Blood and Politics (75 page)

Three months later Francis’s position deteriorated further after the rival
Washington Post
published a book excerpt on the first
American Renaissance
conference. It included a description of Sam Francis’s call for an explicit white racial consciousness to defend the genetic material that had made America great. He was told to “resign.” Just like that.
⁵

Francis was abashed. Why had he been fired from a newspaper whose chief editor had once claimed to defend the Confederate flag? he asked. He concluded that a neoconservative cabal had been at least partially responsible. The
Times
, Francis claimed, was actually in the hands of fake conservatives, who (by Francis’s reckoning) were really liberal wolves. In his mind, the “neos” wanted to drive “paleos” such as him out of positions of influence in Washington, D.C.
⁶

Initially, neoconservatives were disappointed liberals who claimed they were driven into conservative ranks by the supposed excesses of the radical left in the 1960s. Through much of the 1970s and 1980s they retained a moderately conservative social agenda along with a fierce opposition
to the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence. Before the Cold War ended, neoconservatives occupied key positions in several of the wellspring foundations and think tanks of the conservative movement. And they remained globalist and interventionist, in contrast with the nativism and isolationism that characterized paleoconservatives.
⁷
Paleoconservatives harkened back to the conservative movement as it existed prior to World War Two. They were traditionalists and social conservatives, unafraid of the tinge of racism and anti-Semitism periodically associated with their ideas. A deep schism between the two trends had emerged during the 1980s, when they fought over money and positions of power within the Reagan coalition.
⁸

The split over foreign policy in 1990, when Pat Buchanan, regarded as a paleoconservative, opposed President Bush’s drive for war in the Persian Gulf, was one piece of this larger dispute. At stake in September 1995, when Francis was fired, he claimed, were the “limits” that could not be transgressed when respectable conservatives discussed race. Francis’s analysis had the ring of truth. He had crossed the border and been thrown out as a result.
⁹

The erstwhile Heritage Foundation analyst and former senior aide to a U.S. senator, having been fired from the self-described conservative newspaper of record, now suffered no additional penalty from stepping even farther to the white side. When the Populist Party met for the last time on September 16, 1995—eleven years, one month, and one day after its founding convention—in attendance were Sam Francis and his colleague Jared Taylor from
American Renaissance.
They witnessed the formal vote taken to “suspend” operations of the entity called the Populist Party, as the party officially disbanded.
¹⁰
Francis’s appearance at this event confirmed his trajectory out of the conservative establishment and into the leadership of the contra-establishment, the Council of Conservative Citizens.

As the council convened its semiannual board meeting and “national conference” in Birmingham the first week of December 1995, this gathering exhibited all the earmarks of organizational health. Two locally elected officials greeted the crowd. A small choir of preachers invoked Jesus’ name and delivered grace. A Wetumpka city councilman pledged his opposition to gun control and support for the Confederate flag. Mississippi State Senator Mike Gunn added his name to the speakers’ rostrum. Anti-immigrant activists from Alabama, Florida, and California, including a representative from the group that had spearheaded the
Proposition 187 campaign, warned of the dangers and prospects ahead. Also speaking that day were Jared Taylor, the American Renaissancer, and Judge Roy Moore, who was then making himself notorious by refusing to disassemble a courthouse monument to the Ten Commandments in a case that eventually wound its way to the Supreme Court. The
Citizens Informer
reported on Taylor’s appearance at the Birmingham meet and published his photo on page one in a lineup that also included Judge Moore. On these pages, at least graphically, scientific racism joined Christian fundamentalism.
¹¹

Francis and Taylor, by eschewing conspiracy mongering and what they called “paramilitary infantilism,” gave white nationalism greater potential access to the conservative mainstream.
¹²
While their emphasis on traditional culture and authority didn’t create any new audiences among white power skinheads, the absence of bloodthirsty rhetoric kept away the bombers and shooters. And as Pat Buchanan prepared for his second run through the Republican primaries, the Council of Conservative Citizens developed the legs and lungs of a long-distance runner.

