Ta-Nehisi Coates and Yoni Appelbaum on Charlottesville's Aftermath

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Neo-Nazis and white supremacists have seized the attention of the United States while the president sticks up for the memory of Confederate leaders.

There's hatred and bigotry on many sides, he says.

But whose side is he on?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hello.

I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

Here with me in DC.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg.

I'm the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

And over there in New York.

Hey, I'm Alex Wagner, contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Excellent.

We have with us our distinguished colleague, Tanahasi Coates.

Tanahasi, welcome to the Radio Atlantic table.

Hi guys, thanks for having me.

Welcome.

Why does he sound so shy?

Why does he sound so shy like that?

I always sound like that.

It's been a week, I think.

I think that's probably

a big week.

It has been a very big week and a bad week.

Over the past few days, we've seen a succession of events that have struck many of us as extraordinary.

First, long-dreaded sequence of rallies by an assortment of neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia went about as tragically as many feared it might.

Three people died, two state police officers in a helicopter crash, and one counter-protester, Heather Heyer, run over by a car in a brutal act the Attorney General has called domestic terrorism.

Then the president's evolving responses to this tragedy.

First, he avoided calling out the neo-Nazis and white supremacists explicitly, attributing hatred and bigotry to, quote, many sides.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms

this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.

On many sides.

That prompted a lot of outrage from Republicans and Democrats, so he made another statement on Monday, specifically condemning neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

But on Tuesday, he gave a press conference that left many astonished.

Not only did he double down in his remarks from Saturday, but he drew this stunning equivalency between two leaders of the Confederacy and two American presidents.

This week it's Robert E.

Lee.

I noticed that Stonewall Jackson's coming down.

I wonder, is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?

You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

But

it was a really interesting juxtaposition.

The president seemed to make no distinction among the heads of the Confederacy.

It is an amazing moment when the President of the United States can't delineate the difference between the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.

That was, that's a break.

I think this is a breakpoint in modern American history.

Well, I think it's a breakpoint certainly for Donald Trump.

Yeah, but we've been saying that for months.

Yeah, but this time, I think we all really mean it.

I mean, we really, I shouldn't phrase that as a question, but this feels like

an actual public meltdown that we're witnessing day after day after day, where it just just seems to get worse.

Tanasi, are you surprised by any of this?

No, no, no, not even a little bit.

Not even a little bit.

And I'm not talking about only Donald Trump.

I'm talking about the resurgence of white identity politics.

No,

no.

I would not, well, I think it's worth unwinding what's happening here.

Okay.

The president was opposed to

the taking down the statues.

And I believe somebody asked him, you know, who do you think should make this decision?

How should this happen?

He said, well, I think the local authorities should do that.

Well, that's actually what happened in Charlottesville.

It was a, you know, a decision made by local.

And that's what's been happening around the country.

That's what happened in New Orleans.

Yes, exactly.

That's what happened in Baltimore yesterday.

It's not been, it's not been Congress that's been doing this, obviously.

That wasn't enough for him.

The response to that

was this March.

And, you know, ultimately, this sort of violence that we saw on Thursday.

Given where the Civil War has been in our history, given presentations of the Civil War, given how valorized Robert E.

Lee has been for the country at large, and then given the place the Confederacy has in the mind of white supremacists, given the context of your first black president eight years before that, given the context of your

president right now who came to office openly, not dog whistling, but openly running on white supremacy and racism.

No, no, I don't think any of this is surprising at all.

Tanhasi, what do you think

the sort of politics of white supremacy and white nationalism,

how does that intersect with the modern Republican platform?

Given the fact that the president seems to be giving safe harbor to white nationalism and white supremacy, he is the titular leader of the GOP.

At the same time, there are Republicans that have expressed consternation about the president's reaction, but have yet to take specific action.

How do you see their agendas intersecting?

Well, I think it's central to it.

You know, I think, again, you know, you have to rewind this back to, you know, President Obama when he was running N07 and N08, people showing up at, you know, conservative conventions with things like Obama waffles, the tolerance for birtherism, the tolerance for the idea that he was a secret Muslim,

the fact that

large, you know, in some cases, majorities, but not always, certainly, you know, large portions of the Republican base, you know, believing that Obama was not a citizen, that he wasn't entitled, you know, thus to be president.

That was tolerated.

That was tolerated.

People talk about how,

you know, crazy, you know, Trump is now, but he's a product.

of the very sort of things that you know the party tolerated for eight years under under obama this effort to go after your voters and voting rights claiming that you know was it two or two million or whatever number of votes what were fraudulent that's a direct outgrowth of the idea of voter fraud which the republican party en masse which is a leadership, has embraced.

Trump didn't come up with that.

He didn't invent that.

And so I think he's more blatant.

I think he's more direct, but he's not the author of those ideas.

You know, McCain in 08 was talking about voter fraud.

This is not new.

Even the folks that you would point to as respectable and intelligent, their hands are dirty too.

So it's nice to hear people reject and say, we got to stand up to white supremacy.

When somebody comes out with some sort of statement against that voter commission that's been assembled under Trump, I'll be impressed then.

Is there some utility, Tanahasi, to having this racism expressed more openly than it was?

You talked about the transition from dog whistling to, I don't know what, to sort of open

display.

Yeah, yeah, just

yelling words that are very clearly, plainly understood.

Is there some utility to it?

