Young white men are the hidden crisis

Disenfranchised youths in the American South are once more looking back to a fairy-tale past

Charlottesville is a pretty college town named after Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, and accommodates the University of Virginia. Just outside is Monticello, the gracious home of that most gracious of American presidents, Thomas Jefferson. The tragic irony of Jefferson is a metaphor for the South itself. It was Jefferson who wrote the lines: “All men are created equal” while owning hundreds of human beings. Some were his own flesh and blood.

The Confederacy itself was a kind of dream: a notion of England, home of all things genteel and worthy. Enslaved women were named after characters in Shakespeare; white womanhood was put on a pedestal, an echo of the time when “knighthood was in flower”. Chivalry abounded along with the notion of honour. None of this, of course, extended to the millions of people, bred and owned like cattle, who shared this fairy-tale England over hundreds of years.

When the crunch came and Lincoln declared that no nation could survive half slave and half free, the South broke away, fired on a US fort and set out to defend what it called the “Noble Cause”. The North, with its much larger population and unmatched industrial power could – in the words of one southern historian – have defeated the South “with one hand tied behind its back”. But the “Noble Cause” did not die.

It lived anew in the idea of States’ rights; and now in the battle to preserve Confederate monuments. Nevermind that the Confederacy was itself an act of sedition, whose commemoration has to be a strange thing for the victorious US to allow. “We’ve lost the South for a generation”, Lyndon Baines Johnson told his fellow Democrats as he signed the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-sixties. An arch politician of the southern old school, he knew what he was talking about. Richard Nixon’s “southern Strategy” scooped up the old “Dixiecrats”, and turned them into Republicans. But they still had the same old fortress to defend: White Supremacy.

And what better time to march right down the street by torchlight than in the era of that President of Dreams, purveyor of the imaginary time of MAGA: Donald J Trump. Trump’s key word: the “again” in “Make America Great Again”. This march was not about preserving a statue. Or even of conservatism itself.

Donald Trump began his political life as a “birther”, one of those who believed that President Barack Obama had not been born on American soil, therefore disqualifying him from holding office. The “birther” stance attracted many branches of the White Supremacist movement, with its necessary component of anti-semitism.

Trump had great credentials, honed in his campaign against the African American youths falsely accused of rape in Central Park in the 1980s. Even after they were acquitted and compensated for their time in prison, Trump never let go of his campaign.

Now this father of a Jewish woman; father-in-law of a Jewish man; and grandfather of Jewish children, cannot find it in himself to condemn fully marchers who chant: “The Jews don’t rule us.” Because White Supremacy forms part of his base. The root of White Supremacy is anti-semitism. Jews are seen as manipulators of the “sub human” African and destroyer of Northern European civilisation. Fascism arose out of White Supremacy, which is why some of those on the Left who simply call Charlottesville “fascist” betray an ignorance of fascism’s roots. White Supremacy is at its root. And White Supremacy is about regaining power.

But it is also about loss. The march in Charlottesville was filled with young white men, many unemployed. They are the largest unrecognised radicalised group in America. Young white men are also the largest demographic caught up in the opioid epidemic raging in the United States. Yet they are not seen as a category with problems. Now one of their members has perpetrated an act of domestic terror.

Young white men, in the US, in the UK and in Europe are the hidden crisis. The march in Charlottesville has told us that they have found a philosophy and believe they have a President of the United States to lead them. But they are like the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. They are being marched backward. Their torches are flickering in the dark.