Nine years ago this month, America was introduced to what was then called the “alt-right” and is now pretty much just “the right.” On Aug. 11, 2017, we witnessed what had been advertised as a “Unite the Right” rally in which a large group of young white men marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil!” The next day, a young counterprotester named Heather Heyer was killed by an alt-right participant who drove his car through the crowd at high speed. President Donald Trump famously announced that there were “very fine people on both sides,” and it was clear to many Americans just where he and the Republican Party were heading.
It was startling at the time to hear those chants. They seemed like something out of the history books. Such open antisemitism was a vestige of the Klan and neo-Nazi marches of the past, and the words “blood and soil” had no American antecedent at all, at least not the specific term. They are associated with the Nazis, derived from the German völkisch movement, which romantically valorized the agrarian people as the backbone of society and evolved into the eugenics and ethnic cleansing programs under Adolf Hitler.
