TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100190/1001106.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.4 KB | 237 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 43

David Duke's Addictive Politics


The former Klansman is tapping a vein of resentment that may
reach far

By GARRY WILLS


    Tailgate parties before L.S.U. football games are an all-day
affair in Baton Rouge. Vendors set up, even for a night game,
during the morning. By noon the vans are rolling in from all
over the state to raise their family marquees. The vans, trucks
and station wagons are traveling statements. One has a horn
that bugles "Glory, glory, hallelujah" as it enters the parking
area. Some are equipped with public-address systems through
which the owners issue cheers, personal manifestos and
invitations to join them for a drink. On the platform atop one
large van, Confederate flags flying from its railing, is a
Dixieland band. When a David Duke truck pulls into the lot, the
men in the band intone "white power" into their mikes. David
Duke, running for the U.S. Senate, has come home.

    On opening day of the season (the Louisiana State-Georgia
game), Duke strikes out into the jumble of vans and says
facetiously, "We might even meet some opposition out here!" A
woman at one van, standing next to a scribbling reporter,
shouts, "We love you, David, and to hell with the media." (In
the best Southern tradition of jocular animosity, she hugs me
while she says it.) Young people along his route take up and
pass along his barked accolade: "Duke!" "Duke!" "Duke!" "Duke!"

    An aide asks, "Have you even seen a grass-roots campaign
like this?" I say, Yes, I covered George Wallace in 1968 and
1972. Yet the dynamics are as different here as is the
candidate. The early Wallace was a colorful Southern racist,
at one with his followers' ancient prejudices. Duke is a smooth
outsider, an intellectual of an alien ideology who has tempered
his appeal to fit people's anxieties.

    "He looks better than on TV," one woman tells another with
approval. In real life he looks better than real. Cosmetic
surgeons, employed in relays, have made him larger of chin,
lesser of nose and chemically scrubbed of wrinkles, as if to
erase an embarrassing past from his face as well as his record.
Only rays of "laugh lines" going out from the side of his eyes
are unnaturally deep, like a high school actor's heavy
pencilings for an older part.

    Duke looks too young, at 40, to have founded so many racist
organizations and journals and to have run for so many offices
-- twice for the state senate (as a Klan member), twice for the
presidency (as a Democrat and then as a Populist), once for the
vice presidency (in New Hampshire), once for the state
legislature (as a Republican) and now for the Senate (as a
Republican without the party's endorsement). Even as a Klan
member, he won 33% of the vote in his 1975 Senate race. As an
overnight Republican, he won 51% in his runoff victory for the
statehouse seat he holds. The latest polls show him with 25%
going into the Oct. 6 primary against incumbent J. Bennett
Johnston's 42%, but Duke claims he has a secret vote from
people who will not confess their preference to pollsters. This
was the case in his 1989 victory, and pollster Susan Howell
says Duke "flies below radar." But as he becomes more
acceptable, more familiar on the scene, more identified with
nonracist politics (like his defeat of Governor Buddy Roemer's
tax increase), there is less reason for voters to hide their
support of him.

    Even Georgia fans are accepting Duke's stickers and labels,
as he tactfully claims: "It will be all right, whether Georgia
or L.S.U. wins -- we're all Southerners." But he does not sound
like a Southerner. When he entered grade school in New Orleans,
he was teased for having a Dutch accent. (His engineer father
had taken the family to the Netherlands in the 1950s.) A
bookish loner in school, Duke sought out extremist mentors who
treated him as a brilliant young disciple. With contemporaries
he was condescending or defiant, moving to a deeper rhythm of
history than they could be aware of, trying to shock them into
submission with "street theater" involving swastikas and Klan
robes.

    He jokes now about his youthful "indiscretions," presenting
them as typical of the 1960s. Tom Hayden, he likes to say, was
tried for inciting to riot before he entered a state
legislature. He claims without proof that the late U.S.
Congressman Mickey Leland was a Black Panther. Those people
were associated with violence, whereas "my branch of the Klan
was nonviolent."

    A woman at the L.S.U. game presses close to say "I'm for
you, but my sister says she will never vote for a man who hates
Catholics." He answers, with a smile, "When I was in the Klan,
most of my members were Catholics" (as are most of the
residents in his current district).

    A dentist from Lafayette describes the support for Duke at
a hospital where he works. He thinks it is dirty campaigning
for Duke's foes to keep bringing up his past: "The
Times-Picayune does not bring up Chappaquiddick every time it
mentions Teddy Kennedy." "They bring up my past," Duke tells
the dentist, "because they do not want to talk about my
issues." His issues -- he owns them around here -- are
opposition to affirmative action, minority set-asides and
welfare without drug testing. "I'm for equal rights, even for
white people" is the briefest statement of his program -- and
one that usually elicits rebel yells.

    As he moves among the L.S.U. students, they talk as if
oppressed by blacks "who are getting everything." One says,
"Yeah, think of the Nike thing" -- Operation PUSH's boycott of
the sportswear company, demanding it hire blacks at the
management level. "That's just extortion."

