In the wake of a white supremacist march in Charlotte that turned violent and, before it broke up, was the cause of an act of terrorism that killed one American and injured many others, readers of the New York Times woke up this morning to a Bret Stephens column about how the violence showed us that Barack Obama was bad and Muslims remain the real problem here. I do not mean that he makes the point in passing: I mean that the entire column is devoted to an argument that white supremacist violence in Charlottesville should remind us that Barack Obama was bad and Muslims are the real problem here.
[I]t should also be a reminder that when it comes to looking the other way in the face of extremism and violence, failing to call evil groups by their correct names and providing economic alibis for moral depravity, liberals have their own accounts to settle. That may not be the most obvious lesson from Charlottesville, but it’s one that still needs to be learned.
The column requires no rebuttal. The only interesting narrative that can be gleaned from it is that Stephens is indeed stubbornly, even proudly dull-witted; as evidence we offer any of his paragraphs, chosen at random; as final proof we offer his belief that what this moment in history most needed was yet another screed about Barack Obama and the danger of Muslims.
The National Review, founded as a segregationist rag and still, at this late date, unwilling to rid itself of an obsessive both sides-ism when it comes to any matter touching on race, delivers this time as well. To be sure, they say, Nazis are bad. But those opposing the Nazis is also bad; we must be rid of them both.
There’s still no certain knowledge of who began the violence, but before long, the sides had broken into the sort of brutal scrum that used to characterize Weimer-era Germany. The two sides then carried the red banner and the swastika; so did the combatants on Saturday. [...]
None of this is new, of course. The Left has engaged in identity politics since the 1960s and engaged in heavy violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The white-supremacist movement has been with us since the founding of the republic. But both movements had been steadily shrinking until the last few years.
The Review comes to the same conclusion that all of the far-right has insisted upon: We were doing fine, until the black president came along. This new racial division is the black president's fault. This has been the defining logic of the National Review since its inception: Racism is bad, but it exists because of the speech and deeds of black Americans:
President Obama allowed the politics of racial fragmentation to fester on his watch; he repeatedly trafficked in broad generalities about American racism. Obama focused incessantly on the specter of white bigotry: “the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives,” embedded in our collective DNA. In response, an identity politics began creepily infusing the Right, with some white people embracing the mold cast upon them by the Left, creating a soft racial solidarity in backlash. This, of course, only strengthened the Left’s views of white privilege, which in turn strengthened the Right’s views of white victimhood.
Obama spoke of being black. He spoke of our plain history. He pointed out that racism still exists. It seems that "in response" to these perceived slights, says the magazine that continually has to rid itself of white nationalist writers after they have done one last thing that renders them toxic to the sort of faux-intellectualism more staid conservatives aspire to, "some white people" were obliged to become more vocally racist just to teach "the Left" a lesson.
As an aside, whether such a thing as white privilege or white victimhood exists can be empirically measured. We need not guess at it; we can look at wages, and criminal sentences handed down for equal crimes, and traffic stops, and insurance rates, and all of these are indeed regularly measured and give us concrete, numerical estimations of white privilege or its inverse. There is no ideological hand-waving required; the political right and left have the same plain numbers in front of them. We could simply use those, and see where they lead us.
As another aside, the Review writer also makes numerous references, in his piece, to the malevolent role of "social justice warriors" or "SJWs" on the "Left." This is itself a term adopted from the alt-right and from the "GamerGate" movement, a flamboyantly misogynistic campaign of online trolls and saboteurs who popularized both the name and abbreviation as derogatory reference to their opponents. That it slid from those toxic realms so smoothly into the opinion pieces of the National Review is, perhaps, another data point to contemplate.
Other than that, I believe we are done here. The "serious" conservative response to the steady rise of sometimes-violent white supremacy is, as always, to declare that it is the fault the first black president and that other groups, from the Middle East to those that show up to oppose the white supremacists, are as bad or worse and that we should therefore be talking more about those. There can be no simple condemnation of racism or white nationalism; it must always be paired with a defensive explanation of how none of this would ever have happened, were the opponents or targets of that white supremacy not so uppity.