Exorcising Duke - David Duke - Interview

Democrats and Republicans alike deserve some of the blame for David Duke's rise. Author Thomas Byrne Edsall talks about race and politics.

In simpler times, Republicans could win presidential elections by tapping into working-class concerns about jobs, taxes and crime using racial symbols such as job quotas, welfare queens and a black rapist named Willie Horton on prison furlough.

Then David Duke burst onto the political scene. In one stroke, the former neo-Nazi Klansman adopted the Republicans' coded rhetoric of racial blame and exploited the Democrats' failure to allay working-class fears about the impact of civil rights and anti-poverty policies.

Duke's majority white vote in Louisiana wasn't enough to win him the governorship. But the racial anxieties he harnessed deepen as the economy worsens -- and challenge all mainstream politicians to defuse the racial time bomb they've exploited or ignored.

Arguably, few foresaw the Duke phenomenon more clearly than political journalist Thomas Byrne Edsall and writer Mary Edsall, authors of a new book, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics.

In Chain Reaction, the Edsalls assert that the Democrats' "neglect of powerful and volatile issues involving race" has given the Republican party a key opening. By exploiting fears about the impact of civil rights remedies and "assumptions about black poverty and crime," Republicans have come to dominate the white working-class vote -- and presidential elections.

The 1988 Bush campaign's use of Willie Horton was only a harbinger. President Bush since has fueled a fresh attack on affirmative action in the fight over civil rights legislation to restore minorities' standing to sue against workplace bias. Bush first vetoed the bill, accusing Democrats of pushing minority hiring quotas. When he later flip-flopped and signed a similar bill, White House aides moved to abolish the federal bureaucracy's own affirmative action plan (but were blocked in the ensuing public uproar).

In the wake of the Duke phenomenon, however, mainstream Republicans risk alienating moderate voters if they continue to fuel racial polarization. At the same time, President Bush needs to appeal to the working-class constituency that Duke is aiming for. And while the Democrats know they can't win if they ignore these voters' concerns, addressing them could risk alienating key minority votes.

In the following interview, Thomas Edsall, a national political reporter for the Washington Post, decodes the legacy of racial politics in America and talks about the 1992 elections. Edsall also recommends how political leaders might curb the politicization of race.

CC: The nastiest political issues of 1991 -- the Thomas confirmation hearings, the bickering over job "quotas" and the specter of David Duke -- thrust racial issues into people's living rooms. Why is national politics so obsessed with race today?

EDSALL: I see today's focus on race-driven issues arising from unresolved tensions that began forming around the 1964 presidential election.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act [a landmark statute that outlawed racial discrimination] was central to Democratic presidential incumbent Lyndon Johnson's campaign platform while Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, was an opponent. That's when the Democrats began to be seen as the party of racial liberalism and the Republicans as the party of racial conservatism.

But race and civil rights issues became increasingly complicated and troublesome for the Democratic party and helped to drive a wedge through its traditional, New Deal voting base: poor, working and lower middle classes. As that happened, it became increasingly easy for Republicans to capitalize on these issues.

You can't underestimate the impact of the major riot in the Watts section of Los Angeles in August 1965, with banner headlines and newspaper coverage of the riot, of guys saying "burn, baby, burn." At the same time, negative racial stereo-types began to be reinforced by problems associated with the underclass: crime, illegitimacy, school failure, social disintegration, lack of solid family structure. This kind of social disruption was very threatening to lower-income families struggling to make it, and their concerns were more than about race or racism.

You also began to have government remedies that called for not just the establishment of equality but for real [resource] redistribution based in part on race -- in effect, asking people to not just open doors but to actually start paying costs.

At the extreme, liberals inflamed resentment when their agenda required some citizens -- particularly lower-income whites -- to put homes, jobs, neighborhoods, children and their values at perceived risk in the service of remedies for racial discrimination and segregation that nobody agreed on.

What made it worse is that the remedies were established, in the eyes of these voters, not by the political process in which they had a voice, but by coercive federal courts and intrusive federal bureucrats--goaded by liberal elites whose own lives were unaffected by these changes.

Busing, for example, never had popular support -- it was a court-determined remedy to attack the problem of school segregation. Whites opposed it overwhelmingly and black sentiment was maybe 50-50. Nixon called the school bus a "symbol of a wrenching of children away from the schools their families may have moved to be near." No other issue brought home so vividly to whites the image of the federal government as intruder and oppressor, and liberal elites identified with this very painful court agenda.

