In the wake of the Charlottesville protests, the
equivocations among Republicans are already beginning, starting with President
Trump. The president, who seldom fails to speak his mind on Twitter, offered an
uncharacteristically judicious tweet in the wake of the violence.
“We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands
for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets [sic] come together
as one!” the president tweeted.
If ever there was a time for President Trump to issue a
strong message that parses no words, this is it. While the message of unity is
appropriate, it is also appropriate to condemn the white supremacists who
started the whole fracas.
While radicals on both sides deserve to be condemned, it
should not be hard to single out neo-Nazis who march under
the swastika flag for specific condemnation. The German Nazi flag cannot be
considered to be part of our heritage. Far from it. We fought a world war to
keep the swastika flag far from our shores.
Neo-Nazi radicals have the right to their opinion. They have
the right to peacefully and lawfully assemble. That does not mean that they
should not be criticized and condemned for their actions and the violence that
they have instigated.
While all the groups involved in the Charlottesville
skirmishing are worthy of condemnation, it is especially important for
conservatives and Republicans to denounce the alt-right demonstrators for two
reasons. First, in the minds of many people, the Republican Party is already associated
with racism. Republicans should take every opportunity to distance themselves
from that perception.
Second, the demonstrators explicitly claim to be associated
with President Trump and the GOP. There are numerous reports
of white supremacists wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and other Trump
gear. Former Klansman and Republican candidate David Duke said
at the rally, “We're going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump, and
that's what we believed in, that's why we voted for Donald Trump, because he
said he's going to take our country back and that's what we gotta [sic] do.”
Failure to publicly renounce Duke’s words is a trap for
conservatives. If Republicans do not rebuke racists claiming to act in the name
of the Trump Administration it will be an implicit endorsement of their
actions. For once, it would be to President Trump’s advantage to fire off an
angry tweet specifically rebuking the Charlottesville Nazis in terms at least
as strong as he reprimanded Jeff Sessions.
If President Trump fails to condemn the white supremacists
in Charlottesville, it will be a break with the true traditions of the
Republican Party. The GOP was founded as an anti-white supremacist party at the
dawn of the Civil War with the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, as its first
president. Another Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, ordered the 101st
Airborne to Little Rock to enforce school integration a century later.
More recently, President Reagan specifically excluded bigots
from the big tent of the GOP in his second
inaugural address. “In the party of Lincoln, there is no room for
intolerance and not even a small corner for anti-Semitism or bigotry of any
kind,” Reagan said. “Many people are welcome in our house, but not the bigots.”
In modern America, what easier target for condemnation is
there than white supremacists rallying under a Nazi banner? If the president
cannot find words to denounce American Nazis, it will speak volumes about his
Administration and the new Republican Party.
Originally published
on The Resurgent
No comments:
Post a Comment