Our society's REAL conflict: the authoritarians vs. the idea of America
I still maintain that since the Nazis and Klan, unlike the counter-demonstrators, came to Charlottesville with the specific intention of committing violence, spent the entire weekend terrorizing the Charlottesville community, had clearly rehearsed and even drilled group maneuvers to facilitate attacks against counter-demonstrators, and were, in fact, the aggressors in Saturday's violence, they bear more responsibility for the disturbance than the counter-protestors who for the most part simply defended themselves.
I also still maintain that in view of the death of one demonstrator and the mayhem inflicted on close to twenty others, to speak of this matter without due weight being given to the disproportionate character of the violence inflicted by the white supremacists is inappropriate even if only one white supremacist was responsible for that car being driven into that crowd. Even if responsibility for the other violence was remotely equal- which it was not- to say that "there was blame on both sides" would still be to treat the two sides as equally responsible for something which would have been a minor story were it not for the actions of that one individual, actions which elevated the tragedy from a story about a non-lethal conflict between two groups of people into a story about how one side- even if by the agency of a single person- took that matter to the level of using deadly force.
On May 4, 1886, a peaceful rally was held by labor activists in Haymarket Square in Chicago. It was a time of high tension. Several strikers had been murdered by management goons at the McCormack Harvester plant the day before. But the crowd was peaceful. The mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, even observed the rally and noted that fact before leaving early. In fact, the mayor was a strong supporter of the "radical" idea which was the primary issue: the eight-hour day.
There were potentially violent elements among the protestors. One poster called on working men who attended to arm themselves. One of the organizers of the event, August Spies, refused to participate further unless that language was removed from the offending flier. It was.
Shortly after Mayor Harrison left, Police Captain John Bonfield made the unauthorized and completely irrational decision to break the rally up, interrupting the final speaker and ordering the crowd to disperse. Bonfield had a reputation as a brutal man who hated the labor movement. The irony was that the meeting- which, again, had been completely peaceful and orderly- was literally at the point of ending anyway! And bear this in mind: it was an action which the only person with the authority to have ordered it, Mayor Harrison, would never have approved. He sympathized with the workers. and had even registered his opinion by explicitly pronouncing the meeting peaceful and going home early because he saw the peaceful conclusion of the matter as a done deal.
But as the police advanced on the crowd, someone- to this day, nobody knows who- threw a dynamite bomb. It killed seven policemen; two more died later. The police responded by opening fire indiscriminately at the crowd, indiscriminately enough that several other policemen were hit by friendly fire!
Four demonstrators were killed. Was there "blame on both sides?" No. There remains to this day not a single scrap of evidence that the bomb-thrower was in any way affiliated with, or even shared the ideology of, those who had organized the rally. In fact, the consensus of historians is that the bomb-thrower was almost certainly an extremist who hated the organizers of the rally as much as the "bosses" and the police! There was nothing violent about the meeting and nothing which encouraged bomb-throwing. If there had been, the blame would have fallen disproportionately on the side of the people who organized the meeting and encouraged the bomb-throwing. But in fact, there was not.
In retrospect, the bomber was almost certainly an agent provocateur of radical elements who had nothing to do with the meeting or its organizers and probably despised them as weak-kneed moderates. If there is anybody who was not to blame for the tragedy, it was the organizers of the rally, who scrupulously and zealously fought against any attempt to introduce even the possibility of violence into the situation.
Not a single scrap of evidence was ever found tying anyone involved with organizing the rally to the bombing. Remember that.
Captain Bonfield- without orders from Mayor Harrison and absolutely without justification or reason- chose to disrupt a completely peaceful meeting which was about to end peacefully in any case. Once the bomb was thrown, the police- understandably, but with a culpable lack of discipline which ended in four completely innocent listeners to the speeches being killed and several more of their own being wounded- emptied their revolvers into a crowd of law-abiding citizens and, by some accounts, reloaded them and emptied them again.
The bomb-thrower bore primary responsibility for the tragedy. Captain Bonfield also bore a great deal; if he hadn't made the ill-considered decision to disrupt the ending of the rally the bomb would never have been thrown. And it was the individual policemen who made a bad situation worse by emptying their revolvers into a crowd of innocent people.