In other words, does it make your job easier to say, no, look, this is what I've been talking about.

See, now it's naked, now it's open.

No, I don't think so.

Because I think birth of wism was pretty obvious, you know, even if it's not, you know, even if he took it to the extreme.

I, I'm going back to Alex's point, it wasn't obvious to most Republicans, obviously, who tolerated it for several years.

I don't know that it is obvious to most Republicans now.

Um, we'll see.

All right, yeah, we'll see, we'll see, we'll find out, but I don't know, Alex.

You described this as a major break or major breakpoint.

What was the break for you?

I mean, I think when, you know, and Jeff has made this point, when you find yourself

having to say the words neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan in a defensive crouch,

I think you found yourself absolutely on the wrong side of history.

I mean, just explicitly, there is no,

you know, you're on the losing side when you find yourself in any way sharing a bed with those groups of people, which is effectively where the president has found himself.

But independent of that, I I just think the behavior that we've seen on his part going from sort of reluctant criticism of the alt-right to the next day, effectively a temper tantrum at a press conference, is revealing of a man who is no longer, I mean, he hasn't listened.

It's clear that the president hasn't been listening to

whoever the cooler heads are in the White House, but this was more than a tantrum.

It's someone that is almost acting sort of vindictively against his own best interests.

And I think at that point, you know, when emotion is just that all-consuming, you really have to question what is the road forward from here.

And I think, I mean, I know Jeff makes a very important point that we have said this many times before, but I just, this time feels different, and not least because someone died.

And

that's a line in the sand.

This time really does feel different.

And we've seen, obviously, fatal conflicts touched off by race and ethnicity in America almost every week that we can name.

Tanahasse, you said that you're not surprised by this at all.

It does feel different.

Does it to you?

No.

No.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

This was bad.

To be Tanahasi is not to be disappointed in a kind of way.

No, no, I'm serious.

No, but I mean, no, it's not.

I've been following this for a while.

No, it's not even that.

It's not even that.

You have to go over how many absurd things have already happened.

And I will, you know, forget.

Like, I think they happen so much that people forget.

You have a president who was caught on tape.

I mean, essentially bragging about sexual assault.

I mean, that's a thing that actually happened.

But can I?

I think that would be a line.

And that's not the only thing, Alex.

We can stop right there.

No, we could have like six.

Usually in American politics, that would be enough.

But don't you feel like slavery and the legacy of the Civil War and neo-Nazism and skinheads and white supremacists?

I mean, this is America's original sin is around race.

And I, as a woman, would like to say, oh, I mean, you know, sexual harassment and sexual assault are important and they're, they're sinful and they're transgressions and all the rest.

But as it concerns this country, the weight of this and the sort of like history behind this is heavier than almost anything else.

I mean, you would think so, but why wouldn't national security be that line?

Why wouldn't, you know, uh bragging about having can the FBI director to the very people you're being accused accused of potentially colluding with.

Why would that not be the line?

So what is the lesson that you're drawing from this, that there's no line for him to cross?

In other words,

he just keeps going forever and it gets worse and worse?

Well, I think, you know, you asked this, actually, for me, the lesson is I don't know where the line is.

That's probably, you know, this could be different.

It could be.

But you asked me, does it feel different?

Right.

And

what I'm saying is I don't have the ability to detect that.

That's what I'm saying.

The amazing thing to me is that, and I will confess to being somewhat surprised by one aspect of this, which is that, all right, put the racism and the sexism aside.

These are sins that we've seen on the part of many politicians.

He has shown himself unusually sympathetic, or at least neutral, on the question of Nazism, right?

What's more un-American than Nazism, right?

I mean, this is what we, we're the country that defeated the Nazis.

And what's interesting to me and what's surprising, even with a man who doesn't surprise me much anymore, is that his instinct was all wrong from an american perspective it's like dude the easiest thing in the world to do is be against the nazis when you're an american politician and yet there's there's a vox article that just came out yesterday and the headline is i blame obama and vox went and talked to a bunch of conservatives in alabama and i mean that was the case i blame obama obama divided us obama divided us no that's why we're here there is that's why we're here there's an element of this that i want to focus in on one of the things that the president did in his remarks on tuesday was introduce this term alt-left to the authorities.

Which is clever.

Introducing this idea of both sides.

There is an ongoing effort to introduce a sort of binary nature to what's going on here.

And I'm curious, a lot of folks will read this conflict in those terms.

And I'm curious, is that part of the ground that has shifted?

Have we moved towards more people perceiving this

crowd of neo-Nazis as being part of this broad set of things that are construed as the right.

I wouldn't be surprised if on the left, more people think of the right in these kind of terms.

That makes a lot of sense, which goes to this question of polarization and fracturing.

But I don't know if that's entirely fair, but it's right.

It's up to the Republicans who don't agree with this right now to come up and say,

this ain't us.

Yeah, I think if you want to differentiate yourself, you got to stop feeding them.

I mean, this, again, this moment does not come out of nowhere.

It is not spontaneous.

I believe that the leadership, I mean, you got a guy running for president Newt Gamers in 2012, calls the

president a food stamp president.

And his name is Dog Whistle.

I mean, that's just so,

that's just so obvious.

No, by the way, I couldn't believe.

By the way, it was a deniable dog whistle.

I wrote something about that at the time.

So many conservatives are like, no, that has nothing to do with race.

And it's like,

really?

