By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
This is easy research: you can do it on the web. David Duke was born in Oklahoma, but he grew up in New Orleans. His mother was an alcoholic, as sometimes happens. His father left when his son was eleven and didn’t come back.
He joined the Klan while still in high school and after a brief flirtation with the Nazi party he made the Klan his political home. He rose to the top of that organization and gained publicity by advertising a modern version of its timeworn philosophy, claiming he was less anti-black than pro-white. Then he left the Klan, though it’s hard to say why. He maintains he disliked their violent tendencies. Others say it was a financial scandal.
He ran and lost races for the Louisiana State Senate two times, as a Democrat. He even tried to run for the presidency as Democrat. Then in 1988, he ran for the state senate again, but this time as a Republican. Both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush spoke against him, but he won anyway. “It’s as if Attila the Hun joined our party,” the state chairman lamented. He served a few years and accomplished next to nothing.
He ran for the United States Senate in 1990, the only Republican in an open primary. Former Louisiana governor John Treen, also a Republican, called his program “garbage” and further opined “he is bad for our party because of his espousal of Nazism and racial superiority.” The Republican party ended up endorsing a Democrat in that election.
He then ran for Lousiana’s governorship. President Bush castigated him again. He ran for the presidency again; he ran for the U.S. Senate again; he ran for the U.S. House. The chairman of the Republican Party stated for the record, “there is no room in the party of Lincoln for a Klansman like David Duke.”
Duke is still around. He has expressed his support for the likes of Ilhan Omar and Jill Stein. He doesn’t really care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. He just follows the hate.
He is also just one example. The Republican party has long been plagued by its lunatic fringe. Because the Democrats and their machines tended to run our country’s big cities, the GOP inherited the representation of our countryside, thereby becoming the natural political base of our nativists and those fearful of change.
It was the Klan and the Birchers in years gone by; it’s the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys today. But no matter what you call them, the lineage runs clear back to the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party of the mid 1800’s. And Republican leaders from Eisenhower to Bush, who listened to Wall Street as much as to Main Street, who always took their history as the party of Lincoln seriously, who even at their worst shied away from the abject racism of the solid Democratic south, were always careful to disavow these groups (Trump, sadly, much less so).
Eisenhower particularly disliked them, because the Birchers included Ike in their paranoid imaginings. Nixon repeatedly disavowed them, in one election after another. William Buckley took it as a personal challenge to rid the modern Republican party of their influence. And as the David Duke story shows, the Republicans would even cede a seat to their opponents if necessary.
I mention this because recent primaries have saddled the Democratic Party with a lunatic fringe of its own. The Democrats of Michigan have given themselves a Senate candidate named Abdul al Sayed. Al Sayed won a close race. Like his soul mate Zohran Mamdani, he pals around with Hasan Piker, an influencer who praises Hezbollah and Hamas, and he ran and won on his signal hatred of Israel. The purity-ridden students of Ann Arbor put him over the top.
Asked if other opinions of Israel besides his own (he is against its existence) could be reasonable, he said, “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights.” As to whether a Zionist can also be a progressive, he declared, “Every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.” He also made fun of his opponent’s appearance and speech.
Faced with that obnoxiousness, and with notions of false morality that barely mask blatant anti-Semitism imported from abroad and translated to suit the needs of self-satisfied students, one might hope that the Democratic party would denounce this man and either support a third party challenge or cede that seat to his Republican rival. Instead we are getting mush. Gavin Newsom, Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer have all fallen in line.
They need to learn from their Republican friends. In case of emergency, break glass.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.