It was inevitable that the anniversary of last year’s racist march in Charlottesville, Va., would be treated as a watershed. The horrifying torchlight parade of neo-Nazis and Klansmen shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans was straight out of our collective nightmares about the past.

Yet its significance stemmed not so much from those scary images but from the idea that it was all President Trump’s fault. This theme of Trump as the enabler and inciter of racist hate confirmed everything his opponents believed about the populist revolt that put him in the White House.

Worse, Trump’s comments about the incident, in which he attempted to draw a moral equivalence between the marchers and the countermarchers, strengthened arguments that he was promoting hate.

But when only a couple dozen white nationalists showed up for the much-ballyhooed “unite the right” rally and were overshadowed by the presence of many thousands of counterprotesters — including some Antifa far-left activists clearly looking to initiate violence of their own — that didn’t change the narrative about Trump.

For those determined to brand the Trump administration as irredeemably racist, the flop of the racist march serves as a distraction from a greater truth. But those convinced that Charlottesville provided a moment of insight into the ugly face of Trump’s America need to take a deep breath. While the existence of any Nazis or KKK members is abhorrent, the notion that the country is boiling over with right-wing lunatics looking to take over our streets and the government is not only untrue, it’s a partisan myth as harmful to democracy as Trump’s ill-advised comments.

The context for this spin on Charlottesville is the widespread conviction on the left that Trump is not merely an unorthodox president but actively leading us down the path to fascism.

The left often treats reasonable conservative positions — held by many if not most Americans —such as opposing illegal immigration and backing voter ID laws as evidence of racist extremism. Yet Trump has largely governed the country as a mainstream conservative with policies and appointments that any Republican would’ve implemented.

The notion of America reliving the final years of the Weimar Republic may be fueling the “resistance,” but it’s nothing more than partisan hyperbole. Trump often speaks and tweets in a manner that is inappropriate for a president. But American freedoms, including that of a press corps that Trump continually disparages and baits, are intact, and any suggestion to the contrary is false.

So, too, is the accusation that Trump has encouraged anti-Semitism. The Anti-Defamation League, which seems at times to be more interested in being a Democratic auxiliary group than in fulfilling its mission to monitor anti-Semitism, never retracted its accusation that Trump was behind a series of bomb threats at Jewish Community Centers in 2017 even after the crimes were proved to be the work of a mentally disturbed Israeli teenager rather than alt-right extremists inspired by the president.

Though he may have wrongly confused the debate over keeping Confederate statues with one about neo-Nazi hate when he said there were “some fine people” on both sides in Charlottesville, his administration has opposed anti-Semitism and has been the most friendly to Israel in decades.

The truth about the far right in this country is that Sunday’s turnout is actually an accurate measure of its pathetically small numbers. Despite the post-Charlottesville hype and confusion about the conservative website Breitbart.com being a platform for neo-Nazis (it isn’t), such groups remain a tiny, marginal phenomenon.

That isn’t the case with a revived and increasingly influential far left, as avowed socialists have become the rock stars of the Democratic Party. Hate for Israel — a new form of anti-Semitism — has edged into the mainstream. Just as disturbing is the willingness by some influential members of the “resistance” to give Jew-haters like Louis Farrakhan a pass.

Like the president, America in 2018 isn’t perfect. Hate isn’t extinct. But the idea that alt-right extremism is gaining influence is a myth that the Charlottesville anniversary should have debunked even if that doesn’t fit into the liberal media narrative about Trump.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributor to National Review.