I mean, really?

Come on.

Come on.

So I think, I mean, this is like, you know, you water, you know, the ground and things spring up, you know, and I think this has been a part of, you know, a watering that's gone on.

It took

nine people, having many, were killed in Charleston to get the Confederate flag to come down.

I mean, I just, I always get, you know, in this sort of pessimistic spot.

I'm really not a pessimistic person, guys.

I'm going to dissent from that observation.

I love people and I love the world.

I believe you, Tanahasi, for the record.

No, no, no, it's true.

He loves people.

He just is a little bit of a downer sometimes.

It's true.

He does love people.

I'm really a fun guy.

You know, one thing that surprises me is the way in which the right, and I, it's sort of Trump's right base, has taken the most,

well, not the most, but has taken sort of weapons that could be used against them and turned them right back

at the left or at the other side.

So for example, it was like the rise of fake news.

Right.

Well, now the president uses the term fake news to describe all sort of mainstream journalistic reporting or the rise of the alt-right.

Now it's all about the alt-left.

It's literally the I am rubber, you are glue sort of like school of thinking, but it's worked for him.

So, I mean, I wonder.

It's very good at jiu-jitsu.

You're right.

It's kind of a verbal jiu-jitsu.

It's incredible.

And I guarantee you, there will be corners of the right universe where alt-left becomes the new, I mean, the new hashtag ji-jitsu.

It's already happened.

If you're on Twitter today, it's already happened.

I don't know what Twitter is.

Twitter is some sort of social media platform.

Part of the alt-level.

Very useful and uplifting platform.

where journalists go to depress themselves right the among the many things that the president can do is set the boundaries of normalcy set what is by definition mainstream and i think that's what i'm struggling to i'm struggling with here it's that the ground that feels like it's shifting is the ground of what ordinary folks consider to be the sides in these conflicts.

Well, I mean, Trump's signal gift to American politics is he shifted the boundaries of what's acceptable to even say out loud.

And

this is the true danger over time, right?

Is that you've reintroduced

into the national discourse things that you weren't supposed to talk about.

And it's amazing the degree to which he's been allowed to do that to this point.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, and also the degree to which he's been able to sort of mine this vein of grievance among a newer generation.

I mean, I think one of the most stunning things about Charlottesville is how many young sort of white supremacists there were.

And when you talk about grievance, we've often couched white grievance in this country related to socioeconomic ills, part of a later generation, a less educated generation.

But this is something else entirely.

And it's an incredibly

robust ideology among a set of individuals.

It's inexplicable in a lot of corners.

Why do these people feel the way they do about the rest of the country?

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Tanahasi, you wrote an article last week.

I think it's last week, it seems like a year ago already, about an HBO proposed show on HBO called Confederate.

And you came out against the idea of a show that proposes an alternate universe in which the Confederacy won.

And one of the reasons you argued this is you were saying that essentially, look, Reconstruction isn't over.

The Civil War is not yet over.

The piece seems mildly prophetic in a way.

Talk to us for a minute about your argument

and

how far are we away from actually resolving the issues that were raised out of the Civil War and Reconstruction?

Yeah, so, you know, HBO show Confederate takes its premise, the idea that the North lost the Civil War, South wins, and they are able to preserve slavery up into the modern day.

First of all, the show is called Confederate.

I mean, that's just, you know,

a grand statement in and of itself because it shows you where the lens is directed.

And the thing about that is that that is not an unfamiliar pose in Hollywood.

There's always been this sort of romance around Confederate heroes and, you know, this idea that they were fighting for, you know, some, you know, lost way of life, which just happens to depend upon slavery.

The distance to propose that show, the psychological distance has to hold that we have somehow.

gone far away from that point or even in fact that the white south is arguing that in that piece actually lost and i think there's quite a bit of evidence to say that that's not actually true and so i think what happens is that there are many questions that you can ask about American history.

We have repeatedly asked this question: what if black people were still slaves?

It's actually quite common trope to the point of cliché.

In art, there are comic books about this.

There's alternative fiction about this.

There have been mockumentaries about this.

I mean, it's not actually a new and original idea.

And for me, the real question is:

why do we keep going back to this?

What is this with this desire to see me in chains again?

I mean,

what is going on here?

What do you think is going on here?

i think a people don't understand the civil war that's the thing i i think they really don't actually understand the civil war um i think they think of it as a kind of romance and i think they don't understand the confederacy quite frankly i'll bring it back to charlottesville in the vein of nazis they they they don't understand that this was an army that lee when he went north actually kidnapped free black people and sold them into slavery like that's not a known thing that the plan wasn't just to liberate these slaves that act to liberate these states from the union it was actually to expand slavery south into the tropics and conquer Mexico, conquer Cuba.

That this was actually the idea.

It was in many ways, not a war of independence,

but a war of conquest, in fact, and the right to secure conquest.

It's just not a widely understood perspective, I think, even now.

Tanahasi, among many things, you are a good reporter.

What questions?

What questions do you have right now?

What are you wondering?

What are you most curious about?

I'm not really curious about any of this right now.

That's part of the problem.

What do you mean?

Why is that?

All the reporters are jumping down your throat.

Why can't you be, why aren't you curious?

I feel like

I know.

I feel like I spent, and Jeff, I've talked to you about this, but I spent eight years when I was really, really curious asking questions in this particular vein, in the vein of, you know, why Charlottesville happened.

