One year after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., turned violent and deadly, the organizers have planned a new event creatively dubbed Unite the Right 2. Denied a permit in Charlottesville, the white supremacists and their ilk will instead gather in Washington, D.C., with the main rally set to start at 5:30 p.m. on Aug. 12 in Lafayette Square.
According to Jason Kessler’s application to the National Park Service, planned speakers include former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke, neo-Nazi Patrick Little, as well as other white-supremacist notables.
Although online instructions clearly discourage weapons and implore attendees to refrain from violence, recent alt-right affairs don’t offer much assurance that it will be a peaceful weekend in D.C.
Why, though, would hundreds of people make the effort to come to D.C. to march around in the swamp’s humidity for “white civil rights” when violence or arrest is a real possibility?
What is going on in these people’s lives that makes this seem like a worthwhile undertaking?
Without making excuses for the attendees or the organizers, this is an important question to ask. It is a variation of a question that has perplexed national security experts in Europe and America trying to understand why people would leave their homes, families, and communities to travel to Syria and join the Islamic State.
Part of the answer though is maybe in the last part of the question — perhaps what many of those marching in D.C. have in common with those who joined ISIS is not leaving a community behind at all but, instead, searching for a sense of community that is otherwise absent in their lives.
Indeed, that was what the words “Unite the Right” mean: literally bringing disparate elements of the alt-right together, in person — a sort of big, bigotry jamboree. To some extent that worked. Groups that had previously existed mostly online joined together to march with Tiki torches shouting “You will not replace us” or, alternatively, “Jews will not replace us.”
There are complex and illuminating questions to ask about why “Jews” continue to make such a convenient scapegoat, who the “you” is, or how the “replacing” happens. But the most interesting word is “us.”
As with young Muslim men in the Middle East joining ISIS, the alt-righters are often drawn by a perversion of the very human desire for community.
A recent survey suggested that those who hold alt-right views are far more likely to be unemployed, and to have not gone to college. College and a job aren’t merely about wealth, they’re also about connection — they are valuable institutions of civil society that connect people. If you dive deeper into these networks, you find that so many people drawn to extremism are drawn from the condition of alienation.
Desperation for community and identity makes people vulnerable to the entreaties of racist groups who say, “You belong with us.”
Most white Americans suffering from this alienation wouldn’t ever turn to white supremacy or the alt-right, but enough do that we should see this as a national problem.
So, Americans Left and Right wondering how to stanch the tide of extremism need to consider this. Somehow, much of our countrymen have slipped through the cracks and find themselves utterly alienated.
The radicalization on display last year, and again this Sunday, is among the bitter fruits of this alienation.