Affirmative action policies suffer the same problem, even today. The courts mandated promotion or hiring policies that, in effect, are tilted to make up for the extraordinary past discrimination against blacks, but they made people who weren't personally responsible for the discrimination feel like they might have to pay a personal price.

So the debate over affirmative action is the 1990s version of the busing fight during the 1970s -- a backlash against court-ordered civil rights remedies.

Look at the case involving the Birmingham, Ala., fire department. In 1968 Birmingham was a majority black city but had no blacks whatever on the fire department. Clearly something had to be done. But the federal court didn't impose a penalty on the city of Birmingham, such as requiring it to hire blacks and create a special fund to pay them. Instead, the courts asked other white fire fighters, who might say, "I am not a biased person," to pay the penalty -- perhaps by not getting the promotion or the job.

Through much of the '80s the Democratic party maintained much of its support for tough affirmative action remedies even when these were created by the courts and regulators and were very divisive (although in this case blacks support tougher affirmative action than whites).

Affirmative action is seen as an issue of both fairness and economics among whites and blacks. On one side of this conflict is the American tradition of equal opportunity -- that people should have an equal chance to compete for jobs and opportunity at the starting line when the gun goes off. On the other side of this conflict is a very strong case that such a race now would be unfair to a whole class of people, black Americans, who for 200 years or more were physically and mentally brutalized.

Wasn't the showdown over the 1991 Civil Rights Act supposed to settle the issue of affirmative action to some degree?

It didn't. Both the White House and the civil rights groups dropped the opportunity to resolve the fundamental conflict over affirmative action.

The 1991 Civil Rights Act really throws back to the courts the obligation to interpret the obligations of employers to hire minorities and women. Instead of liberals fighting to sustain affirmative action and conservatives fighting against it, the issue was compromised in a way that was unsatisfactory to the right, and the left may well get burned because it's still left up to the [conservative] federal courts, which are clearly opposed to policies based on racial preferences.

Liberals are going to have to make a much stronger case if they want to sustain affirmative action measures based on racial preferences. There's not much dispute with aggressive efforts to seek out blacks, Hispanics, women and others who have been left out of a certain kind of job or schooling. There are, however, legitimate problems with policies that put racial or general preferences over merit -- that approach requires real explanation and convincing. But proponents of racial preferences have depended on the courts just to rule. That's a real negligence on their part.

They should pay attention to people who are too young to have any real sense of the history of the struggle against racial discrimination. They didn't see the march on Selma. Without that history it's going to be even tougher for them to support affirmative action remedies of any kind. A remedy implies a wrong. If you don't understand the wrong, the remedy is illegitimate.

How have the Republicans responded?

Republicans have taken their cues from [former Alabama Gov.] George Wallace ever since he helped define racial issues as an independent presidential candidate in 1968.

Wallace's popularity among white working- and middle-class voters made the Republicans really think, "What has this guy got going for him?" His real genius was not to be anti-black, but to identify the enemy of the working class as a liberal, basically white elite: Havard-educated, briefcase-carrying, bicycle-riding social engineers who were going to impose policies in a non-democratic fashion. He mobilized voters in a way that eliminated their guilt over race.

In doing so, Wallace basically drove a populist wedge into the popular cause of civil rights, giving almost a moral legitimacy to those who felt burdened by civil rights policies.

Long term, this gave the Republican party the opportunity to lessen its image as the party of the affluent and to gain at least some credibility as a conservative populist party and the proponent of working-class voters.

Isn't that what George Bush did in 1988?

At one point in the 1988 presidential campaign Bush was 17 points down in the polls. That's when [the late] Bush campaign chair Lee Atwater developed a set of themes that combined race, values and elite liberalism, all in one package -- bang, bang, bang -- with Willie Horton, the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU membership, the Harvard Square boutique liberalism. It was a perfect package to define Dukakis as the quintessential elite that George Wallace talked about 20 years before.

Dukakis walked right into it because he was that kind of liberal elite. And it transformed Bush, a guy who had a very strong patrician establishment image, into a credible candidate in many white working-class precincts -- the kind of candidate who in the past would have had real major liabilities in those areas.

At the same time the Bush campaign was using racially loaded issues in a way that would not produce any constructive solution to real problems in the United States.

...Setting the stage for David Duke's political ascent.

David Duke represents a major failure of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

The Democratic party has avoided the issues Duke raises; the Republican party has toyed with these issues but never really followed through. The 1992 campaign will mark 20 years of Republican use of issues that touch on white voters' concerns, but they haven't really attempted to substantively address or resolve them.

