Blood and Politics (76 page)

Thus the “Hands off Buchanan” call had less to do with Buchanan’s personal politics than with maintaining a Republican base among the antiabortion zealots, anti-immigrant activists, gunners, economic nationalists, and Confederate flag wavers drawn to his campaign.

Also notable among those defending him from the charge of anti-Semitism was Seattle Rabbi Daniel Lapin, whose organization, Toward
Tradition, openly allied itself with the Reverend Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. “There are good reasons to oppose Pat Buchanan for president and legitimate ways in which to do it,” Rabbi Lapin argued, but “accusing him of anti-Semitism is not a good reason and vilifying his followers is not a legitimate way.”
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Underneath the general media’s radar, Liberty Lobby and
The Spotlight
endorsed Buchanan with a special edition
Republican Voter’s Guide.
This four-page tabloid-size insert predictably nailed the “powerful Special Interest Groups Behind Media Attacks on Buchanan.” Who were they? Well, if the readers could wait as long as the second paragraph, then they would learn that “the wealthy and powerful American Jewish community (popularly known as ‘the Jewish lobby’ or ‘the Israeli lobby’) does not like Pat Buchanan.” His “victory would constitute the greatest political revolution in history,” the tabloid opined.
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If you agreed, Liberty Lobby was eager to sell you a subscription.

Actually, Liberty Lobby liked Pat the nationalist more than Pat the Republican. By April 1
The Spotlight
had begun pushing the idea of Buchanan as a third party standard-bearer. He stood “at the crossroads.” The Republican elites would not nominate him. On the other hand, “a new party would immediately galvanize the millions of Americans who no longer have a home in the Democratic or the Republican Party.”
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If Buchanan decided to bolt from the Republicans, he could make history. While Liberty Lobby had supported Buchanan’s Republican bid in 1992, it could not countenance his continued stay in the party after the 1996 primaries. Later it declared that he had used and abused supporters and “callously” led them “astray” by not leaving Republican ranks in 1996.
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In contrast with Liberty Lobby, the Council of Conservative Citizens neither made exaggerated claims nor used Buchanan’s campaign simply as a marketing opportunity for its own ideological goods. Instead, council members, many of whom had once filled the Populist Party’s leadership ranks, trudged through the election-year cycle like realpolitik soldiers. In 1995, soon after Buchanan announced his candidacy, council members in New York City had joined with several Populist Party officials to sponsor a fund-raiser in the Bronx. Then they helped collect thirty thousand signatures to put Pat on New York State’s Republican primary ballot.
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In Mississippi, Republican state senator Mike Gunn gave Buchanan a special boost.
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And after the South Carolina council state chair William Carter was fired by Buchanan’s campaign, there was little of the Willis Carto–style petulant thrashing by his former allies.
The council quietly stayed the course and focused on supporting the Confederate flag and opposing free trade agreements, pressing its case where it could.

At the second
American Renaissance
conference that May, attendees expressed support for Buchanan’s nationalism and unhappiness about his campaign. One participant worried that Buchanan’s attempt to appeal to various constituencies did not evoke a sense of white unity. Another tried balancing the effects of negative media exposure against the harm done by campaign missteps. The most informed critic, Sam Francis, argued that Buchanan lacked politically steady advisers and had lost direction. With the eye of an insider, he claimed that Pat’s sister Bay, who managed the campaign, was unable to direct the bunch of kids “running things.” Francis recounted his “defenestration” since the last meet. And during a question and answer session, Francis declared that the Republican Party must be destroyed, a sentiment certainly shared by many other Buchanan supporters in the room.

For his part, Jared Taylor reprised his attack on the pernicious appeal of social equality and “multiculturalism.” During the past two years Taylor’s personal visibility at white nationalist venues had increased sharply, and he had become a regular speaker at Council of Conservative Citizens events and Confederate flag revivals. For the council itself, Gordon Baum stood and repeated his entreaty for new members. Atlanta attorney Sam Dickson closed the proceedings once again, this time with a biting attack on race traitors—much like his closing at the memorial for Revilo Oliver.