I don't feel particularly curious about this particular conflict anymore.

I think, at least as a journalist, I think think I understand.

I think I'm, and that ties back, and it doesn't mean I know what's going to happen tomorrow, but I have some idea of it.

Like I have some idea of the range of what could possibly happen and what probably won't happen.

I could be wrong about that, but I just, I have so few questions these days.

You know, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make this a therapy session, but.

No,

we brought you in in part for a mutual collaborative therapy session.

What speak for yourself?

Radio catharsis.

I want him to answer the question.

Radiocatharsis.

Yeah, exactly.

What could, what is the range?

What could happen?

Well, Trump could, I could see Trump doing two terms.

That's possible.

That wouldn't surprise me at all.

I would be shocked if in any sort of substantive way, the Republicans who find it easy to denounce an open.

neo-Nazi, open white supremacist rally find it much, much harder to denounce the policies that I talked about, you know, this idea of voter fraud, the notions that actually led that to be.

I think that's a much, much harder fight.

I would be shocked if that happened.

I think the things that actually made Trump, the things that actually made Charlottesville, are actually baked into the modern Republican Party.

I think that's sad.

I think that doesn't mean that everybody in that party is racist.

I don't think it means that the leadership is necessarily racist individually, but I think it's baked within the structure right now, and unfortunately.

So what's the future of the party then, looking at the demographics of the United States?

I think they can continue to do pretty well, actually, because I think there's been quite a bit of restructuring on the state level, you know, to make sure that the House of Representatives continues to represent folks out of proportion to what the population actually is.

I think the Senate is already set up that way to be that way.

And I think Trump showed the great power.

of motivating a particular group of people around the idea of whiteness.

That's a lot more potent electoral force than maybe we thought it was.

So I think they'll be competitive for quite a while, actually.

Tanahasi, we did not bring you on to cheer us up.

but it has

always been.

And you're not disappointing.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Tanahasi.

Be well, Tanahasi.

Thanks, guys.

Next, we are going to hear from the Atlantic's politics and policy editor, our resident historian, Yoni Applebaum.

Stay tuned.

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Today, para sabermás.

So, we've got the Atlantic's politics and policy editor Yoni Applebaum here with us.

Yoni.

Hey, man.

Hello.

Glad to finally get you on Radio Atlantic.

And sad about the occasion that has brought you to the table.

I get a lot of that these days.

I'm sorry for the guests.

Nobody actually wants the dinner party.

No, we want you here.

It's more like reconnecting with friends at a funeral.

We want you here.

Yoni, we've spent the first part of our conversation talking about the events of this week.

And I wanted to ask you.

to give us a longer view.

How do you process the past few days, the remarks of the president?

How extraordinary are they in the

long history of the presidency so far?

Aaron Powell, you know, five years ago, Donald Trump was a New York businessman, and I was teaching the Civil War and Reconstruction at Babson College.

And I wouldn't have expected those two paths necessarily to intersect.

But listening to the president the last 72 hours and

working with reporters to cover what he's done, it's been remarkable to watch the issues that have bubbled beneath the surface in America and periodically erupted over the last 150 years come right back into the center of the conversation.

Aaron Trevor Barrett Aaron Ross Powell: Yoni, do you feel like the sort of sentimentalization of the Confederate side in the Civil War,

that that is

the sort of like warm haze that certain revisionist historians have colored that period in American history, that that has always been underlying in American society,

or that this particular moment

has caused sort of a flourishing, a renaissance of pro-Confederate white nationalist sentiment and ideology.

Oh, that's such a great question.

You know, this has gone back and forth in cycles for the last 150 years.

In the decades right after the war, you get radical reconstruction.

You get this huge effort.

to fight for racial equality in the South, to construct a new society that will be fairer to both whites and blacks in the South than the old slavocracy had been.

And then you get a pushback against that.

You get redemption.

And by the turn of the 20th century, you get something called the Dunning School.

Historians sitting around and romanticizing the old South and writing about the lost cause.

You tend to get those moments

in the wake of pushes for racial equality.

And I think it's probably not coincidence that we're getting a moment like this just after America spent eight years with its first black president.

I I want to ask you

the sunnier version

of some questions we've been grappling with.

The sunnier version of the question is: is Donald Trump's lasting legacy going to be the acceleration of the demise of Confederate symbolism across the South?

I mean, it seems like there's a reverse Midas thing going on here.

The more he talks about this, the quicker cities seem to be taking down the statues, and the quicker more Americans seem to be getting educated about the non-romantic qualities qualities of the antebellum South?

Yeah, this is the glass half-full interpretation of the Trump presidency, that he is the least effective president of the modern era.

What's the expression?

Malevolence tempered by incompetence.

Or never let a good crisis go to waste.

And he wastes pretty much every crisis he gets.

But they're all self-inflicted crises so far.

And he exacerbates them.

If what he was trying to do was defang the left, the effective way to do that is to convince the left that the government is there and that they don't have to take to the streets in violence.

He got that backwards.

If what he's trying to do is defend Confederate symbols, the thing to do is not to so politicize it and wrap it up in neo-Nazi and white supremacist hate rallies that they become totally delegitimized.

Everything he's done here has pushed for the removal of these memorials.

And the other thing that's going on there, which I think is really, really important to note, is that we're talking about blue cities and red states.

So throughout the South, urban areas of the last 30 years have tipped to the progressive end of the axis.

