The crisis that erupted last week in Charlottesville is simply an extension of the one that began last summer, when the Republican Party, instead of opposing Donald Trump, decided to go all in on his side. It’s
absurd now, for instance, to witness hand-wringing over what Charlottesville reveals about the extent or even the existence of Trump’s racism. Birtherism, Trump’s brutal cause, was the most overtly
racist movement in contemporary American political life—an attempt to
discredit the legitimacy of a black President by insisting not merely
that he is not an American but that he is an African, as part of a
script written often and deeply in every racist tract of our nation, in
which Africans are the eternal Evil Other. It was an effort to
symbolically stop and frisk a black man by suggesting that he was vulnerable as an “alien.”

With a patience wholly admirable and, in some ways, almost saintly,
Barack Obama chose to ignore Trump’s attempt to delegitimize him by
treating Trump, during the post-election transition, as if he might be a
normal politician engaged in a normal exchange of power, apparently in
the hope that acting as though it might be so would make it so. Since
then, despite all attempts to pretend otherwise, Trump’s assault on the
premises and the principles of democratic government has been ongoing,
and Obama’s silence has been increasingly puzzling to many of his
admirers, and not made better by his occasional appearance looking
carefree on holiday. The appetite for Obama’s leadership is as real as
ever, not merely among liberals but among Americans of many political
stripes and sides; he left office, after all, with nearly record-high approval, and would almost certainly have been reëlected had the law allowed it. The extraordinary, historic retweeting—if one can now use the word “historic” about retweets—of Obama’s apropos quote from Nelson Mandela
after Charlottesville, officially the most-liked tweet ever, is typical.

This truth raises a question that can’t be avoided: Will Obama step
forward to help lead the opposition to Trump? His reluctance to act too hastily has honorable reasons. His hatred of drama leads him at times to underestimate moments when dramatic crises demand dramatic acts, and his love of and natural instinct for reason make it hard for him to fully credit the depth of unreason in others. This incapacity, as likable as it is at times almost pathological, led him to such errors of misplaced good faith as his nomination of Merrick Garland
to the Supreme Court, in what was clearly the sincere belief that a
Justice pre-vetted by Republican worthies would actually have a chance
of being treated seriously. (In retrospect, Obama missed an opportunity to
nominate a candidate whose contemptuous rejection by the Republican
Senate might have provided a more advantageous political lever.) And
historians may speak critically, and perhaps worse than that, of his
caution last year surrounding possible Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election, and the role that members of the Trump campaign may have played in them.

Obama’s logic of self-restraint is sympathetic. He first of all clearly
believes that one President should grant another a period of grace, as
Presidents almost always do—George W. Bush, to his credit, lent a long
one to him—and that is, in anything resembling a normal oscillation of political power, appropriate and correct. But this is not a normal
time; it is a national emergency. Trump long ago disposed of the notion
of normal constitutional courtesy when, without a shred of evidence or
truth, he accused Obama of “wiretapping” him—i.e., committing a grave
crime. To pretend, as Obama was almost visibly willing himself to do
throughout the grim months of last November, December, and January, that
Trump in any way resembles a normal, democratic-minded leader is folly.

Obama also doubtless thinks, with some wisdom, that his reappearance as
a beacon to some would serve to make him once again a target to many.
Much of Trump’s and the Republican Party’s program is no more than crude
Obama-trolling, as in the departure from the Paris climate accord, or
in the health-care fiasco, where the sole logic in putting forward a program that even Republicans hated was to placate the base by undoing
what the black President had done. For Obama to make himself more visible would only supply a convenient enemy
at a time when Trump and his followers seem to be self-destructing on
their own. Obama may also believe that the crisis has not come yet—the
real, full-blown constitutional crisis that may arrive when the special
counsel, Robert Mueller, acts, or if Trump attempts to act against him,
or if another terrorist incident happens, and a voice of reason is not only
useful but existentially essential. Obama’s only hope of leading then is to depoliticize himself now. And both Barack and Michelle Obama would surely like a break from the relentless presence of politics in their
lives; it has always been a sign of Obama’s essential sanity that the
appetite for power seems to blow hot and cold in his life, rather
than—as it must be said it seems to do for Bill and Hillary Clinton—as a
perpetual propelling wind.

Against all this—as admirable and, in some ways, impeccably logical as
it may be—is that national emergency, and the need for leadership among
the coalition of leftists, liberals, independents, and conservatives of
integrity who oppose Trump, especially as we move ever closer to the
frightening possibility of continuing violent confrontations, a
possibility that the catastrophic open-carry state laws have only made
more likely. That the instigation of the violence in Charlottesville was
exclusively at the hands of the neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates does not
alter the truth that, historically, one side’s violence produces
another’s. Leftists, infatuated as they are sometimes tempted to be with
a renewed rhetoric of “street action,” need to be reminded that such
violence in American history has always worked to the advantage of the
wrong side. As the political scientist Omar Wasow, of Princeton
University, reminded us not long ago, it was, above all, the fear of
street violence in the nineteen-sixties that got Richard Nixon
elected—and then reëlected. In liberal democracies, non-violent mass
protest can be an astonishingly efficient engine of reform; the threat
or fact of violence empowers only its enemies.

What the dissenting, or “resisting,” side needs is exactly what Obama
can help supply: principled leadership from as close to a universally
respected figure as one could hope to find. At a moment when the
leadership of the congressional Democrats is desperately uninspired, and
the next generation of liberal voices has yet to emerge or remains
uncertain of purpose, the opposition is in need of real leadership,
meaning what real leadership always is: a voice of reason lit by
passion.

No one wants, or expects, deliverance. The purpose of leadership is
neither to be “messianic” or to encourage blind obedience. Good leaders
don’t make followers; they make participants. Much needs to be done, but
even more needs to be said. The window of meaning needs to be widened.
One imagines Obama, with his usual rhetorical deftness, making the point
that the neo-secessionists and the neo-Nazis are not merely extraneous,
obnoxious fringe groups—they represent exactly the enemies whom
Americans united to defeat in their two most consequential wars. We are
not merely combatting the enemy within; we are reaffirming what unifies
us in history by carrying the fight forward.

One can hear in one’s head—and even directly in one’s ear from impatient
others—the objection that Obama’s is already a voice of the past. But
history does not work with such relentless linear direction. Figures
long dismissed arise to lead when necessary—Churchill being the most
obvious example—and lights gone dark often reappear to illuminate a new
time. Obviously, we need new generations of leaders and the ascent of
newer voices. Yet coalitions of the kind that this emergency demands
need voices capable of speaking to the many, not the few, articulating
values held in common, not in contest. It could be that Barack Obama’s
true historical moment will arrive, with an irony of a kind that
American history specializes in, not during his Presidency but after it.