On Sunday I went to Lafayette Square to observe the Unite the Right 2 rally and the counterprotests. As has become well-known, the Unite the Right rally was as pathetic as it was disgusting: After carrying swastikas, chanting the “Jews will not replace us,” and killing Heather Heyer last year, this year’s rally-goers could scare up only a few dozen people. On the opposite side of the square, hundreds of counterprotesters, including affiliates of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, showed up in opposition.
At the protest, like in much public discourse, it was the far left who most clearly and powerfully denounced racism. Conservatives like David French have denounced the alt-right, but overall conservatives have not done a proper job of articulating why racism, the alt-right, and similar radicals are not extreme versions of conservatism: Indeed, they are incompatible and antithetical to conservatism. Without this understanding, the lines between conservatives and extremists have been blurred. The reality is that defending our legal and intellectual tradition requires being opposed to all racism.
Conservatism and the alt-right are opposed because the latter believes in the advancement of a race, and the former believes in the advancement of an idea; one supports whites because they are white, and the other supports freedom no matter the skin color. In defending our individual liberties as established in law and precedent, conservatism keeps our nation free from racial favoritism. It defends our tradition of liberty against any extremists’ vision for what America ought to be.
Conservatism requires respect for our Constitution, our tradition of individual liberty, and for all individuals simply because they are individuals. However, the alt-right wants to remake our Constitution in the form of white nationalism. Jared Taylor for example, the founder of the well-known alt-right website American Renaissance, would prefer us to return to the understanding of America that he believes the founders had. Despite decades of legal precedent and our constitutional amendments which protect individual rights regardless of skin color, he believes America would be better if it were for whites. He derives this view of our nation not from precedent, from the Declaration of Independence, or from the original public meaning of our Constitution, but from what he believes was the private intent of the founders. In his vision, it would be better if John Adams had said we are a nation of men, not of laws. Therefore, he is hardly a conservative, but a racially motivated radical.
While those who came to protest Unite the Right were surely motivated by the moral cause of opposing the alt-right, the radical left’s opposition nonetheless represents a disconcerting agenda as well. Marching under the anarchist banner and hiding their faces behind bandanas and gas masks, some black-clad Antifa members got into brief physical confrontations with law enforcement. As police rode by on bikes one said, “Aww, isn’t it cute—the pigs are having a race; oink, oink, oink.” Organizers for the left-wing group the Answer Coalition denounced, not simply white supremacy, but the United States as whole. Speaking on a stage, one organizer even said that Unite the Right was not an particular incident, but was a visual representation of the whole United States. To loud applause, other organizers denounced capitalism and the “fascism” of the police and ICE.
The issue is not whether the radical left is somehow “morally equivalent” to the alt-right. The problem is that radicals who reasonably opposed the Unite the Right rally do not themselves present a good vision for the future of this country. What is wanting is a condemnation of bigotry derived not from a radical agenda, but from the principles of the American tradition itself.