And that's where most of these memorials are.

The ones at the relatively rural county seats are not contested at this moment.

It's the ones in the big southern cities that are suddenly flashpoints.

And yeah, I mean, Baltimore took its down last night in the dark so that there wouldn't be rallies and protests.

And I think it's quite likely that we'll see this fall throughout the country.

You think the statue should come down?

Why?

You know, I changed my mind on this over the last few years.

I'm a historian.

I don't love the notion of going and erasing things

and approach the statues as a historian does, as cultural artifacts to be contextualized, to be interpreted, to be understood,

a record of the messiness of America's inconsistent progress toward democracy.

And I changed my mind by talking to people.

I changed my mind by listening to people tell me what it was like to walk past statues,

to go to school at an elementary name for Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Klan, what it's like for many of my fellow Americans to see this written into the landscape of the country, evidence of their lack of equality, evidence that the crimes that were committed against them are not taken seriously.

And I came to understand that leaving them up imposed a cost on people other than me, a cost that I take really seriously.

So, yeah, I think they should come down.

Don't you worry, though, that the toppling of the statues makes those who support their erection in the first place ever more defiant?

I mean, I ask you this, given the fact that America's Attorney General is a man named

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III,

you know, the celebration of the Confederacy, while broadly maybe coming to an end in certain corners, aren't they becoming more defiant in their celebrations, however secret they may be?

Are you worried about radicalization?

I mean, I don't know.

One would argue that it's pretty, I mean, aren't we sort of at that point now?

I don't know.

Yeah, you know, that's how social change works.

At moments of the greatest social change, those who are resisting it feel particularly embattled and you get violent confrontations.

It's often an indicator of progress rather than

an indicator that we're regressing.

But the key thing here, I think, and the thing that I try to bear in mind, is that we've generally made the most progress on issues of race in this country.

by pressing hard.

We're reliving Reconstruction again.

We're reliving the civil rights era.

We are again in a moment when we're pushing nationally for social change and for greater racial racial equality and acceptance.

And just as in those eras, and those are erased when there was great memorialization of the Confederacy, metaphorical and reconstruction, and then physical.

One of the two great spades of monument building in the South comes during the civil rights era.

That's when a lot of these statues went up.

And they went up for exactly this reason.

People pressed for social change.

They pressed to integrate schools.

Many people said, let's go slow.

Many people said both the NAACP and the Klan are radicals and we need to chart a middle course.

But because America pressed...

hard.

Yeah, it was classic, but they used the phrase both sides.

Eisenhower used the phrase both sides.

But because we pressed hard, it did provoke violent opposition.

Lives were lost, and yet progress was made.

And in the places where the change was not pressed for, the progress wasn't made.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So to what degree should the people that support the sort of romanticization, well, the lost causes of the Confederacy, to what degree should they be punished?

I mean,

one of the debates happening right now is the people who are marching in support of the neo-Nazis, the KKK, the erection or maintaining these statues, they're getting outed, named, shamed on the internet.

Some of them are losing their jobs, et cetera.

Where do they fall in all of this?

I don't want to follow the president.

I'm blurring the line there between

people who have an affection for Confederate leaders, for Confederate statues, and people who will march in a mob by torchlight through the streets of a city chanting anti-Semitic and racist slogans and threatening and committing violence.

There are a lot of good Americans out there who have tremendous affection for leaders of the Confederacy who they learned about as children, for icons of their community that they've walked past every day.

I respect those people.

I think they're wrong about what those statues mean.

It's funny, a more articulate president could have just said what you've said.

Yeah.

And it wouldn't have been controversial.

And it wouldn't have been particularly controversial, I think.

You know, it's not hard.

It's not hard to condemn condemn white supremacy and Nazis, right?

Well,

I think, I mean, the softest ball in American politics is the condemnation of Nazism.

Ioni, given your knowledge of history, can you tell me what playbook the neo-Nazis are following here?

And are they succeeding as they seem to think they're doing?

Are they losing?

How do we know?

They're following a classic playbook of consciousness raising and radicalization.

They want to get out there in the streets, attract media attention, draw converts converts to their cause.

Many people who are radicalized by extremist movements of all kinds think of themselves more as soldiers than as ideologues.

They're not necessarily thinking through the issues, but they want to join a movement.

They want to be out there protecting that movement.

And a movement that seems energetic and growing can create a momentum of its own.

That's what...

the alt-right was trying to do in Charlottesville.

It's what it probably would have succeeded doing if not for the attack using a car toward the end of that rally, which really changed the tenor of the conversation around it and made many people grapple with the horror of what was being done there.

And the movement, for the moment, seems temporarily setback, disorganized.

Various leaders who are there are disclaiming any responsibility for what took place.

They're trying to blame the police for the violence.

At the moment, it's in a state of chaotic disorganization.

But that's for the moment.

They also have the implicit backing of the President of the United States.

That is not a small thing that the press conference that the President gave on Tuesday is going to really resonate.

We went and we talked to alt-right leaders.

After that, they felt, they said, energized, empowered, proud by what the president had said.

And lots and lots of young men in particular, and it's a movement that tips that way, are going to hear those remarks and feel as if this is something that's energizing and exciting.

So that's the question.

Do people recoil from this?

Do they start to think that associating with it brands them as socially unacceptable, as a loser?

