White supremacists love Donald Trump. Last week, David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, endorsed the American Il Duce. As reported by the website Buzzfeed:
“Voting for these people, voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage,” Duke said on the David Duke Radio Program Wednesday, referring to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. “I’m not saying I endorse everything about Trump, in fact I haven’t formally endorsed him. But I do support his candidacy, and I support voting for him as a strategic action. I hope he does everything we hope he will do.”
Duke then urged his followers to call Trump’s campaign headquarters to volunteer.
“And I am telling you that it is your job now to get active. Get off your duff. Get off your rear end that’s getting fatter and fatter for many of you everyday on your chairs. When this show’s over, go out, call the Republican Party, but call Donald Trump’s headquarters, volunteer. They’re screaming for volunteers. Go in there, you’re gonna meet people who are going to have the same kind of mindset that you have.”
When confronted on CNN last weekend about David Duke’s endorsement, Donald Trump pleaded ignorance and refused to condemn the high profile white supremacist or others who share such beliefs, before grudgingly doing so later.
The news media have now made Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan the “hot” talking point of the week. Republican candidates have tried to use Trump’s evasions about the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists as a cudgel to paint their rival as unelectable, unhinged, and irresponsible.
These are distractions from fundamental and basic questions about the post-civil rights era Republican Party, justice, equality, and the color line.
In reality, the Republican Party’s “problems” with the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy are much bigger than Donald Trump.
Sociologists David Cunningham, Justin Farrell, and Rory McVeigh have done groundbreaking work examining the relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and how the Republican Party was able to win over Southern white voters in the years during and after the civil rights movement.
As explained in their recent paper “Political Polarization as a Social Movement Outcome: 1960s Klan Activism and Its Enduring Impact on Political Realignment in Southern Counties, 1960 to 2000,” they found that:
The primary question that drove our research is whether or not southern counties that experienced Klan activism in the 1960s showed greater increases in Republican voting than did southern counties that did not have Klan organizations. We statistically controlled for numerous other changes that took place within counties over time. Our analysis benefited from the fact that we had a measure of Republican voting prior to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1960s, as well as measures of voting in subsequent elections that were held after the period of intense Klan activism had faded.
We found that Klan counties did, in fact, experience greater movement to the Republican candidates and, importantly, we found that the effect of Klan activism did not diminish over time.
For example, when we examined the difference in the Republican vote for Richard Nixon in 1960 and the vote for Republican George W. Bush in 2000, the growth in Republican voting was, on average, more than five percent higher in Klan counties compared to non-Klan counties, net of other factors that contributed to the change. Given that the 2000 election was decided by an extremely tight race in the state of Florida, one might argue that the historical influence of the Klan represents the difference between a Bush presidency and an Al Gore presidency…
Our interest in political polarization led us not only to examine change in county voting over time, but also to analyze how former Klan activism might be related to individual voting behavior. We obtained survey data from the 1992 Southern Focus Poll to examine voting preferences decades after the Klan had declined. We were particularly interested in how racial attitudes mapped on to voting preferences, and whether that differed depending upon whether the Klan had previously been active in the individual’s county of residence. In multivariate analyses, we found that conservative racial attitudes did predict Republican voting, but that was only the case in counties that had experienced prior Klan activism.
The Ku Klux Klan was not coincidental to how the Republican Party was able to win over white, southern—and formerly Democratic—voters. The Ku Klux Klan was integral to that process. Of course, Republicans and their right-wing news entertainment complex would be aghast at this fact and would deploy their usual parade of disinformation, lies, and historical fictions in order to dispute it.
They would repeat the tired talking point that the Republican Party is the “party of Lincoln” and the “civil rights movement.” Likewise, the Ku Klux Klan would be depicted as being founded by “Democrats” and as a “progressive” organization.
These fictions are easily destroyed by the facts of American history.
White conservatives rejected the civil rights movement and the struggle for black freedom. More liberal-minded and forward-thinking white politicians and other elites supported the civil rights movement. The Southern Democrats who founded the Ku Klux Klan would eventually become the Republicans and conservatives of the post-civil rights era. Moreover, these supposed defenders of “civil rights” and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln have feverishly worked to limit the voting rights of African Americans in the Age of Obama.
The killing of many tens of thousands of black Americans from the end of the Civil War and through to the middle of the 20th century by the country’s largest terrorist organization was a profoundly conservative and reactionary political act. By comparison, the expansion of freedom and liberty to former African-American human property as part of the long struggle for black freedom is one of the most progressive and forward-thinking projects in the country’s political history.
The umbrella fiction that enables the Republican Party to present itself as a defender of the legacy of the civil rights movement, as well as to smear the Democratic Party as “racists” who founded the Ku Klux Klan, is embodied by Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s recent comment that “This party does not prey on people's prejudices.”
To make such a claim means that Paul Ryan (who several years ago actually endorsed the anti-black white supremacist pseudo science found in the discredited book The Bell Curve) is either an unapologetic liar, profoundly ignorant of his own political party’s tactics, or may actually be so delusional that he convinced himself that such a lie is the truth.
In the post-civil rights era conservatism and racism are one and the same thing. Because of that dynamic, the Republican Party is the United States’ largest white identity organization.
The white supremacist behavior and attitudes of today’s Republican Party are legion.
The Southern Strategy of using subtle and overt racial appeals to win over white voters has been the preferred strategy of the Republican Party since the 1960s. As detailed by Lee Atwater:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
Republicans have repeatedly used campaign tactics designed to gin up white racial resentment, fear, animus, and hostility toward black Americans and other non-whites. These include Ronald Reagan’s allusions to mythical “welfare queens” and “black bucks” who are social parasites that steal from “good,” “hardworking” white people; the infamous black beast rapist Willie Horton ad that was run by the first President Bush in 1988; the racist ads against Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee in 2006; the darkening of Barack Obama’s skin tone by McCain-Palin during the 2008 election to make the future president look more “black” and “menacing;” Mitt Romney’s “makers and takers” rhetoric; and Birther conspiracy theories that mark Obama as illegitimate for the United States presidency because he is supposedly “black,” “foreign,” other.
Public opinion and social psychology research has shown that what is known as “old fashioned racism” is resurgent among conservatives in the Age of Obama. Racial animus towards Barack Obama by white conservatives is now so extreme that it determines the likelihood of a white person supporting the Republican Party.
The tea party, a group that likely has much overlap with Donald Trump’s supporters, was also comprised of whites who were much more likely to be racially resentful toward African-Americans.
Racial animus, overt racism, nativism, and bigotry are not extreme or uncommon attitudes among Republican voters. They are features which tie together the Republican base. As I argued in an earlier essay, not all Republicans are racists, but racists are much more likely to be attracted to the Republican Party.
Republican elites are flummoxed by the ascent of Donald Trump and the power that his naked, unapologetic, racism has over their party’s voters. They are powerless to stop Donald Trump because the right-wing media, GOP operatives, and elected officials are in denial about how they are members of a political movement that is tied together by racism and white supremacy. Like an alcoholic or other addict, the Republican Party bigwigs are incapable of confronting the GOP’s addiction to racism and white supremacy—because they are unwilling to admit that they have a problem.
Donald Trump is the hell spawn of decades of Republican racism and white supremacy. They can try to deny their bastard child … but the world will still know his parentage.