ON Saturday, a white supremacist smashed his Dodge Challenger into a group of helpless anti-fascist protesters. Many were left injured, and one woman was killed. “Bodies flew, people were terrified and screaming,” noted a photographer at the scene. “The driver, a skinny white guy with a scraggly beard, reversed out of there and drove off, his car all smashed up”. The footage is chilling, especially when cut with clips of torchlit marches in on the University of Virginia campus in defence of the American tradition of slavery.

Donald Trump’s “violence on many sides” response has been condemned, and rightly so. However, Shuja Haider of Jacobin magazine notes that Trump was simply following a script written by the liberal media. The New York Times reporter at the scene had tweeted: “The hard left seemed as hate filled as alt-right”. Indeed, the anti-fascist counter-protest was initially met with standard disdain: “Bernie Bros” and the “violent left” as the equally monstrous counterpart to white nationalism. Typically, hand-wringing liberals only abandoned this “both sides” narrative when Trump adopted it.

That’s the worrying thing about Trump. People naively see him as abnormal, excessive, an extremist in a conservative country. This narrative is fundamentally wrong. Conservatism is rarely deserving of the name; where it wins a mass audience, it always has a violent, unruly spirit. The particularities of American history add an extra layer of malice. America was born out of genocide, grew up around slavery and matured into an imperial power with a prison industrial complex on steroids. Historically, there’s never been a normal period for American “race relations”.

There’s a period of slavery, and a period of heavy repression before the civil rights movement. At that point, the Republicans launched their infamous Southern Strategy. After that, it was racially coded rhetoric which helped bring a succession of Republican presidents to power. Ideologically, the tactics reached a peak in 1988, when a group backing the “moderate” George HW Bush released its “Willie Horton” attack ad linking the Democrats to a (black) convicted armed robber and sex offender.

But things really bottomed out under Bill Clinton. He came to power offering crackdowns on what Hillary called “superpredators”. Bill’s 1994 crime bill offered “truth in sentencing” which severely curbed prisoners’ prospects for parole. It led to an unprecedented build up in prison numbers, from 500,000 in 1984 to more than 2.2 million in 2015, with African Americans incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans. It’s been described as modern-day slavery, most notably in the excellent Netflix documentary 13th.

Trump, therefore, belongs on a spectrum of presidential racism. His idiot refrain – “all lives matter” – is simply an updated version of Republican attacks on “special privileges” like affirmative action. His rhetoric has a kinship among the ideas and stereotypes of the Clinton presidency, if not as a brother or sister then certainly as an ideological second cousin.

So why does Trump “feel” so excessive? The answer has more to do with context than ultimate values. Nine years ago, Barack Obama defeated both Hillary Clinton and John McCain on a centre-left populist platform. Obama wasn’t the outsider he claimed to be, and his impact on the socio-economic status of poor black Americans was paltry. However, symbolically, he marked something. A perception that the ugly volumes of American history could be closed and put back on the shelf.

That’s why Trumpism has been such an ugly awakening. Under Obama, Western liberal opinion had forgotten the brutality of the civilisation that runs the world economy and much of the global military.

The violence in Virginia will lead to inevitable calls for unity and healing. Nobody will object to that. However, American liberals can’t have it both ways. They can’t condemn the “alt-left” as mirror images of Trump one minute, and then offer soothing platitudes the next. At some stage, the American centre must reckon with its own recent past.

Perhaps Trump’s biggest achievement has been to foster the myth of a moderate, small-c conservative centre-ground in politics. Under centrist presidents, prison populations spiralled, stop-and-search policies became routine, and the American state embarked on policies that John McDonnell – referring to Grenfell – called “social murder”, all aimed implicitly at African Americans. And that’s before we consider foreign policy. Tariq Ali rightly called this the era of the “extreme centre”.

Trump, in that context, is not the betrayal of the centre-ground. He is the liberal-conservative compromise in a funhouse mirror, the obscene truth of white American hypocrisy.

For America’s many poor whites, who are often taken in, the tragedy is compounded by how little racism works to their advantage. African-Americans, compared to whites, are five times more likely to be in jail. But poor white Americans are still considerably more likely to face jail time than their counterparts in other countries, because racism creates a general climate of authoritarianism. Racism holds back health reform, making working class whites sick or forcing them into remortgaging their house when a family member does. And it holds down wages, letting the rich get richer while everyone else suffers the brunt of “reforms”.

For decades, liberals in Europe have idealised the American model.

Trump’s outlandishness and vulgarity has pushed the debate in a different direction, and America now represents our fears about where Europe is heading.

This could be positive.

The danger is that we call for a return to normality at all costs, forgetting that what we call normality is a carefully constructed American myth.