The biographer and essayist Deborah Baker’s Charlottesville: An American Story is both an account of those two horrifying days and an intellectual history of the far right in the United States. It mixes investigative rigor—Baker must have listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of archived Charlottesville City Council meetings, as well as far-right podcasts and YouTube videos—with emotional intensity and wide-ranging cultural critique. Baker reaches from Virginia’s slaveholding history to the poet Ezra Pound’s deluded post–World War II fascism to the misogynistic trolls of Gamergate in her quest to understand Unite the Right. The result is not merely smart but shattering. It joins the ranks of some of the best American nonfiction in recent years—Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing; Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show—as testimony to events we’d be unwise to forget.
The author knows some of that inconsistency personally, which is the other distinctive piece of her approach. She grew up partly in Albemarle County, Virginia, where Charlottesville sits. Her father, though he came from a family of New England abolitionists, was also raised there, and he lends the book a telling moment. In 1968, when Baker was in elementary school, he published a “thin volume” called Strike the Tent: In the Steps of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In its preface, he wrote that, although his account might seem “a bit sentimental and slanted” toward its Confederate subjects, he wanted not to glorify or redeem them, but to comprehend why it is that, as he wrote, “[w]hat men may sincerely believe they are fighting for is often unrelated to the consequences of their doing so.” Any Confederate who thought he was defending “individual liberty and freedom” was risking his life for its opposite.
Of course, the whole country suffers from these issues. We always have. One of Charlottesville’s central arguments is that the nation’s refusal to reckon with history is connected to its most violent, authoritarian elements. Donald Trump, of course, is radically anti-historical. During his first term, he created a commission for “patriotic education” in reaction to The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which described the centrality of slavery to America’s founding, and this March, he issued an executive order banning “anti-American ideology,” which seems to mean any discussion of race, from exhibits at the Smithsonian museums. It is as if he believes that, by erasing racism from the historical record, he can also erase its effect on our present, though the effect he and his supporters have in mind isn’t structural inequality but what they call “wokeness”; as if, by forbidding talk of racism, he can prevent protest of it, too. Charlottesville is full of this absurd way of thinking, and Baker makes no bones about its link to fascism. Fascist movements, from Benito Mussolini’s to Richard Spencer’s, claim they will turn back time to an illusory past in which the dominant social order went unquestioned. Trump wants to do the same.
Charlottesville starts with the statues. In 2015, a Charlottesville high schooler named Zyahna Bryant launched a petition to get the city’s sculptures of Lee and Jackson taken down and the parks where they stood renamed. At 15, Bryant wasn’t a stranger to activism: Baker, who has a novelist’s instinct for detail, writes that, after Trayvon Martin’s murder three years earlier, Bryant had organized a “protest at the federal courthouse: a twelve-year-old girl corralling ten-year-olds with popsicle stains on their shirts.” In high school, she called the city’s vice mayor, Wes Bellamy, and asked him to get on board with removing the statues. He did, and Charlottesville created a special commission to examine the issue, but conversation stagnated. Baker writes that, at community forums (which she listened to after the fact), the statues’ white defenders “believed that four generations in Virginia, or a Confederate ancestor who was by Lee’s side at Appomattox, or simply their childhood memories should give special weight to their testimony.” Many of the city’s longtime Black residents steered clear of the debate, recognizing that in the face of such willed obliviousness, “Silence was the only power [they] had.” And the obliviousness was intense. One white Virginian wrote to the commission that, although she agreed that the story of slavery needed telling, the statues should remain in place because she appreciated their beauty alongside the parks’ blooming trees: She imagined, Baker writes, that “these two histories might peacefully coexist, one ugly and painful, the other framed by flowers.”
Of course, those white supremacists weren’t only local. The statue debate got Spencer’s attention, too. A University of Virginia graduate and professional hate-monger who coined the term “alt-right,” he was, in 2017, as Baker writes, “openly audition[ing] for the role of Trump’s brain.” He was also adopting harassment techniques he’d learned from Gamergate, the concerted threatening, stalking, and doxing of the game designer Zoë Quinn in 2014. In writing about Spencer, Baker decodes an aspect of Unite the Right that initially bewildered her. Early in Charlottesville, she writes that after the virulent antisemitism of the torch march, she “was hard pressed to see the connection between Charlottesville’s Confederate statues and Hitler Youth, between Southern white supremacy and European fascism. Which histories—whose histories—were in play?... It felt as though American and European national creeds were being remixed and weaponized in ways I couldn’t wrap my mind around.” She wasn’t alone in her confusion: She writes that even a Charlottesville rabbi she spoke with struggled to see why neo-Confederates hated Jews.
Unite the Right didn’t change my mind about that. But it did make me take seriously the alt-right’s belief that Jews aren’t American at all. Baker takes it seriously, too. In researching the history of fascism in the United States, she came to understand that “Jews were the glue that held the ideology of white supremacy and white nationalism together.” She traces this idea to the 1930s, when Ezra Pound, who had moved to Europe, became a fascist. Hoping to ground Mussolini’s and Hitler’s ideas in U.S. history in order to better promote them at home, he turned to Virginia’s sage, Thomas Jefferson. He argued that Jefferson’s vision was, in fact, the same as Mussolini’s, and, in the 1950s, acquired a young protégé, John Kasper, who he hoped could help spread these ideas and “give fascism an all-American face.” Kasper did so, Baker writes, by going to Charlottesville in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and arguing that Jews had put Black people up to demanding integration. Some 50 years later, Spencer took the Confederate statue debate as an excuse to do precisely the same.
There, the alt-right mob encountered no resistance from the University of Virginia’s authorities—its president, Baker writes, assumed that because Spencer was an alum, he’d abide by the university’s honor code—or from Charlottesville and Virginia police. Baker draws a direct line from the city’s underwhelming response to the statue debate sparked by Zyahna Bryant to its failure to prepare properly for Unite the Right, although police intelligence analysts and anti-fascist activists had given warning. The city and state governments and police chiefs just didn’t want to take seriously the threat that the alt-right posed. And the Unite the Right organizers applied for, and got, a permit for their march. In the city’s eyes, this entitled them to do what they liked, even as their rally turned into a violent and then murderous riot. Meanwhile, the unarmed Charlottesvillians who opposed the white supremacists received no police protection. They were accused of unlawful assembly; cops watched blankly as armed men kicked, hit, and maced them. It seems that not one trooper or officer was present when Heather Heyer was killed.
All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don’t feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish.
At the very end of the book, Baker challenges readers to attend closely not only to the hateful currents she investigates in chilling detail, but to the activists who resisted them in Charlottesville and continue to do so to this day. She is clear that these activists are responding to a deeply entrenched hate that preceded them and is more powerful than them—so powerful that its representatives are now in Congress and the White House. Yet these grassroots movements, she thinks, are our only hope. She writes that we must listen to them. “We must regard them not as radicals … but as ordinary Americans standing up and fighting in a myriad of ways for what is right.” At this point, we’ve all got to do the same.
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