The most marked change was by Wayne Lutton, the Institute for Historical Review intimate turned anti-immigration guru. As at the 1994 meet, Lutton used facts, figures, and anecdotes to weave together a fearful picture of a dark-skinned voodoo-worshiping future. But this time his speaking style was polished and emotional, rousing the crowd with invocations that “demography is destiny.” Like Sam Francis, he accused the Republican Party of surrendering the continent to a “non-Western” invasion.
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As the twenty-first century came into view, and the time when white people would lose their majority status loomed larger, Lutton and his anti-immigrant program became increasingly important.

In one postconference appraisal, published in Wilmot Robertson’s
Instauration
newsletter, Lutton was credited as the only speaker with a sense of direction. The emphasis on IQ and crime, this writer averred, did not penetrate the enormity of the demographic tsunami facing Anglo-Saxondom. Particularly irksome to this participant was Jared Taylor’s “appeal to a very broad racial category, which is commonly referred to as ‘white.’ In particular they have sought to enlist Jewish participation
in their activities and to avoid any connection or association with anti-Semitism.” Such an approach was deemed “counterproductive.” A second attendee, by contrast, counted a possible alliance with Jews, deserving of “careful consideration.”
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The debate about including Jews in the category of white people continued to swirl around
American Renaissance
, but it too faded as the Republican Party’s convention came into view. Buchanan’s forces teamed up with the Reverend Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and seized control of the party’s platform. They defeated Bob Dole’s effort to soften the antiabortion language, and they included a strident anti-immigrant plank requiring a constitutional change to the Fourteenth Amendment. Capturing the platform committee was not the same as winning the nomination, however, and Bob Dole was loath to have a repeat performance of Buchanan’s 1992 prime-time culture war speech. So Buchanan was given a spot and a time on the dais outside the limelight, charged with rousing the troops of the religious right, and ultimately pledged his loyalty to the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Nobody walked out.

November 5, 1996.
Depending on who was listening, election night delivered different messages. For Democrats seeking to vindicate President Clinton, he trounced Senator Bob Dole, 49 to 41 percent. For Republicans, particularly conservative Republicans from the South, their continued dominance in the House and Senate brought Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich back as Speaker of the House and Mississippi Senator Trent Lott in as Senate majority leader. For Ross Perot’s loyalists, his slip from 19 percent of the vote in 1992 to 8 percent in this election signaled difficulties but not the effective end of the Reform Party. It would own several million automatic dollars from the Federal Election Commission, since it had pulled more than 5 percent. And for the myriad other less endowed third parties, right and left, the two-party oligopoly proved insurmountable.

Howard Phillips repeated his miserable 1992 vote-getting tally, receiving fewer than two hundred thousand votes as the Taxpayers Party’s presidential candidate. And in the why-bother? category, former Nazi Party chief and Populist Party state chair Ralph Forbes got five hundred votes as the presidential candidate of Ed Fields’s America First Party.

The electorate remained riven by race, religion, and gender: 53 percent of white Protestants voted for Dole, while 84 percent of blacks and 72 percent of Hispanics voted for Clinton. Asian Americans and whites
both voted for Clinton at 43 percent, while Jews voted for the Democratic incumbent at 78 percent. The gender gap yawned at ten points: 38 percent of white men voted for Clinton, while he received 48 percent of white women’s votes.
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Congressman Jack Metcalf, the longtime anti–Federal Reserve activist and anti–Native American treaty rights legislator from Washington State, won reelection to the House of Representatives after an extremely close vote count. Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth, the Republican from Idaho, breezed to a second term, her past support for militia and opposition to environmental regulation apparently resonant with voters and her back-door relationship with the John Birch Society not an issue. In another Texas district, Ron Paul reemerged from the libertarian far right to win election to Congress as a Republican. One of those few figures who routinely jumped back and forth across the border between respectability and zealotry, Paul had won three elections to Congress, lost badly as a Libertarian candidate for president, maintained a leadership position in the John Birch Society, and then reentered the Republican Party. His election underscored the one salient fact undermining the emergence of any third party on the Republican Party’s right: there was still plenty of room inside the GOP for ideologues like Chenoweth and Paul and even for a white nationalist like Buchanan—as long as they did not run for president.

