The political craziness that followed the events of a riot in Virginia

David Goldman:
Future historians will find it ridiculous, but the response to a few hundred white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia will be the trigger for a realignment of American politics. Polite opinion, which includes Establishment political leaders, corporate CEOs, religious leaders of virtually all denominations, the universities and the press, abhor Donald Trump for his alleged moral equivalence between the Charlottesville neo-Nazis and the demonstrators who opposed them. Trump did no such thing, but he did something less pardonable altogether: He split the country along the fracture line of political correctness.

We are in terra incognita for American politics, and predictions are unreliable especially when they concern the future. Nonetheless I believe that the storm of opprobrium that broke upon Donald Trump this week will dissipate, and when the dust settles, the United States will have a different political alignment. Trump’s populism will split both the Republican and Democratic parties, with consequences we can barely begin to imagine. Waving the bloody shirt of Charlottesville will have unintended consequences. I do not know what the president was thinking, but I think his seemingly spontaneous wrangle with the press at his August 15 New York press conference was carefully gauged.

The economic and social condition of African Americans deteriorated sharply under the Obama Administration, and future prospects are grim. Black political leaders have been unable to suggest practical solutions, and instead propose symbolic ones, for example, destroying monuments to the defeated Confederacy of slave-holding states. In fact, black Americans want to keep the monuments to their old oppressors, by a margin of 44%-40% in a recent poll (white Americans want to keep them by a margin of 65%-25%). Although black leaders from the Congressional Black Caucus to the radical Black Lives Matter movement have made the Confederate monuments a wedge issue, there is no enthusiasm for Taliban tactics against relics of American history.
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There is much more.

As always, Goldman is an astute observer of politics.  I am still hopeful that sanity can seep back into the discourse as people investigate the events that led to a death of a woman.  One of the reasons it has had such a hard time seeping out is the emotional reaction in the media and the left that did not want to hear anything that conflicted with their narrative about the racists' rally, and their bogus attempt to tie it to the President.

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