    The people who are "getting everything" are nowhere to be
seen among the picnickers. The only blacks visible wear the
Day-Glo blazers of parking attendants. In fact, the prosperity
of Duke's supporters is a point of pride to the campaign aide
who asks me, "Do these people look like piney-woods rednecks?"

    For this audience, the welfare chiseler is an icon of moral
theft rather than a real challenge to the pocketbook. (Welfare
in Louisiana is stingy; aid for dependent children takes only
2% of the state budget.) Duke's people are affronted by the
thought that large bodies of blacks are getting something for
nothing, or actually being rewarded for irresponsibility (or
crime). Ronald Reagan got great mileage from a mythical
"welfare queen." Duke has a true story he tells to even greater
effect, developing it to apocalyptic dimensions. He gave me one
of its shorter versions:

    "The first baby born in New Orleans last year was the eighth
child of a woman on welfare -- all eight born in the hospital
at taxpayers' expense. In Louisiana it costs about $4,000 a
year to educate a child in public school. Eight times four is
about $30,000 a year. In ten years that is $300,000 -- in
education costs alone, and you haven't talked about welfare
payments, food stamps, housing; you haven't talked about police
and fire protection; you haven't talked about courts and
corrections. It is estimated by most sources that every child
born to the welfare system costs well over $100,000, and that's
if the child doesn't get into serious criminal activity. So
that one woman's welfare family could cost taxpayers over a
million dollars. The cycle continues. In this country it costs
between $16,000 and $25,000 a year to incarcerate someone in
prison. Add the rising insurance costs to business, the human
costs of people being slaughtered in our streets and stores and
byways."

    This peril to the West can be developed until the crowd
swirling around the L.S.U. stadium feels that bastion of
civilization is rocking on its base -- all from the output of
one woman's womb.

    In deftly adding education costs to his accounting of
society's loss to blacks -- though these costs cover all
children, rich or poor, white or black, who attend public
schools -- Duke is expressing a resentment of the poor for
daring to exist. During his more forthright racist days, he had
eugenic solutions for the problem: tax deterrents to breeding
by the lower class matched by incentives for the genetically
superior. He has softened that to drug testing and mandatory
instruction in contraception for all welfare recipients.

    Duke presents his campaign as a call for courage. Speaking
a few days before the L.S.U. game, he told a Cajun crowd in
Reserve, La., "What I say is just what you say to each other
around the dining room table; but I'm the only politician who
has the courage to say it in public." There is a rogue air of
risk to his enterprise. Only those willing to risk obloquy will
put his bumper stickers on their car, post his signs in their
yard -- and so each such display becomes a kind of guerrilla
statement. He revels in being attacked by "respectable" people.
"The President of the U.S. attacked me [when he ran for the
state legislature]. The ex-President attacked me. The state
party attacked me, the national party. The only one who didn't
attack me was the Ayatullah Khomeini, and that was only because
he was ill at the time." The Cajun men in undershirts cluster
around Duke as he moves across a duskily lit softball field,
praising his courage. "No one else will speak out," one of them
says.

    Some see in this a pattern of demagogy of the sort Louisiana
has specialized in from Huey Long's time to that of Edwin
Edwards. But Huey Long did not claim, as Duke does, to be a
serious author writing on the environment and other subjects
-- even, once, a sex manual -- under various pseudonyms. Ben
C. Toledano, one of the founders of modern Republicanism in
Louisiana, sees nothing of Huey in Duke. "My family has lived
in New Orleans for 265 years -- a long time for Americans, and
I don't see anything Southern in Duke. You drop him in Iowa,
or anywhere, and he would get the same response."

    Lance Hill agrees. He is the director of the Louisiana
Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, founded to oppose Duke.
"His appeal can be reproduced wherever a white middle class is
close to a black high-crime area. Duke practices what I think
of as cocaine politics. Like cocaine, his appeal is easily
transported, easily concealed and highly addictive." There are
rumblings around the nation that show the spread has already
begun. Though Lee Atwater was quick to dissociate the national
party from Duke, many Republicans feel that opposition to
affirmative action and set-asides is a stand too rewarding to
be renounced.

    Duke is right, in some measure, about his opponents'
unwillingness to talk about "his issues." Liberals have been
rather cowardly about defending affirmative action. They allow
caricatures of it to be attacked with impunity (even by blacks
like Shelby Steele, a San Jose State University English
professor) as a program for quotas, or for rewarding the
unqualified rather than finding the qualified. A combination
of conservative opportunism and liberal faintheartedness
creates soft areas for Duke to exploit.

    No matter how he does in this race, his growing
acceptability opens up many opportunities for him in 1991, when
he can pick his target in a state where the open primary seems
made for this kind of permanent campaigning. He can run for
Governor, state senator, or the U.S. House. He has struck a
vein of rich ore, and others are circling closer to share in
mining it.