Plenty of blame on both sides- but only if we assign the bomb-thrower a "side." But there is no reason to do that unless one is determined to get Captain Bonfield off the hook at all costs. And as it turned out, that is exactly what the political establishment decided that it wanted to do.
So who was blamed? The organizers of the meeting were put on trial for murder in what to this day is cited as a textbook example of a kangaroo court. Judge Joseph Gary was openly and outrageously biased against the defendants. Completely without evidence of any kind, they were convicted. Four of them- Louis Lingg, George Engel, Albert Parsons, and August Spies, who had refused to be involved unless the language calling about attendees to arm themselves was removed from the flier- were hanged. Others had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment by Gov. Richard Oglesby. The surviving defendants were pardoned by Oglesby's successor, Gov. John Peter Altgeld, an act of justice which cost him his political career and earned him an epitaph by Vachel Lindsay and a place in John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.
Altgeld came right out and said that other than the bomb-thrower, the man who was ultimately responsible for the Haymarket tragedy was Captain John Bonfield.
But that fact was obscured for years by those who clung to the myth that "the other side" was responsible as if the bomb-thrower were somehow a part of the same "side" as Lingg and Engel and Parsons and Spies, and that somehow made the latter guilty and justified the behavior of Bonfield and the police. That, in essence, was the case the prosecution made before Judge Gary's court, and the basis upon which they were convicted. But it was a lie.
When President Trump speaks of their being "blame on both sides," he is doing nothing more or less than to try to take the heat off the white supremacists and lessen it by spreading it around. Since white supremacists and the alt-right crowd are among Mr. Trump's most loyal constituencies, how can this not be seen as a partisan political ploy on his part? How can it be objectively seen otherwise when the white supremacists and bigots themselves publicly interpret it that way?
The Far Right demonstrators at Charlottesville differed from the crowd at Haymarket Square in two important respects. First, they were violent while the Haymarket crowd was peaceful. And while the bomb thrower cannot fairly be lumped together with Lingg and Engel and Parsons and Spies and the others, James Alex Fields, Jr,, who drove that car into the crowd at Charlottesville on Saturday, was absolutely one of those involved in that violent group. If we're going to talk about "sides" here, the blame belongs disproportionately on the side of the racists, and to use the language of equivalence is quite simply to try to get them off the hook just as the legal lynching of Lingg, Engel, Parsons, and Spies was an attempt to get Bonfield off the hook.
The only people in the morgue or the hospital were put there by a member of one specific side- a side whose very ideology is defined by hate. Incidentally, as has become depressingly common in such incidents, a lame attempt has been made to convince people that Fields was a Leftist or an anti-Trump activist or even an "Antifa" activist. That claim is without foundation. The guy is an alt-right hater and very much a part of the far right cabal which hijacked what had previously been a peaceful movement to protest the removal of a statue.
So attempts to take some of the heat off the racist and alt-right side by claiming that there was "blame on both sides" ignore the difference between being involved in minor physical altercations and committing murder and mayhem. If one is going to talk about sides, then the responsibility Fields- who, unlike the Haymarket bomber, who almost certainly had nothing to do with the people who organized that fateful rally, was absolutely a part of the white supremacist side- tips the scales. If one wants to argue that there was "blame on both sides," one is then obligated, if one is addressing the matter honestly, to acknowledge that there is disproportionately more blame on the side one of whose members murdered a member of the other side and injured 19 others than on the side whose members got into fist fights and scuffles and might have bloodied a nose or two, but did nothing requiring any of them to be hospitalized. Beyond that, there is a clear moral difference between a group of people who came to Charlottesville with the specific purpose of inciting violence, which had actually rehearsed quasi-military maneuvers to be used in joint violence, who spent all weekend terrorizing the community, and those who simply protested against the hateful ideology the first group represented and either defended themselves against the premeditated violence or, perhaps in isolated cases, lost their temper and punched somebody in the heat of the moment.
But there is also another villain here. It's the attitude which makes people on both sides of the political spectrum regard openly disagreeing with them in their presence is somehow an act of provocation and a justification for violence.