Farther down the tickets in state parties, an even bigger political space existed. Georgia State Senator Pam Glanton, a Republican with a record of association with militia supporters, for example, easily won reelection.
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So did Mississippi State Senator Mike Gunn, the Council of Conservative Citizens leader who had benefited from that Buchanan-supported fund-raiser. Not all such Republican candidates succeeded, however. The council supported Dean Allen, who failed in a bid for state office in North Carolina. Sheriff Richard Mack, a militia circuit regular and darling of the gun rights lobby, lost his primary. And David Duke received only 10 percent of the vote in Louisiana’s open primary for the U.S. Senate. The broadcast media paid him little attention, demonstrating once more that if a candidate continues to run and lose time and again, he eventually gets relegated to the class of also-rans.

Despite Clinton’s victory, the institutional power of the Christian Coalition and the National Rifle Association, two pillars of the Republican right, remained unmatched by any parallel organizations loyal to the Democratic Party. Other groups were larger in numbers and could produce campaign funds and run ads. But none had the same power to mobilize its own membership to volunteer for campaigns and to vote.

Despite the growing strength of white nationalists, 1996 had been a
disappointing year. Their troops were as likely to rob banks as run for office. They had no real candidate after Buchanan stopped running. “In the history of presidential politics, 1996 will go down as the year that Pat Buchanan cast away the political opportunity of a lifetime,” one Ohio Klansman turned Populist Party wannabe said. “[He] raised and spent some $30 million. Yet, what is there—in the end—to show for all of this?”

The question was apt. Buchanan would never again win three million votes. If the Republican leadership could keep Buchanan’s voters inside the party, then third parties would remain a difficult and ultimately frustrating pursuit time and again. The only alternative, a decided tendency of white nationalists believed, was outside the electoral process. Lack of access may help explain the popularity of the militia and other private armies more than any popular zeal for marching around in the woods with guns. Nevertheless, nonviolent extraparliamentary activity had its own frustrations. Sure, you could march by the thousands to keep the Confederate battle flag flying. You could eat, greet, and meet with fellow revisionists and scientific racists until your white skin sagged off your face. But that wasn’t going to topple the New World Order establishment or end “race mixing.”

Worse, the one mainstreaming movement chief with extra money, Willis Carto, allegedly kept hiding assets.

Willis Carto’s thirty-year run as a movement godfather comes to an end. William Pierce’s organization of cadres does not survive his death. Yet a new movement is looking to be born out of the old, even as its most important leaders have yet to fully emerge.

October 31, 1996.
The judgment of history is not impartial. Whether future generations remember Willis Carto as an early godfather of an ultimately victorious white nationalism or his legacy is eventually lost in the backwaters of a white supremacy long stilled, only our great-grandchildren will be able to judge. If his testimony before the Honorable Rustin G. Maino, California Fourth Appellate District, Division One is considered at all, however, it will be a reminder that not all history depends on the victors. Some judgments depend simply on the law and the facts.

At this moment Judge Maino had a pedestrian decision to make: Did Willis Carto and his codefendants owe legion-IHR any money, and if so, how much? As the judge repeatedly told the court, his decisions would be the same regardless of the beliefs of the two contending parties.
¹
The new directors of the Legion for the Survival of Freedom now possessed the Institute for Historical Review’s name, book stock, mailing lists, and such financial documents as Carto left behind. The content of future
Journal
articles was no longer the subject of shoe-stamping debate. The multimillion-dollar Farrel legacy, however, still remained beyond their grasp. Seeking to recover what it had lost, the legion-IHR had filed suit during the summer of 1994.
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