Blood and Politics (49 page)

While economic status, education level, religion, and gender helped draw a partial picture of who Duke voters were, these factors did not explain why the white electorate voted as it did. The Democratic Party, of course, had an immediate interest in finding out more about the “Duke-Democrats” who had been deserting their party in favor of an identifiable racist. Here a poll conducted by Garin-Hart Strategic Research in the midst of the Senate race offered some preliminary advice. Duke voters were noticeably not economically distressed. “Indeed, voters’ feelings of
political
alienation were a far better predictor of support for Duke than their feelings of
economic
hardship [emphasis in original].” They advised Democrats to champion middle-class interests against “the wealthy special interests” on issues such as tax fairness.
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In a pair of elections in which race and racism became the defining issues, telling Democrats to focus on taxes was as useless as telling Republicans to nominate Holloway.

After the elections passed into history, a dozen academics jumped into the fray, analyzing opinion poll surveys and parsing precinct-level voting and demographic data. They ran statistical programs of every sort and wrote up their conclusions for scholarly publication. This was the first clearly identified vote for an undisguised racist since Alabama’s Governor George Wallace had run for president in 1968 and 1972. Studies of the Wallace vote had been the benchmark for understanding the angry white vote in the late 1960s. The Duke vote in Louisiana
could have played the same role for understanding the early 1990s. Perhaps the most thorough analysis of opinion poll surveys was conducted by Tulane’s Douglas D. Rose. After considering six different kinds of motivations, Rose concluded that each told only a partial truth: “As we have seen, all these explanations account for some of Duke’s support. The least powerful are those picturing Duke primarily as a populist candidate who draws on distrust of government among marginal and disappointed citizens.” Race and racism, he argued, rather than any kind of right-wing populism predicted whether or not white people would vote for Duke.
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Although virtually every scholar concluded that the central factor motivating Duke’s voters was “racial prejudice,” several controversies emerged around the edges of this debate. Some questions, such as whether or not it was possible for pollsters to gather accurate data over the phone from Duke’s voters, had limited significance. Other points of contention did have significant implications for the decades to come: Was the Duke phenomenon specific to the open primary process, or could someone like Duke replicate his success outside Louisiana? Outside the South? Was the racism exhibited by Duke’s voters a new development or simply a reincarnation of an older white supremacy dating from the Wallace years and farther back? Two different edited collections of studies,
The Emergence of David Duke and the Politics of Race
and
David Duke and the Politics of Race in the South
, starting from opposing points of view, actually ended up pointing in the same disturbing direction, although neither expressed its conclusion in terms used by the other or even the terms used here.
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Simply put: David Duke had been right when he claimed victory. One, he had emerged personally as a strong leader. On this point, Duke’s willingness to break the rules was considered an asset. Two, his leadership had further polarized the people of Louisiana.
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Although he was not as powerful as Serbia’s Slobodan Milošsević or Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman, the lack of open conflict in Louisiana was due to the comparative stability of American institutions and the sizable white minority that had opposed racism rather than to Duke’s own actions. Three, his leadership had imbued a definable sector with a distinct sense of itself as a “victim” group, a dispossessed white majority. “Supporters in part saw Duke as a voice for whites, in the same sense that minorities have spokespersons,” Douglas Rose’s study concluded.
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All three points are related.

For a significant number of white people qua white people to desire or want a unique voice such as Duke’s, an important change in self-consciousness needed to have occurred. They needed to identify themselves
as white people first, rather than as Americans. As one former neoconservative analyst, Michael Lind, noted in his book
The Next American Nation
, white (Christian) people had thought of themselves as the quintessential real Americans since before the country’s founding.
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They drew no distinction between their identities as white people and their identities as Americans; and for two centuries that congruence was cemented in laws relegating black people to second-class status. Even after the laws were changed, most white people still saw themselves as first-class citizens. David Duke, on the other hand, had spent three consecutive years telling white voters that no!, white people no longer ride in first class. Instead, he said, black people have special rights that you don’t. (In smaller circles he argued that white people no longer ran the government, but that Jews did.) A statistically measurable segment of Duke’s voters now believed they were not just Americans or the American majority, but a distinct white (minority) facing a black threat perceived as real (not symbolic) and dangerous. In this white mind, they were not consciously trying to preserve Jim Crow or the material prerogatives of pale skin. However wrong the notion, they believed political power was a zero-sum game: the more power for black people, the less power for white people. It didn’t matter that they all were Americans.

This odd transformation was implicitly measured in one statistical study that asked if the perception that black people constituted a “racial threat” to white political dominance might influence white voting behavior.
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From the period of legal segregation through the Wallace campaign in 1968, whites in the South had tended to vote for explicitly racist candidates at higher levels in counties with correspondingly higher percentages of black populations. Prior to the civil rights movement, one study after another had concluded that this trend resulted from white fears of losing “their” dominant political position. (It was actually a behavior that only further disempowered and impoverished the white poor, however, as it left them at the mercies of the region’s [white] economic elites.) After 1968 an increase in the number of black voters pushed the study of “racial threats” off the map of analytical inquiry. But in the Duke campaigns, “racial threat” re-emerged as a factor motivating white people to vote for Duke. That is, with other variables being accounted for, the higher the percentage of black voters in a county or metropolitan area, the higher the percentage of white voters who pulled the lever for Duke. (Conversely, in those areas with lower percentages of proximate black voters, whites tended to vote for Duke’s [more racially tolerant] opponents.)

It is virtually a truism among human relations professionals that one way to smooth over America’s racial fault lines is for black people and white people—indeed people of every hue and description—to live together in the same neighborhoods, eat together in the same restaurants, attend the same houses of worship, go to the same schools, and vote in the same precinct houses. Here was at least some evidence of the contrary. White people tend to be “tolerant”—a mealymouthed term—up to a certain point. At that time, when the percentages change and white people approach minority status, they tend to run. The sociological literature on housing segregation makes that point over and over. The question that emerges from Louisiana in 1990 and 1991: What is (at least one) electoral equivalent of “white flight”? The answer appears to have been: David Duke.

