ROD DREHER: CHARLOTTESVILLE IS THE KIND OF AMERICA THAT IDENTITY POLITICS IS CALLING INTO BEING. It’s time for straight talk about that:

Finally, we on the Right have to start speaking out without fear against identity politics — and calling out people on the Left, especially those within institutions, for practicing it. The alt-right has correctly identified a hypocritical double standard in American culture. It’s one that allows liberals and their favored minority groups to practice toxic identity politics — on campus, in the media, in corporate America, on the streets — while denying the possibility to whites and males. By speaking out against left-wing identity politics, and by explaining, over and over, why identity politics are wrong and destructive, conservatives strengthen their position in chastising white nationalists on the Right. But none of this will matter at all as long as the Left refuses to oppose identity politics in its own ranks. As I keep saying here, you cannot have an identity politics of the Left without calling up the same thing on the Right. Left-liberals who want conservatives to stigmatize and denounce white nationalism, but conservatives who do so will be sneered at by white nationalists as dupes and fools who advocate disarmament in the face of racist, sexist forces of the Left.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): David Marcus was warning of this over a year ago: How Anti-White Rhetoric Is Fueling White Nationalism: White people are being asked—or pushed—to take stock of their whiteness and identify with it more. This is a remarkably bad idea.

Related: We’ll have more Charlottesvilles. I’d rather have a culture in which people responded to ideas and groups they dislike with peaceful criticism, but we haven’t had that for a while.