New York Times Op-Ed
For Duke, Just a Start
By Leonard Zeskind
David Duke may have lost the vote count last Saturday, but in all other respects his Louisiana senate campaign was victorious. In accordance with his long-term strategy, Mr. Duke has taken another giant step toward moving white supremacy off the margin and into the mainstream of American politics.
While Louisiana’s reputation for anything-goes politics is well-deserved, Mr. Duke has done more than appeal to fickle or frustrated voters. He has established campaign themes, an organization and political base that can be duplicated in other areas. Communities like Vineland, in southern New Jersey, or even central Tennessee immediately suggest themselves as future targets for white supremacists.
In conventional terms, the 44 percent of the vote captured by Mr. Duke amounted to a burial by the incumbent Democrat, Bennett Johnston. But it would be a mistake to measure David Duke by conventional political standards.
Just days before the election, for example, polls had Mr. Duke in the range of 22 to 28 percent, indicating that his supporters were still reluctant to admit their real choice to telephone pollsters. The same was true in February 1989, when Duke voters were undercounted before his upset election to the Louisiana House of Represenatives.
Mr. Duke carried almost 60 percent of the white vote, extending his powerbase beyond its existing blue collar ranks. A poll take last summer showed his support running at twice the levels among young white males as among the white population as a whole. Thus, today’s teenage white males could push Mr. Duke’s vote totals higher in the future.
He carried 25 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes, including Jefferson parish—one of the wealthiest and best educated in the state. His support spread from the white Protestant piney woods north of Baton Rouge to the ethnically diverse and Catholic southern half of the state.
Mr. Duke’s campaign themes echoed those of George Wallace in his 1968 Presidential bid: racism combined with a resentment of white elites. But David Duke is not George Wallace.
Mr. Wallace was following voter sentiment when he began his career as a segregationist. Mr. Duke, on the other hand, is creating a racist movement. He pioneered the “new” media-genic Klan of the 70’s and searched throughout the 80’s for a vehicle to spark a white racist movement across the country. He has found that vehicle in campaign politics. And he is likely to ride that vehicle as far as it will go.
Mr. Duke has successfully racialized Louisiana politics. He may have used code words about affirmative action and welfare. But it was a code everyone understood and, therefore, a code no longer. That is a significant victory for white supremacists seeking to change the political discourse.
In three short years, David Duke has managed to place himself squarely in the mainstream of Louisiana politics. He is no longer seen as the kook in a Klan costume—despite leading a white power march in Forsyth County, Ga in 1987, selling neo-Nazi literature from his state legislative office in 1989 and continuing to espouse Nazi-type eugenics theories.
He has married his own white supremacist ideology to the “southern strategy” of the Republican Party. Already, to the dismay of national G.O.P. officials, other racists are seeking to imitate his success, trying to claim the future of the Republican Party. One of them—Mr. Duke’s campaign manager in 1988, a former leader of the American Nazi Party named Ralph Forbes—received 46 percent of the vote in the Arkansas Republican primary for lieutenant governor.
Despite a turnout 15 percentage points below the white voting rate, black voters in Louisiana saved whites from themselves. But the battle against racism cannot be won at the ballot box. It must be fought first in the hearts and minds of Americans.
><