The Dark Forces That Produced Charlottesville Are as Old as America

From Esquire

All over the South, the statues came down, but there was blood on the streets of Mr. Jefferson's town.

It is one year now from the day on which actual Nazis made a kind of war in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a 20-year-old from Ohio named James Fields, Jr. decided to cap off the day by driving his 2010 Dodge Challenger down a pedestrian mall. Fields injured 18 people and he killed one, a 32-year-old legal aide named Heather Heyer. In a parking garage, a 20-year-old African-American special-education teacher named DeAndre Harris was assaulted by a group of actual Nazis, who beat him with their fists and with metal pipes. Four men were arrested; two of them eventually were convicted in jury trials. One of those men was named Scott Goodwin.

The proximate cause of the kind of war that was made in Charlottesville was a Unite the Right rally called by various white nationalist, neo-Confederate, and actual Nazi groups to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a prominent Charlottesville park. This was the particular cause of one Jason Kessler, a mixed-up political halfwit who ended up finding his identity in opposition to the movement to remove Confederate memorials all over the South, a movement sparked in reaction to the massacre at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, perpetrated by a white nationalist named Dylann Roof. This all happened a year ago today.

On Friday, as part of its anniversary coverage, National Public Radio handed Jason Kessler a microphone and allowed him to rank the races by intelligence. Kessler said:

Later, as part of its anniversary coverage, NBC News ran a video package it had first aired in April about the life of Scott Goodwin, one of the men convicted for trying to kill DeAndre Harris. Apparently, Goodwin's life was something of a "path" that led him somehow to a parking garage in which he beat a black man half to death because that man was black. His parents came along on his "path." Both the NPR segment with Kessler, and the NBC documentary about Goodwin and his parents, were defended by the argument that we have to understand the mysterious forces in America that produce men like Kessler and Goodwin.

Worse, after Kessler's segment, a spokesperson for the Black Lives Matter movement was asked to respond to Kessler's statements, as though the two movements were in any way equivalent. The latter was asked whether he could "converse" with Kessler and his people. As an NPR spokeswoman told the Observer, in a response to the rising outrage that the interview with Kessler produced:

What a barrel full of mush-headed white liberal nonsense that is. What is there to be learned about Jason Kessler that we don't already know? What "context" was provided by having Kessler rank the races by intelligence?

My sneaking suspicion is that the elite political media wants to make the forces that produce our Kesslers and our Goodwins as mysterious and unfathomable as possible, so that we don't have to face the fact that they are produced by something that has been fundamental to the American identity since its founding, the same thing that kept a memorial to the treasonous Robert E. Lee in that park all those years, and that kept the banner of sedition flying proudly over the South Carolina state capitol until Dylann Roof gave us all a vivid illustration of that for which the flag really stood.

There is an awful tendency not to ask the only question that really matters, and that is not how America produces its Kesslers and its Goodwins and its Roofs, but why there aren't more of them. All over the South, the statues came down, and there was blood on the streets of Mr. Jefferson's town.

How do we memorialize an event like Charlottesville? There are vigils and candles, thoughts and prayers. There is the endless video replay of the events of that day, and of the night before, when a bunch of Polo-shirted gauleiters fired up the Tiki torches they'd bought at Lowe's and chanted, "You will not replace us," as though they didn't know in their heart of hearts, and as though they weren't reminded every time they grabbed a coffee or bought a newspaper, or, yes, bought a Tiki torch at Lowe's, that it already had happened.

It is hard to memorialize an event so fundamentally dedicated to reversing centuries of progress. It is said, often, that the American experiment never was intended to be complete. Implicit in that belief is a redemption narrative that has proven through time to be a dangerous kind of narcotic. Not every experiment produces a breakthrough. Not every experiment is for everyone. Penicillin was one of the great discoveries of 20th century medicine, but, in 1957, it almost killed me through anaphylactic shock. There is a price to progress, as well as a great temptation to hubris in the belief that all progress is both forward and irreversible.