The years since 1992 had vindicated Pat Buchanan’s initial campaign. He had tapped a nascent force that had grown into a full-scale “angry white man” syndrome, complete with a measurable distrust of government and the mass marshaling of militias. His anti-immigrant rhetoric had been followed by Proposition 187 in California. An insurgency had started that had not yet been quelled by the horror felt after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Buchanan had held his own forces together during these years with moneys developed by a nonprofit corporation bequeathed by an old friend from the Reagan White House. He renamed it The American Cause, installed himself as chairman, his wife, Shelley Buchanan, as vice chair, and his sister Bay as president. He added several former campaign aides to the payroll, keeping family and friends employed and available in off-election years. The corporation’s nonprofit educational status allowed it to raise and spend money outside the purview of the Federal Election Commission while essentially maintaining the rudiments of a campaign apparatus. Between 1992 and 1996 it raised two and a half million dollars, much of that from direct mail solicitations to the campaign’s contributor list.
¹³
A second related corporation received almost two million dollars from just one donor, Roger Milliken, an ultraconservative South Carolinian with a miniempire in the textile industry, an industry increasingly challenged during the 1980s and 1990s
by low-wage competitors overseas.
¹⁴
With Milliken’s money behind him, Buchanan spent four years thumping the anti–free trade drum, urging new tariffs to protect domestic industry.

Buchanan’s friend and colleague Sam Francis had urged him to add the fight against gun control to the antiabortion and antigay agenda. Battles for cultural symbols such as the Confederate flag were as important as (if not more so than) promoting school prayer, he urged. Put opposition to immigration and free trade side by side at the top of the Middle American platform, Francis said, because these issues spoke directly to the “racial dispossession of the historic American people.”
¹⁵
Buchanan listened and freely borrowed from Sam Francis’s ideas during the 1996 primary campaign.

February 20, 1996.
Pat Buchanan stunned the Republican establishment and placed first in the Republican Party’s New Hampshire primary. During the campaign he had hit long and hard on low-cost foreign labor competition, but his concern for workers’ wages and conditions did not extend as far as supporting trade unions. AFL-CIO leaders challenged Buchanan’s newly found concerns. “Saying Patrick Buchanan speaks for workers is like saying the Ayatollah Khomeini speaks for priests and rabbis,” the head of the trade union federation said. “Patrick Buchanan is a racist, he’s anti-Semitic, he bashes women right along with labor and immigration, and he’s a believer in supply-side economics.”
¹

Nevertheless, Buchanan drew the highest percentage of New Hampshire voters concerned most about the economy and jobs, 33 percent. Exit polls also found that almost 60 percent of his constituency described itself as “very conservative,” and almost as many considered themselves part of the religious right. In other words, “religious right” voters were also concerned about the economy, and Buchanan had a hard core of very conservative support.

During the course of his campaign, Buchanan pushed issues of American sovereignty and economic nationalism to the fore. He made the usual complaints about moral relativism’s replacing “Judeo-Christian” values. But those themes were subordinated to stories about proud bread-winning workers losing their jobs to cheap imports and runaway factories. Early in the process, he signed Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt as a campaign cochair. He also took other steps to broaden his appeal past the religious right throughout the primaries. In southern states he embraced the Confederate battle flag. In Arizona he waved rifles in the air and dressed like a Saturday night cowboy.
And he hit at brown-skinned workers from Latin America wherever immigration was an issue. Yet Buchanan was a white Christian nationalist first and foremost, and his voters understood that.

