Unearthing the Deep Fascist Roots of the Unite the Right Rally

Baker isn’t caught in this rhetorical (or maybe emotional) trap, but she’s intimately acquainted with its distinct Virginian manifestation. All over the country, Americans tell themselves romantic stories about the Confederacy, narratives in which Southern troops were scrappy underdogs who didn’t care about saving slavery. Of course, this narrative has its own moral bankruptcy: Not caring about slavery is differently, not less, rotten than championing it. But Virginia’s white elite, squinting backward from Lee and Stonewall Jackson to George Washington, James Madison, and Charlottesville’s own Thomas Jefferson, have their own set of “fairy tales. That the South stood for something fine and brave. That Virginia was exceptional in the same way that America, above all other nations, was [and] Virginians were a breed apart from the regular run of Americans. Finally, to be a Virginian was to live in accordance with the most exacting code of chivalry, ‘for here the ideals of the nation were born.’” Because Baker knows this vision of Virginia, she can—and does—write against it. She suggests that for white Charlottesvillians, a real reckoning with history would involve not only removing Confederate statues, which the city did in 2021, but confronting the toxic effects of Virginian exceptionalism: state, city, and university authorities’ refusal to admit the presence of hate; white Charlottesvillians’ unwillingness to listen to Black ones; an overriding inability to react to new information.

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.

In 2020, a Charlottesville clergyman who counterprotested the rally told Baker, “We’re in the shit. America is Charlottesville now. Everywhere is Charlottesville.” In 2025, he’s more right than ever. During the two days of Unite the Right, Charlottesville, Virginia, was the place where the nation’s better ideals came to die, and one of the places its dark new ideology, the one now ripping civil society and the civil service to shreds, was born.

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.”