A friend in Boston writes to ask if I know of anyone “commenting with particular insight” on what unfolded in Charlottesville last weekend. “No,” is my tersely emailed reply, but it is less a reasoned response to the quality of the commentary I have read so far than a visceral disgust with the evil that resulted in three deaths, many injuries, and a deep disturbance of the peace not only in my hometown but in my nation. Even critical commentary confers dignity—the dignity of reasoned consideration—upon its subject, but the subject in this case is a moral enormity distinguished only by its lack of civility and civilized virtues, and therefore undeserving of any civil consideration.
I claim no vatic powers when I say I saw this coming—clearly, though not for the first time, on the morning when the man who is incapable of clear moral utterance was elected to the highest office of our land. As I wrote to a friend that morning, “I never knew how much I loved my country until now, when I see how vulnerable it is.” I say this without partisan rancor; friends of all partisan stripes have shared similar sentiments with me. And I know, more to the point, that the culture that made possible the election of this supremely hollow man was shaped by forces associated as much with progressivism and liberalism as with conservatism and reaction. Is it any surprise that this man with no real party affiliation, this man without qualities apart from self-aggrandizing, self-dramatizing need, took three days to name the evil forces—above all, the white supremacist racism of Nazis, neo-Confederates, and alt-right thugs—behind the senseless deaths and destruction of last weekend?
The fish rots from the head, runs an old adage. But it does not really describe America’s current condition. The rot is general through the body politic. The current president is a mirror—a funhouse mirror, perhaps—in which we see, and now must recognize, our own disfigured selves.
We can do much better. We must do much better.
Jay Tolson is editor of The Hedgehog Review.