The White Nationalist House

The GOP once drew the line at Nazis.

- Jonathan Chait

ON AUGUST 12, when a coalition of white-nationalist groups scheduled a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, it was intended to demonstrate their strength. The actual event instead demonstrated the opposite, at least in its initial effects. Despite drawing upon supporters nationwide, attendance topped out in the mid–three figures. The attacks on counter protesters that killed one and injured dozens horrified the nation. But what transmuted the failed rally into a rousing success was the response by President Trump, who, in a pair of rage-addled rants before the news media, drew the white-nationalist movement into the Republican coalition and gave it a legitimacy it could never have dreamed of.

The rally’s marchers were summoned by posters depicting marchers in Confederate uniforms with Nazi eagles; they chanted “Blood and soil!” and “Jews will not replace us!” Still Trump insisted, “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me”; some of them were “very fine people.” He parsed the ideological definitions presented to him. (“When you say ‘the alt-right,’ define ‘alt-right’ to me. You define it.”)

It is hardly novel for Republicans to get mixed up in racism. Whatever the abstract merits of small-government conservatism, its political prospects have long required the exploitation of white racial resentment. What is new and even shocking is the intermingling of Republican politics with open white supremacy.