If that's the mentality of some on the crazy Left- and it absolutely is- it's still more frightening when it's tacitly supported by the President of the United States. Yet a great deal of my opposition to Donald Trump has always been based on his effortless and apparently eager embrace of that principle. Say what you want, but neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton, outrageous though they may have been in other ways, ever to my knowledge explicitly endorsed or encouraged their supporters to treat that to expression of a contrary opinion in a public venue in which their supporters were in the majority as provocative act which justified violence.
Trump has. That very thing that happened at Trump rallies throughout especially the early campaign! A protester or protesters in numbers far too small to have any chance of disrupting or interfering with rallies even if they tried were routinely assaulted, and the response of the Trump supporters present was that they "had it coming" for exercising their First Amendment rights and registering dissent! At one point Trump himself, of course, offered to pay the legal expenses of anyone who assaulted one of them!
At his core, Donald Trump is a bully and an authoritarian. The core of his supporters- I do not say every single one of them, and certainly, not everybody who voted for him in November- are bullies and authoritarians.
And yes, it's perfectly true that the "progressive" movement as a whole, if not every individual in it, has become a movement of bullies and authoritarians, too.
It is no surprise that Trump and Putin get on so well, or that our president so greatly admires dictators and authoritarians who lead other countries. A study during the primary campaign, you may recall, found that authoritarianism was the strongest single quality predicting support for Trump. Trump is the Man on a White Horse. Trump is The Leader, the One Who Must Not Be Questioned. And that is as alien to our system, our values, and our way of life as anything possibly can be. Ok, his personal unfitness for the office he occupies is a major factor, too. But more than anything else, it's Trump's authoritarianism and that of his followers that cause me to oppose him so strongly in spite of the fact that there are several "hot button" issues on which I agree with him.
There are many problems we who are not his fans have with the man; his ignorance, his behavior, his personal qualities, and the kind of people who tend to be most strongly attracted to him are several. But one of the most basic is that he is not a democratic leader. He and his followers share an intolerance for dissent- and he, himself, is a petty, childish man with a thin skin ill-suited to a system of government in which people are supposed to criticize their leaders and hold them to account. Such qualities are unhealthy, to say the least, in the leader of a democracy.
Evan McMullin said the other day that the "two sides" in the Charlottesville affair were the alt-right on one hand and America on the other. To say that about our political divisions right now would be simplistic to the point of being ridiculous. We're living in a society in which Brendon Eich can lose his job for believing, not out of bigotry but for practical reasons, that marriage redefinition might not be a good idea, and James Damore can be fired from Google for making an observation supported by science but which violate the canons of political correctness. We live in a society in which college professors can flunk students for having the "wrong" political views and in which the Left openly espouses the view that political and social causes with which they disagree should be silenced. The rise of Neo-Atheism has been marked by a degeneration of the philosophy from the tolerance and quiet civility of people like Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and in the present day Stephen Hawking to the infantile and often ignorant snark of Richard Dawkins and others which has become the movement's hallmark. While there is absolutely no evidence that this was the case at Charlottesville, the Left, too, is full of people who are utterly and radically intolerant of any viewpoint which disagrees with their own, sometimes to the point of violence. And no matter who is embracing that kind of totalitarian nonsense, it is about as unAmerican as anything possibly can be, and as alien to our most basic values as Americans.
Yet both extremes embrace it, and the extremes these days are rapidly becoming the majority if they aren't already. It would be simplistic and unfair to expand what Evan McMullin said about Charlottesville to the mess that our political and social discourse is in America, and we have legitimate differences as to exactly where the line should be drawn between individual liberty and the needs of order and the greater good. But I think it would not only be proper but exactly accurate to say that the real battle in America today isn't between Left and Right, but between the authoritarians who have come to dominate both camps on one side, and America's most sacred values on the other.
In the larger context of our political discourse, neither side is without blame. But no useful purpose can be served in refusing to hold the guilty parties responsible for their actions and distinguishing between their degrees of responsibility in individual incidents. The president's refusal to make such a distinction has the effect of giving aid and comfort to the ugly cause of racism and white nationalism. Even more dangerously, it validates and legitimizes the kind of authoritarian intolerance which causes people to see disagreement as an excuse for violence.
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