Like so many people, and as a graduate of UVA, I’m heartbroken about what happened there this past weekend. I don’t know how to understand it — especially the fact that someone was literally killed, that the capacity for human boldness, in a world where we need boldness for so many good and useful and noble things, was instead used to kill someone— but I know we have to try. So here are just a few thoughts on how one might begin to respond:
(1) On an individual level, I think Ross Baird, my friend and classmate from UVA, picked the perfect quote: “Do what you can, with what you have, with where you are” https://medium.com/village-capital/concrete-steps-you-can-take-today-to-respond-to-charlottesville-ff6f74545598 — and just know what happened, how we got here — the places we’ve been, where we should never go again. This: https://eji.org/national-lynching-memorial
(2) There are significant parallels between some of these neo-Nazi groups and ISIS — perhaps most importantly a willingness to seek political change through fear, intimidation, and violence. While First Amendment rights should be fully protected, so too should the public’s safety. These groups are marching with torches and weapons and telling reporters that violence is inevitable (see the HBO Vice documentary) — they’re menacing not just to the targeted communities but to everyone. That said, our safety — and the safety of counter-protestors — shouldn’t be left to counter-protestors themselves. There’s absolutely no equating neo-Nazis with the people who protest them, but no matter how good one side is, human nature generally does not produce its best results when groups of people band together to clash with other groups of people (that goes for inconsequential sporting matches, much less very consequential political issues). We need to give police departments the resources and training they need to set up roadblocks and lawful weapons checks. We can permit speech without enabling violence. And it goes without saying we hardly have freedom of speech if people think they can’t protest or counter protest without being harmed.
(3) The U.S. Secretary of State is permitted to designate an entity a “foreign terrorist organization” (under 8 USC 1189(a)(1) and (d)(4)). Any entity labeled as such has the opportunity to contest the designation in court, but if the designation is merited, it triggers various sanctions that can impede their operations (including a criminal bar on providing them material support, under 18 USC 2339B). Organizations on this list have included Islamist terrorists and left wing paramilitary groups in South America. The Secretary should begin a review of neo-Nazi entities abroad to see if they too meet the criteria — sadly it appears plausible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_terrorism#Europe — cutting off material support for these groups, if they do meet the criteria, could help break up online networks of neo-Nazi terrorists.
(4) I don’t think we need the exact same designation mechanism for domestic terrorism, given the other tools that law enforcement has for thwarting those activities. That said, it might be worth creating a registry of entities that signal a willingness to use violence or have some record of inciting violence. At a minimum, this registry could be used by state and local law enforcement to gauge the amount of police presence needed to keep the public safe. It’s also worth surveying tools and considering things like this: https://lawfareblog.com/domestic-terrorism-danger-focus-unauthorized-private-military-groups
(5) Related, both groups (neo-Nazis and ISIS) subsist on the narrative that perceived social ills (in the broadest sense) exist because of tension and an inevitable clash between a particular view of tradition and “cosmopolitan culture”. As a result, they tend to perceive any clash as only confirming their worldview; in that sense, they benefit from clash, whereas the rest of us generally do not. Given that, I’m concerned we’re making the same mistake with neo-Nazis as we may have made with ISIS, which is to react without fully considering whether the way we engage them counter-productively raises their profile. Maybe the most notable unnoted thing about the incident in Charlottesville is that — after months and months of nationwide organizing — only about a few hundred people showed up. I’ve seen more upset people at a local zoning meeting. Yet somehow they baited a clash that resulted in national headlines and made otherwise level heads wonder if the entire country is on the brink of civil unrest (see https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-america-headed-for-a-new-kind-of-civil-war). These groups thrive on finding isolated individuals who feel left behind or otherwise unsatisfied, and telling them that they’ve been screwed because [enter ideological explanation of the world], and that they can matter by becoming a soldier of [enter ideology]. They sell narratives and notoriety to people who are desperate for a sense of self-importance. I wonder if we make that pitch — however delusional and evil it is — more effective by acting in a way that gives their actions a national/international platform. (As Joby Warrick chronicles in Black Flags, the U.S. naming Zarqawi inadvertently gave him international notoriety and drove traffic to terrorist websites.) I’ve wondered the same thing about the mass shooters — whether the media giving them a name and recognition has the unintended consequence of spurring copycats. It’s counter-intuitive, and I’m not entirely sure it’s right (it quickly verges into ignoring the problem and wishing it goes away), but it’s worth considering. This seems like a thoughtful part of that conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/opinion/why-the-nazis-came-to-charlottesville.html.
(6) It’s crucial to win substantial (currently unlikely) electoral victories in the next election cycle. If you really care about this, it seems to me you should start getting very busy figuring out how to win — this means decent Republicans when challenged by “many sides” Republicans, and Democrats facing Republicans who have traded their party’s integrity, our country’s standing, and our general sense of safety for a team victory devoid of substance. I’m a firm believer that ideological competition is healthy and that it forces the parties to come up with better ideas — but right now it is imperative to send a political message that the Republican Bargain of 2016 is a losing deal. That if they want to win, they should be the party of Lincoln — of Burke and free markets and fiscal responsibility and individual liberty. Not the party that can’t speak straight to tiki torch neo-Nazis.
(7) A potentially winning message for Democrats is to appeal to the universal desire for stability — in terms of jobs but also society more generally. Trump played up instability and offered foreigners and elites as the problem, himself as the cure. Does anyone feel safer, like society is more stable and predictable? It is exhausting living this way. The most important question that Democrats have to answer in 2018 and 2020 is how to convert anxiety and the desire for stability into an electoral victory.
(8) All these words later, I don’t feel satisfied. I guess that wasn’t the point. What happened on Saturday was the result of wrongs from a long time ago, wrongs that were never set right — the nature of the problem just got more and more complicated, and not for lack of good people trying to figure it out. I don’t have answers on how to heal the wounds that slavery and racism caused. We just have to keep trying. As Abraham Lincoln put it: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