Or do they look at a movement and say, hey, it's gathering steam, I want to get on board?

And that's the strategy they're pursuing.

And it's why if you're going to have a society that says free speech is an ideal and it's a value that we commit to absolutely, that places an enormous burden on ordinary citizens.

It means that citizens.

You fight bad speech with good speech, you mean.

Yeah, if you're not out there saying good things, the bad speech will prevail.

You can't count on government to come and help you.

You can't count on

legal enforcement to shut down Nazi rallies.

If you're going to let the Nazis rally, you're counting on people speaking up and pushing back.

And when the president doesn't, that really tests the situation.

You're getting at the heart of something.

This is truly a unique moment in modern American history because the person with the biggest bully pulpit in the land is taking an equivocal stance on racism, white supremacism, and Nazism.

That's what is astonishing.

And what is the responsibility of the ordinary citizen in that moment?

How do you think?

They have no power compared to the person who occupies the White House.

But how do you respond as a good American to your president's direction?

You know, I'm thinking a lot about Andrew Johnson right now.

And he would.

Yeah, not just because he was like an irascible populist guy who went barnstorming around the country, threatening to hang his Tad Stevens, his key congressional opponent,

not just because he broke with the leaders of his own party.

He ran on

a unity ticket with Lincoln and ended up as president, but because Johnson adamantly opposed the creation of a racially egalitarian society, and Congress wanted that.

And there was a knockdown-drag out fight.

And ordinary Americans went to the polls and they voted in the Radical Republicans.

It wasn't a repudiation of Johnson's party, it was a repudiation of Johnson.

And they said, no, we're going to back the candidates who

see our society the way we see our society.

And in 1866, they did that.

And Johnson became

essentially an emasculated president.

He was the head of state.

He was still the president of the United States.

But in many ways, he no longer was head of government.

He wasn't really controlling things.

What do you think the future holds for Donald Trump?

Small questions for Yoni Applebaum there.

Yeah, just a little,

got a couple more seconds.

God, I'd love to know that.

President Historia is there.

In the context of history, I guess.

Trevor Burrus:

Well, this is the question, I think it's a question not really about Trump.

We know who he is by now, right?

If there was any doubt, Tuesday's press conference dispelled it.

The question is not really what becomes of Donald Trump.

The question is,

what does Congress do, and what do senior civil servants and senior government officials do?

Is Congress prepared to act to enact the vision that they ran on?

There is virtually no member of Congress who ran on a platform that came anywhere close to what Donald Trump said on Tuesday.

They told their voters that they had a very different vision of America, and almost none of them agreed on what that vision was going to be, but it wasn't this.

And so it's up to them.

Are they going to allow a president of the United States to impose this vision of America?

Or do they instead fight for the traditional American values that have prevailed for the last 50 years at least

and against what Trump was suggesting he wanted to do on Tuesday?

Do you think there's a chance that the Jews who work for Donald Trump watching their president equivocate on the issue of Nazism?

Let's put aside for a minute his son-in-law who also works for him and is Jewish.

Do you think they're going to go?

I mean, do you think that you know, I guess it's this is a stand-in question for the larger question of what does this man have to do to drive people who are ostensibly loyal to him away?

There's this passage.

I was rereading parts of the plot against America this week.

There's...

You know how to have a good time.

Well, I do.

It's that or Jane Austen.

Jane Austen.

Yeah, don't bring it up.

Alex, don't bring Jane Austen up.

Anytime, Alex.

I'm just going to start off on a third.

Anytime.

There's this moment early in the book

when a character

who is Jewish speaks up in support of President Charles Lindbergh.

And

Philip Roth, the character in the book,

in the book, if you're not familiar with it, Charles Lindbergh Lindbergh becomes president in lieu of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's third term and prevents America from entering the war.

Lindbergh, an actual famous Nazi-sympathetizing anti-Semite.

America First.

America First.

Right.

Who popularized, by the way, America First.

Good point, Alex.

Thanks, Jeff.

You're welcome, Alex.

And there's this moment where

this prominent Jewish personality speaks out in support of Lindbergh and his program and against entering the war.

And the central character of the book, a young Philip Roth,

hears a conversation between a couple of members of his family

where they're asking, what is he doing?

What does this guy think he's doing?

Does he think he's actually going to convince one Jewish person to support Lindbergh?

And the response is, no, he's koshering him.

He is

making it acceptable for the Goyim, for Gentiles, to support Lindbergh,

which was

a dynamic that was perceptive, and I fully expect to see.

Aaron Trevor, you know, I have a lot of friends in this administration, people who work for Donald Trump.

Some of your best friends are Jews who work for Donald Trump.

Is that what you're saying?

Oddly enough, yes.

Okay, all right.

Just want to get it out there.

Also, Christians and

Muslims who have government positions.

Some are political appointees and some are career civil servants.

And I respect and admire all of them for their dedication to this country, that they chose to pursue a career or a few years in public service because they thought they could make the country better.

And I don't envy them the choice because none of them

that I know endorse the vision that Donald Trump articulated on Tuesday.

And

I'm genuinely torn, too, as an American, as well as a journalist.

On the one hand, I want the finest people we produce going into government and working on behalf of the American American people.

Absolutely.

That's the Kelly conundrum, right?

I think most people assume this guy

is the White House chief of staff and took the job because he effectively wants to save the country from Trump or at least make the White House more functioning.

But there comes a point at which

that job becomes impossible.