What does this mean for future generations? The U.S. Census predicts that in the years between 2035 and 2050 white people will become an actual demographic minority in a nation of minorities. If unchecked, the trend mid-century will produce larger numbers of David Duke types, each pushing the perception of a racial threat upon an even more statistically receptive white constituency. Deprived of the monopoly of voting rights they enjoyed during the Jim Crow era and thus unable to enforce their political will through the ballot box, will white people seek other means?

Within days of losing the runoff for governor, Duke announced his candidacy again, this time in the 1992 Republican primaries for president. He promised to run hard at President George H. W. Bush in the South, and his threat now seemed considerably more potent than his fanciful stab at the Democratic primaries had been four years before.
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But after two years and more than two million dollars, Duke was no longer a credible candidate. He had proved that he could not win an election statewide with any significant minority of black voters, and he no longer had the seat for District 81. Duke was hoisted by the petard of his own mainstreaming success. Commanding hundreds of thousands of votes had turned him into a conventional candidate. And as a conventional candidate he looked less like an insurgent racial rebel and more like a perennial loser. Key personnel abandoned the Metairie headquarters. Some hard-core movement cadres went home, disgusted at his pandering to Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals in the last moments of the governor’s race. Others, more pragmatic in their racial politics, prepared to join seemingly less quixotic campaigns. And when Duke did
finally stretch his campaign apparatus outside Louisiana, Republican regulars became unavailable as staff. He was forced to rely on movement personnel with embarrassing track records.
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Nevertheless, the constituency Duke had awakened and the hot buttons he had pushed still existed, not just in Louisiana and other southern states but from New Hampshire to California as well. In the next election cycle, the threat of white majority dispossession helped elect Governor Kirk Fordice in Mississippi and pushed Senator Jesse Helms past the popular black mayor from Charlotte, Harvey Gantt. In addition, new issues animated a new (white) nationalist campaign. Absent a communist threat, foreign intervention would be opposed by an America first isolationism. As multilateral agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, became policy, protective tariffs became the cry of economic nationalists as well as nationalist charlatans. As the free trade in capital mobilized an increasingly global workforce, a renewed nativism would target immigrant rights in the name of opposition to “multiculturalism.” And once again, the refuge of states’ rights would emerge as the last redoubt against the federal Leviathan. Each of these issues (and others) would mobilize constituencies nationally similar to Duke’s Louisiana voters. The intrepid former Klan wizard had opened the door. But it was Pat Buchanan who walked through.

December 10, 1991.
As the presidential primaries came into view on the near horizon, a number of would-be challengers appeared, each hoping to replace President George H. W. Bush. The post-Duke Populist Party presidential candidate blustered his way along a route of superpatriot stops and survivalist fest flops. Ross Perot, a blunt-talking Texan, railed against establishment politics while readying his own millions for a third party independent run for president. On the Democratic side, seven contenders vied for the public’s attention. In Republican ranks, Pat Buchanan formally announced his candidacy for president, reclaiming the party’s right flank for his own anti–New World Order politics.

Just weeks before, Buchanan had urged Republicans to adopt Duke’s issues: “The way to do battle with David Duke is not to go ballistic because Duke, as a teenager, paraded around in a Nazi costume to protest William Kunstler during Vietnam, or to shout to the heavens that Duke had the same phone number last year as the Ku Klux Klan. Everybody in Metairie knew that. The way to deal with Mr. Duke is the way the GOP dealt with the far more formidable challenge of George Wallace. Take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues; and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles.”
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Buchanan believed Duke’s message was “Middle Class, meritocratic, populist and nationalist.”
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Buchanan quickly assembled a competitive campaign apparatus, with his sister, Angela “Bay” Buchanan, as manager. While her brother worked as President Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, she had kept the books for Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972. Four years later she enlisted in Governor Ronald Reagan’s first (failed) presidential primary bid. After that campaign Bay was the comptroller for a nonprofit organization known as Citizens for the Republic, which continued stoking
Reagan’s presidential ambitions while working his contributor lists. When Reagan launched a renewed bid for the presidency in 1980, Bay served as the campaign’s treasurer. She was subsequently appointed treasurer of the United States in the new Reagan administration.
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A few blocks away her brother sat ensconced in the president’s communications offices. When brother Pat began thinking about running in the 1992 Republican primaries, according to the book
Mad as Hell
, Bay secured the endorsement of New Hampshire’s conservative newspaper,
The Union Leader
(Manchester), and walked him into the race.
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Buchanan gained ballot status and began battling through the primaries. Only in delegate-rich New York State did the sitting president’s functionaries manage to deny the challenger a primary ballot line. Duke faded. Buchanan surged. At the level of pure campaign strategy, Buchanan attempted in 1992 to replicate the kind of insurgency staged by Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy in 1968, which had forced President Lyndon Johnson to withdraw from the race. In the months prior to New Hampshire’s primary, Buchanan visited factory gates and small-town diners, talking one-on-one with voters. Direct contact with the state’s electorate enabled him to hone his message more sharply than any poll or focus group would have. President Bush, on the other hand, virtually ignored Buchanan’s efforts.
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On February 18, Buchanan won a respectable 37 percent of the total—65,087 votes. Although he didn’t quite reach the 42 percent McCarthy had received in 1968, the total was large enough to justify his continuing the campaign past New Hampshire. Per McCarthy and Johnson in 1968, Buchanan subsequently asked Bush to step out of the race, a request the president declined even to acknowledge.
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