(CNN) The Unite the Right riot in Charlottesville in 2017 was the largest eruption of white supremacist violence in the United States in a generation, if only the most visible of thousands of incidents that followed the 2016 election. August 11 and 12, 2019, mark the second anniversary of the violence, which claimed the life of the anti-racist protestor Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others. Two police officers died in a helicopter crash.

Jess Row

That weekend in August 2017 was also the moment when the so-called alt-right reached a temporary peak of popularity; in the wake of public outrage, lawsuits and even a few FBI investigations, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups fell into disarray , and the most vocal backer of the movement, Breitbart News, went into a swift decline . These groups have yet to stage a similar event—although the terror itself has continued, carried out primarily by radicalized individuals, like the gunmen in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting or the El Paso massacre last weekend.

The partial disintegration and discrediting of the alt-right was one positive outcome of Charlottesville; there have been others . The violence of August 2017 helped galvanize a broad anti-racist political coalition that has achieved some notable successes in the past two years, from the 2018 opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice , the first monument to lynching victims, in Alabama, to the election of politicians and district attorneys -- like Philadelphia's Larry Krasner -- who are committed to ending mass incarceration, to the first-ever Congressional hearings on reparations for slavery this past June.

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The real news, unfortunately, is what hasn't happened: nothing has stopped the march of Donald Trump's white supremacist policies and rhetoric, which have become so folded into the reality of everyday waking life in the United States that Americans -- even the most politically savvy or left-leaning -- are constantly in danger of accepting them as our purported new normal. Trump's latest attacks on four Congresswomen, and his repetition of age-old racist tropes about crime and decay in Baltimore, have only cemented a familiar pattern: commentators on the left and in the center describe his behavior, accurately, as racist, while Republicans, save a few outliers, act as if his statements never happened. Any observer of US politics can tell you why: Trump is speaking to his base -- roughly a third of the American electorate -- who respond favorably to racist incitement and the outrage it generates on the other side of the political spectrum.

As a white writer who writes extensively about race, I've been observing this situation closely since well before the 2016 election, and I've been dismayed by the unwillingness of so many of my white peers -- people who are personally horrified by Trump and his success -- to come to grips with what is happening in our country. Among white centrist Democrats and liberals there's been a great deal of talk about the importance of civility and free expression, and an explosion of anxiety about how the Democratic Party has lost touch with a monolithic entity called "the white working class." There's been much less discussion in the national press about the underlying political transformation that made Trump's election possible: the rapid growth in racial resentment and white nationalism as primary issues -- even single issues -- among conservative and right-leaning white Americans.