And the question is, are you actually

supporting this man or his continued

holding of office as president?

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah.

And what is your on the other hand?

My My only other hand is that at some point, I think if you're particularly serving as a political appointee in this administration,

you can't pick and choose which parts of the administration's agenda you're advancing.

That's what it means to work at the pleasure of the president.

And

for those folks, particularly the White House staff,

there are branching points.

There are moments of truth where you look and you say, am I doing more harm than good by remaining in this role?

Am I enabling an agenda?

Fig-leafing this.

Yeah, am I enabling an agenda that I can support and be proud of and go home at night and say, hey, I did my best on behalf of the country?

Or have I made too many compromises?

And folks in every administration face those moments.

And this one has come now, I think, for members of the Trump administration.

I think it'll be really interesting to see what happens over the next week.

Alex, Jeff, and Yoni.

Yoni mentioned two identities.

As an American citizen, as a journalist, here's how I'm responding.

As Americans, how do we respond to not the president necessarily, but a big part of the conflict of these past few days has been between different groups of Americans, right?

The residents of Charlottesville responding to

the arrival of an onset of people who did not, by and large, share their values.

And

Americans all across the country, people, I imagine, all across the world, are going to face this question of how do we respond?

I'm going to answer as the editor of The Atlantic.

I'm not going to answer as a private citizen.

There's a confluence, I think.

We work at a magazine founded by abolitionists to bring about equality in the United States.

And so

that's what we stand for.

Another thing that we stand for is truth, empirical truth, that we stand for the Enlightenment values,

that there is observable empirical truth and that we should double down in our support for that.

And by the way, what I'm describing, what we should do as journalists, is also what I'm describing for citizens themselves.

And this is not an ideological observation.

I think standing for the truth, standing for pluralism and equality, these are bipartisan or something past bipartisan points of view.

Alex, if you're living in Charlottesville, if you're living in a place that's about to see a quote unite the right rally,

what is your course of action?

Buy a ticket to Orlando?

No.

Look, I,

you know, it's hard to pretend that I'm a resident of Charlottesville,

but I will for the moment.

And now I guess I'll make this answer dovetail with my answer about how I would respond, how I do respond as a journalist, which is to better educate myself about the ideology and the underpinnings and the history.

Because I think in many ways, and that's not an, that's not necessarily, that is not in a bid to sort of empathize or sympathize with that ideology and the believers in it, but it's more to sort of understand what's happening.

I mean, I think, you know, tribalism, this is a moment of profound tribalism in America.

And

these events, I think, serve to further separate us from one another.

And

I mean, I think probably rightfully dismiss certain aspects of group ideology, but at the same time,

I think it's really important that we understand how people get to this place.

That seems to me to be the first step in bringing truth to light and effectively combating what I think is a very pernicious, totally cancerous state of mind.

You know, I guess maybe it sounds sort of Pollyanna-ish to be, you know, education is the first step, but I do think knowing more about the history behind this and the sort of genesis of it is important for everybody who's observing it from the outside.

I want to come back with one more question for Yoni on the matter of history.

Do you think it's easier to

fight the values of those who romanticize the antebellum South, the Confederacy, with the statues in place or once these things are moved away and out of the consciousness, out of the physical line of sight of people?

Aaron Powell, you know, there are flashpoints right now.

And it's very hard to have a reasoned conversation about anything when there's two screaming crowds, one trying to tear a statue down and the other trying to protect it.

I don't envy the mayors across America who are wrestling with this decision right now, but I think we saw in Baltimore a move to de-escalate in some sense.

I remember traveling once outside of Budapest, Hungary to a small amusement park, essentially, where they had hauled off Soviet-era statues, and you could come and see all of the statuary.

The best part of it, the thing that made it, it wasn't just sort of seeing Lenin's disembodied head on the ground.

It was that they charged an exorbitant price to come in, which was maybe the truest capitalist triumph.

It's triumph of capitalism.

Yeah.

But, you know,

if you take the symbols out of the public square, I think it enables you to have a different kind of debate than if you're there fighting over their destiny.

I was once interviewing the German foreign minister in the foreign ministry, which was then in what was formerly the Reichbank, the bank of Nazi Germany, in which, as the foreign minister himself pointed out, all of the stolen Jewish gold was kept.

And I made some statement to him about how horrible it was to be in this building.

And he said, well, what would you like us to do?

And I said, blow it up.

But then I thought about it later.

And I thought, if it's blown up and if it's gone, there's no conversation around it.

I literally don't know the answer.

There's obviously more appropriate places to move these statues, but erasure

doesn't strike me sometimes as an contextualization is what matters.

The Germans grapple with the Holocaust in a different way than some people, certainly people on the alt-right, deal with the Confederacy.

I mean, I don't want to go down that,

I don't want to trample through that minefield at the moment.

We've got a presidential mansion built in part with the labor of slaves, right?

And it's not even acknowledged on the, there's no sign on the White House that says this is built in part by slaves.

This stuff is just there.

There's no way to erase the history and legacy of slavery from the United States.

It's ours.

It's not a southern legacy.

It's not a northern legacy.

It's an American legacy.

It's here.

We're going to be grappling with it no matter what happens.

The question is, in our public squares, do do we want to valorize, to erect

the statue of Lee that they were fighting over in Charlottesville at this dedication?

The speakers call Lee a Christian saint, the greatest man who ever lived.

