America’s President needs to stand for American values

The apparently never-ending culture wars in the US are ceasing to be depressing and becoming downright alarming, reaching a new low in the recent murderous terrorist-attack-by-vehicle in Charlottesville, in the state of Virginia, which killed a young woman and injured some 19 other people. There has been a building cycle of violence and confrontation between the extreme right and extreme left. Insult has long since been replaced by purposeful provocation, intimidation, violence and murder.

It must be stressed that these events only happen in certain places and at certain times and are not common countrywide events – these extremes, even when combined, represent only a tiny fraction, a minute proportion, of the American people. But what is worrying is that they may be, or appear to be, symptoms of deeper maladies in the American body politic.

On the extreme right, Charlottesville saw a combination of what is called the Alt-Right, Neo-Confederates and full-blown Nazis. The latter two are willing to use violence, including lethal violence, while the first group, the Alt-Right, provides arguments to support and encourage that violence. The violent hard left groups are often referred to as the Antifa. There have been cases of murderous terrorist attacks by extreme leftists in the US in recent years, mostly by individuals and mainly directed against police officers (the most recent example was the attempted murder of Republican Party legislators at a practice for a charity baseball game near Washington DC by a single gunman in June).

But Charlottesville was unquestionably, indisputably, extreme right-wing terrorism. The violence came from their side, not the left. And President Donald Trump has not, to put it very mildly, handled it very well. While a weak, equivocal, initial statement (denouncing violence on all sides, when, in this case, only one side had been violent) had been followed by a much better and stronger follow-up announcement, explicitly denouncing the extreme rightists, he then, in a public statement at a press conference in New York, reverted to blaming both sides.

The American conservative political commentator – I stress again, conservative commentator – Charles Krauthammer, speaking on the Fox News TV channel, put it much better than I could. “What Trump did today was a moral disgrace,” he asserted, referring to Trump’s New York statement. “What he did is he reverted back to where he was on Saturday (when he made his original equivocal statement), and made it very clear that what he read on Monday, two days later, was a ‘hostage’ tape. Clearly reading off a [tele]prompter, saying these denunciations by name of the KKK (Ku Klux Khan) et cetera – that wasn’t Trump speaking, that was the aides speaking . . . What Trump is missing here is the uniqueness of white supremacy, KKK and Nazism. Yes, there were bad guys on both sides. That’s not the point. This was instigated, instituted – the riot began over a Nazi riot, a Nazi rally. And the only killing here occurred by one of the pro-Nazi, pro-KKK people.” War hero and Republican senator John S 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.”

(Depressingly, some bigot responded by tweeting “John McCain is a traitor” (written entirely in capitals). As McCain’s record is not generally known in South Africa, let me summarise it: Captain John S McCain III US Navy retired, was a Navy fighter-bomber pilot in the Vietnam War, flying 23 combat missions, being shot down and captured on the last of these; he was a prisoner of war (POW) for five-and-a-half years, including three-and-a-half years in solitary confinement, and was repeatedly beaten and tortured; his decorations include America’s third-highest ranking medal for bravery, the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit with Combat “V” (showing that it was awarded for bravery, while a POW), the US Distinguished Flying Cross (for pressing home and successfully executing his final attack, despite the fact that his plane had already been hit by North Vietnamese anti-aircraft fire) and three Bronze Stars, all with combat “V”, for bravery during the Vietnam war; he has been a senator for the state of Arizona since 1986.)

Of course, it is a notorious fact that the man who, at the time of writing this, was still Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, allowed the website he ran, Breitbart News, to be used as a platform by the Alt-Right. Some have seen his influence as being behind’s Trump’s failure to show the required leadership over the Charlottesville attack. Fortunately, Bannon has powerful enemies in the White House, but hitherto they have focused on marginalising his influence on staff appointments and policymaking and not on his reputed influence on Trump’s personal political positioning and self-presentation. They might now try to marginalise his influence on these matters as well. In sharp contrast to her father, and after his first equivocal response, Ivanka Trump (who is a senior White House adviser) tweeted twice about Charlottesville – firstly, “There should be no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-nazis” and, secondly, “We must all come together as Americans and be one country UNITED.” The Alt-Right has a strong anti-Semitic streak, and Ms Trump is an observant convert to Judaism and wife of another senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner; she converted when she married him. (The hard left also has a strong anti- Semitic streak, but there is no one in the White House who has ever given them a platform.)

It is to be feared that political extremism in the US will continue and perhaps even escalate. It is to be hoped (pardon the pun) that Ivanka trumps Bannon and that she and the other “adults” in the White House get the President to face facts, stop acting as a leader of a faction (he has certainly not acted as leader of the Republican party or even of most of his voters) and start being, when a crisis like Charlottesville hits, the President of the whole country. He must explicitly uphold his country’s core political and moral values whenever they are challenged. And they were challenged at Charlottesville.