If we are honest with ourselves, and with our history, we realize that the American experiment contains not only the seeds of its own fulfillment but also, like a dormant virus, the mechanism of its own destruction. The virus has erupted over and over again, escaping the constraints of history like a plague that has escaped the laboratory. Indians extirpated.

Slavery. The burning of convents in Boston. Red Scares. Blacklists. Lynching. Charlottesville.

All of these were perpetrated by people who, by any measure you can imagine, were more free than any other people who'd ever lived. That's the virus working. I am so free that I insist that my freedom includes the freedom to deny you yours. This has manifested itself more in the area of race than in anywhere else, because race was at the heart of the great bluff that is the Declaration of Independence. It's the punchline of the creation myth. Dr. Johnson was right-back then, the loudest yelps for "liberty" came from the drivers of slaves.

And when the bluff was finally called at Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, not far at all from Mother Emanuel, it ended with one of the most sanguinary conflicts ever fought. And, when it was over, the country did not look honestly at how basic to its national identity the virus was. Instead, it made marble heroes out of treasonous men and made the slaves for whose freedom the war was fought, and many of whom had fought for it themselves, invisible in the long retrospective eye of history. All over the South, the statues came down, and there was blood on the streets of Mr. Jefferson's town.

For a number of different reasons, I have been reading extensively about Reconstruction over the past few years. It is an astonishing act of historical amnesia undertaken by a dishonest nation refusing to look honestly at itself. As you go through the historical record of the period, you can see the blissful numbness overtaking the nation, the beginning of a long, drunken tribute to the durability of the nation that had survived such a dreadful conflict, a tribute that refused to look at the fact that racism was as durable in this nation as its ideals of "liberty" were.

The long slide toward Jim Crow and the system of American apartheid begins slowly, as the government wrestles with how to readmit the treasonous states to the Union. There is lynching and gun-slaughter and, in New Orleans, there is outright armed sedition. Then there's violence in those states-brutal and effective, and the national government dithers after a while. Then there's a gradual feeling in the speeches and the documents that the country has done enough for the freed slaves, and that, now that they have their "liberty," it's up to them to make their way in this land of opportunity, a country that was just then beginning to gather its corporate might. The noise of the mills drowned out the cheers of the mob and the screams of the burning man hanging from the tree.

The transformation was so complete that, in New Orleans, in 1891, they raised a monument to the armed rebellion that brought down the civil government. The event was called The Battle of Liberty Place. This is what the plaque on that monument said:

Last year, finally, after several decades of moving the monument, and changing the words on it to something (anything!) more anodyne, the monument was finally consigned to the pebbly death it always deserved. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said of the monument's removal:

None of that ever was historically debatable. It was only emotionally defensible. And, after Dylann Roof shot up the Bible class, it wasn't even that. The monuments to sedition came down, one after the other, and that pissed off Jason Kessler, who decided to do something about it in Charlottesville.

I'm wondering now if we aren't in a kind of extended Reconstruction period in the wake of the triumphs of the civil rights movement and the demise of Jim Crow and, ultimately, a reckoning with the truth of our history that we have tried mightily to avoid. Certainly, the resistance to this second Reconstruction is similar in tone and rhetoric to the language and actions that broke the first Reconstruction. The president* today is even crazier than crazy old Andy Johnson was, and he seems to have just as deft a touch for the politics of hate and division, as well as an instinct for salving the vestigial consciences of his most fervent followers.

In 1866, President Andrew Johnson told a crowd in St. Louis:

And today? You're not racist. They're racist. And today, from the president*, there were "many fine people" on both sides in Charlottesville. Pity some of them wound up under the wheels of James Fields, Jr.'s Dodge. Jason Kessler ranks the races and Scott Goodwin's "path" leads him to a parking garage with a pipe in his hands. And all over the South, the statues come down, and there's blood on the streets in Mr. Jefferson's town.

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