said. It’s a very, very good read, a thorough and comprehensive take-down of Damore’s ideas and the pushback to his firing.
• This relatively hopeful take on the Trump era, arguing that the dysfunction/rapid turnover in the White House is a sign of the strength and resilience of America’s civic society. “In weaker democracies, the rise of strongman rule with a legislative majority would have overwhelmed the institutions. Once Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Viktor Orban in Hungary achieved control over their legislatures, they had no trouble taking over other political institutions. Democratic backsliding ensued. By contrast, so far in the United States, it is the administration that has floundered. This is a sign of the resilience of our democratic institutions and values.”
• Right-winger Charles Krauthammer went off on Trump’s Tuesday statements on Fox News, and derides fellow Foxer Laura Ingraham for her cop-out response. Impressive. More outspoken anger on Fox here; today, in a remarkable segment, two Fox contributors broke down in tears as they discussed the events of the weekend. (Then again, Tucker Carlson used his show on Tuesday to explain slavery as no biggie, because lots of people throughout human history had slaves, and it was totes cool until, like, 150 years ago and how were we supposed to know any better? Also, he is explicitly wrong when he says that, before the Civil War, “slavery was the rule, rather than the exception around the world. In fact, Britain had banned slavery decades earlier, in 1833; Russia had abolished serfdom in 1861. Even the U.S. had banned the slave trade as early as 1807. Yes, slavery still existed in parts of Latin America, but by 1860, “approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the American South.” That’s why his examples are all from far earlier in history: Aztecs, Plato, Mohammed (!))
• I highly recommend this episode of Pod Save the People, in which host Deray McKesson speaks with three incredibly impressive UVA students about what they experienced on Friday and Saturday. They are extremely eloquent and their perspective and experience needs to be heard.