Rather than denouncing only the racist demonstrators, he denounced violence on "all sides" with equal fervor, though the violence in Charlottesville seemed mostly to come from the demonstrators rather than the counter-demonstrators and the violence killed only one victim, Heather Heyer, one of the majority of counter-demonstrators who were not antifas.
He expressly and emphatically, as is his way, denounced racists and nazis in his earliest remarks and in about every second sentence of his later remarks, but got into a heated exchange with the press (on Tuesday, I think), insisting "the alt.left" (apparently the antifas) were as bad as the alt.right, seemingly talking about their violence, though I suppose he may also have been thinking about their actual politics, in many cases somewhere to the left of the Khmer Rouge or the Shining Path, though in most perhaps not sufficiently articulate for that.
He embraced with fervor the Zinnite line favored by whites (e.g., Pat Buchanan) and blacks (e.g., Al Sharpton) racist in any degree that pretty much all the heroes of the American republic were morally in much the same boat, from the Founders who owned slaves but embraced universal equality in their ideals of government to the Confederates who rejected universal equality even as an ideal and tried to wreck the Union to save slavery, and to the white supremacists who later built and defended the regime of segregation, citing this moral claim angrily to the press as an argument against the current movement to take down Confederate monuments.
Both the equation of the antifas with the neo-Nazis and that slippery-slope argument against taking down monuments to the Lost Cause have less currency among Democrats (a bit more than half, at a guess) than GOPsters (better than 80%), both at large and among leaders and office holders.
In the media, both enjoy widespread acceptance at GOP outlets and close to none in Democratic outlets.
No comments:
Post a Comment