Is that the message we want to send to the kids growing up in Charlottesville today, that Robert E.

Lee was the greatest man who ever lived, that he's a Christian saint, that he's a

flawless individual and stands for everything that we should do.

But why not leave it there and contextualize it the way the Germans, the post-Nazi Germans, have contextualized Nazi architecture?

Or is it not possible in this climate?

No, I think that's the right thing to do with the University of Virginia, right?

Which is sitting right there.

We do that with all kinds of public buildings, but you will not walk through Berlin and find a large statue of Adolf Hitler in the middle of a plaza.

There is a fundamental difference.

Statues are how we as a society signal to ourselves and to each other.

the things that we value, the ideals that we exalt.

And that's different than wrestling with the legacy of the sins that we and our ancestors have committed.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Even after the statues are removed, presumably from what you've said, Yoni, the legacy will still be with us, of course.

And as Jeff

has said,

I guess my takeaway is we have to double down on truth.

As Alex said, we have to educate ourselves about that history and that legacy and use that education to carry us forward in a way that we can be proud of.

Yoni Applebaum, thank you very much for joining us.

Hope to have a happier occasion next time.

Thanks, Yoni.

Likewise.

Thanks, Yoni.

And now our closing segment of Every Week, Keepers.

Jeff, Alex, what have you heard, read, listened to, watched, experienced recently that you do not want to forget in this week?

I won't forget Dunkirk.

It's a beautiful, beautiful movie.

Our movie reviewer Chris Orr and I were talking about this.

I've never seen, very seldom seen a movie shot this beautifully.

But

not to make too much of a direct point here, but

I appreciate a movie that shows the Nazis as the terrible people they were.

And

I just think

it's good for people to educate themselves about what exactly happened in World War II.

Because apparently, some people in America don't have a full understanding.

Some people being the full-time

of the United States.

I'm not saying.

I didn't say it.

I didn't say it.

Alex, how about you?

What do you want to hear?

I was recently this week at a Dave Chappelle show at Radio City.

And

who better to hear from, who better to process the events that happened in Charlottesville than Dave Chappelle?

At the end of the show, after a riotous set, he talked about the events in a more sort of sober tone and recalled Emmett Till and the death of Emmett Till and the fact that after Emmett Till, the fact that Emmett Till's mother decided to have an open casket so that the nation could see what was done to her son in the name of racial violence and white supremacy.

And Dave made the point that moments of incredible national pain and

break can often lead to healing and suggested at the end that maybe Donald Trump is the lie that will save us all, that out of this moment of

sorrow and pain and anger, some sort of better, more wholesome future awaits the United States of America, which is optimistic, I will admit, but in this moment, it felt really good to believe that or hope for that at least

for a couple minutes.

Man, I wish I did mine second.

That was

that.

We should have ended this.

All she did was go to a show.

Don't be intimidated.

You went to a movie.

Well, all right, it's true.

You had more efforts.

That was such an uplifting note, Alex.

That was very nice.

Mindkeeper is not as uplifting, but I think is not

necessarily negative either.

It is a tweet by a person named Waldo J.

Quith,

whose handle I'll leave in the show notes.

He tweeted in January of 2016.

Quote, I speculate that I would have been one of the white moderates MLK lamented, despite imagining myself a SNCC student nonviolent coordinating committee member.

That was the tweet.

He said, he followed up by saying, quote, it's easy to imagine that you'd have been on the right side of history.

Truth is, most people weren't.

You and I probably aren't special.

It was a really interesting statement, a moment of self-reflection to come across this week, because it's true.

If you've never read Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from Birmingham Jail, in which he talks about his own ambivalence about this phenomenon of the quote-unquote white moderate.

It's worth revisiting or reading for the first time.

That bit, that ability to step out of yourself for a moment and think, you know,

these, the instincts that could be natural at a moment when the president

is leading the country or endeavoring to lead the country in one direction,

How are my own actions implicated in my response?

It was a really interesting

and

I think thoughtful reflection from Waldo J.

Quith.

And

I don't want to lose sight of that self-perceptiveness.

So heavy.

Yeah.

I like our heavy highbrow keepers.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Alex, you took us to heaven and I just took it right back down again.

Yeah.

But you know what?

I look forward to speaking to you again.

As we always do.

As we always do on the next Radio Atlantic.

Alex, thank you once again very much for joining us.

Thank you, Matt and Jeff.

Jeff, thank you.

Thank you, Alex and Matt.

Talk to you soon.

That'll do it for another episode of Radio Atlantic, which was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Katie Green and Kim Lau.

Thanks as always to my co-hosts, Jeffrey Goldberg and Alex Wagner and to our guests Tanahasi Coates and Yoni Applebaum.

For our music we must thank the one and only John Batiste whose immortal rendition of the battle hymn we'll play in full after these credits conclude.

As always, look for us at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

And if you like what you're hearing, please don't forget to rate and review us in iTunes and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Don't miss our show notes, which you'll find linked from the episode description.

And And most importantly, thank you for listening.

Take care of yourselves and spare a smile for a stranger.

We'll see you next week.

All

in glory

My eyes and see the forest of the coming of the law.

Here traps and divines where the red and rattlesnake

faithful lighting of the terrible Swiss war.

His troop is marching on

glory, glory,

hallelujah,

glory, glory, high,

hallelujah,

hallelujah.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.