It was in August of 2017 that then-President Donald Trump, speaking after a deadly showdown between avowed white supremacists and anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, shocked the nation by blithely declaring that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the conflict.
It wasn’t that most Americans were so naïve as to believe racism no longer infected the national bloodstream, even at the top levels of politics. But it was nonetheless jolting to hear a sitting president publicly offer anything other than the unequivocal condemnation that the “Unite the Right” rally of tiki-torch-carrying racists so clearly called for. It was a profound break with 21st-century political norms that required national leaders to at least talk the talk of anti-racism to remain viable to mainstream America.
For a measure of just how much those norms have further eroded in the half-dozen years since Charlottesville, consider recent comments by Sen. Tommy Tuberville. In a radio interview in May, the Alabama Republican accused Democrats of “attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists.”