According to a most remarkable exit poll of Super Tuesday primary voters in seven states, 54 percent of those who considered abortion the most important issue pulled Buchanan’s lever. He drew 46 percent of those most concerned about immigration. He won 42 percent of those most fixated on foreign trade. On all three issues related to moral traditionalism and national sovereignty, Buchanan drew greater percentages than any other Republican. But of those most interested in jobs and the economy, he won only 18 percent. Any claim to “economic populism” had been secondary, derived from his rhetorical style rather than his political substance. Nevertheless, he represented a significant constituency, and by the end of the primaries he had polled a total of more than three million votes, almost three hundred thousand more than he had won in 1992.
²

Much like the 1992 campaign, Buchanan’s 1996 bid had been dogged by revelations of white nationalists and militia promoters in the campaign apparatus—only more so. Just days before the New Hampshire election, controversy erupted over his selection of Larry Pratt as a campaign cochair. The issue became Pratt’s appearance with Aryan Nations figures at Pete Peters’s post-Weaver meet in Colorado. Pratt had been a fickle cochair in any case as he had spent little time at the podium actually promoting Buchanan. Nor did Pratt’s cochair spot keep him off the podium of a Taxpayers Party–sponsored conference. Newspapers and political pundits called for Pratt’s removal; no person with white supremacist links should be a campaign official, was the argument. As a consequence, Pratt voluntarily decided to take a “leave of absence” as campaign cochair, while denying that he was either racist or anti-Semitic. “I loathe the Aryan Nations and other racist groups with every fiber of my being,” Pratt told the press.
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During the same period early in the primary season, another campaign cochair, Michael Farris, was revealed to have (briefly) attended a banquet honoring those who had been convicted of shooting abortion doctors. Farris claimed to have left the dinner as soon as he learned its purpose, however, and managed to keep his post.
⁴

Media reports also told of a troubling incident during the Louisiana primary campaign, where Buchanan supporters distributed propaganda attacking Texas Senator Phil Gramm for marrying a woman of Korean descent. This was not Buchanan campaign material, however, but
The Truth at Last
, published by Ed Fields. Written as if the publication’s readers were Republican regulars rather than hard-core anti-Semites
and racists, it read: “Many conservatives will not vote for him [Gramm] in the primary due to his interracial marriage. He divorced a White wife to marry an Asiatic!” Capital letters and exclamation points were all included.
⁵
Louisiana’s primary had been reset to precede both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire, and Gramm had expected to do well there. Instead, that state, where David Duke had once received more votes than any other Republican, placed Buchanan second behind Kansas senator Bob Dole. In fact,
The New York Times
reported that “3 of the 13 delegates Mr. Buchanan won in Louisiana” had previously worked for Duke.
⁶

Having knocked Phil Gramm out of the race and damaged Bob Dole, Buchanan pushed into the southern states, and more trouble followed. After it was revealed that Susan Lamb, his Jacksonville, Florida, county campaign chair, was a member of David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People, she was summarily dismissed.
⁷
Buchanan’s South Carolina state chair, William Carter, was also fired after the press learned that he had chaired David Duke’s 1992 campaign in that state.
⁸
What did not become news, however, was Carter’s long movement history, including a stint as state chair of the Populist Party and his current status as chair of the state’s Council of Conservative Citizens chapter.
⁹
Neither Lamb nor Carter was allowed to take the “leave” accorded Pratt.

These and other revelations prompted Kansas Senator Bob Dole to tell the press that Buchanan had “extremist” views.
¹⁰
A number of prominent conservatives, however, rushed to defend him. Ralph Reed, who then directed the Christian Coalition, and David Keene, the head of the American Conservative Union, both defended Buchanan, the person and candidate.
¹¹
Like others who had initially argued that Buchanan was neither anti-Semitic nor racist, they effectively dismissed the evidence that his white and Christian nationalism was outside acceptable Republican discourse. Further, they did not want to alienate Buchanan’s voters, particularly the so-called Reagan Democrats. Much like Louisiana Republican state leaders who had tabled criticism of David Duke while he was pulling former Democrats into the Republican voting column, Buchanan’s defenders wanted to keep his voting constituency inside the party.