This has left many white working-and middle-class voters hanging in the wind. As these issues continue to nag and irritate, they provide an opportunity for a candidate like David Duke to come in and win a majority of the white working-class vote.

Does this mean Bush will respond with another Willie Horton-style campaign?

If Bush were decisively ahead, no. But as long as things look close the Republican party is going to fall back on what have been successful election techniques. Also, David Duke is going to force the Republicans to take stands on racially and economically charged issues.

At the same time, the race-driven images used by the Republicans in the 1988 election were only that -- images. Bush never developed the issues they raised and Dukakis never asserted a coherent stand on them. There was no real debate. Today, voters are smarter. Also, people's economic concerns are beginning to make them increasingly suspicious. Use a Willie Horton-type campaign and they'll say, "What is this stuff? Let's get some real answers."

Have the Democrats lost working-class voters forever?

Voters who feel unrepresented in the Democratic party have to be given a voice. The debate over civil rights policies ought to be done in a forth-right fashion. That's why I think the Democrats could have used the Civil Rights Act of 1991 as a vehicle to go through a painful process that the party has been avoiding now for 20 years, to have its representatives on both ends of their political spectrum go ahead-to-head in a debate on affirmative action policy.

The failure of political leaders to openly discuss these issues is really negligent. That's my basic goal as a reporter and a writer: to provoke public discussion of issues.

The country can take a lot more than the politicians think. Politicians are inherently fearful people when their single-minded goal is reelection. They want to avoid any disruption to their constituencies, the consensus that they have developed in support of their reelection within their districts. So there is a huge instinct in the political system, especially in Congress and with an incumbent president, to avoid these issues.

A lot of eggs are going to have to be broken. It will be interesting to watch. But black and white Americans can take an awful lot more tough, head-on argument, debate, discussion -- and anger and bitterness -- than politicians can.

Civil rights activist Julian Bond and professor Adolph Reed Jr., writing in the Nation, call your analysis "wrongheaded" and "dangerous" and "false." The culprit, they say, is not the Democrats' promotion of civil rights and antipoverty policies but rather unabated racism. Their solution is not to open a discussion about these policies, but to "organize and educate against racism within white middle-and working-class constituencies." And they suggest that your book gives white working-class racial resentments too much moral legitimacy.

At the moment the liberal coalition that includes Bond and Reed is in disarray, and is not recognizing or dealing with its inner conflicts. They're ignoring the broader conflicts over race, values and rights in this country, ignoring the question of how to represent both whites and blacks within a political coalition. There are a host of very divisive and polarizing forces at work, and Bond and Reed are just disregarding them.

To illustrate the problem with their argument, look at the welfare system. There are whites and blacks who think the current welfare system has real problems and are legitimately angry about them. The welfare system has functioned to a certain extent like a plantation structure -- it helps finance a whole people in economic subjugation and dependence.

There is racism. But there also are legitimate questions about how to achieve equality, about what is the responsibility of government to black Americans who have been severely damaged. There also is legitimate concern about affirmative action: If you're a policeman or a fireman, about how it affects your promotion; if you're a parent, about it affects your kid's chances of getting into UCLA or San Diego State. These are concerns that both blacks and whites have.

Sometimes these concerns have racist elements. But to blanketly dismiss these concerns as entirely racist is foolish. Once you say someone's concerns are racist, you've closed off all conversation, all discussion -- you have morally denigrated them in a way that will preclude debate. I call that an act of self-immolation.

Don't minorities and the poor have a lot to lose in such an open-ended debate in terms of the hard-fought civil rights guarantees and safety nets provided in the current system?

I don't think the system now is working that well. If you look at the bottom third of the poor, and especially the bottom quarter of black America, things are getting worse and worse. The income patterns are disastrous, the family structure is getting worse, the creation of whole underclass neighborhoods is amounting to a new form of segregation. To endorse the status quo is no solution at all.

The welfare system, for example, was created during the New Deal as a brief remedy to help widows who were caught in a sudden depression and needed money to survive. It is now an institutional form of survival in whole neighborhoods. It is a major source of income in whole wards in major cities, in whole counties in the Mississippi Delta. I don't believe even welfare recipients think it's a great way of life.

In the '60s there were a lot of aggressive black leaders who viewed the welfare system as a system of colonialism. At the same time you had a welfare rights movement that helped expand it hugely. Those are two conflicting forces: one asserting black nationalism and black initiative, the other asserting that welfare is a right, not an entitlement. That debate and tension could be revived and be very productive. What's happened now is a stagnation.

When people don't want to talk about these issues, they fester politically, and you see the emergence of Duke.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Common Cause Magazine
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