David Duke and the New Politics

EVERYBODY'S pissed.

The Croats are mad at the Serbs. The Armenians are squabbling with the Azerbaijanis. The Moldavians are scared of the Russians, and Dneisterians are scared of the Moldavians.

It seems to be the way of the post-Cold War world. Stop fighting the Americans, and start fighting each other.

It wasn't hard to predict such divisions in a world with no single power broker and no single overriding conflict. People would begin worrying about long simmering neighborhood arguments again. People would want their own ideas to prevail within their own borders. They would stop looking with hateful, blaming gazes at the Great Satan or the Evil Empire to explain their nation's woes. People would look closer to home.

People like David Duke.

DUKE, you may remember, is the former Ku Klux Klan "Imperial Wizard" who sparked a national firestorm two years ago when he won a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. He "shocked" Americans and received hate mail from the Bush White House and Ronald Reagan for running as a Republican.

Now Duke is in a hotly contested race for the Louisiana governorship. And once again, he's not doing badly. Indeed, one August poll conducted for a Duke opponent showed him leading his two major rivals, Democrat-turned-Republican Buddy Roemer, the current governor, and the scandal-plagued Edwin Edwards, a Democrat ousted by Roemer four years ago.

And while this poll gave him only one-third of the potential votes, Duke's polls usually miss what The Washington Post calls his "hidden vote" a gap which can apparently increase his numbers by as much as 50 percent.

At first this seems unbelievable. Duke is an avowed racist. He talks about white power. He's a neo-Nazi, for God's sake. So how did he persuade 44 percent of Louisiana's voting population (and, according to The Post, 60 percent of the white electorate) to vote for him last year in a failed bid for the U.S. Senate?

Are Louisianans especially unenlightened? Has all that spicy Cajun food caused some kind of state-wide frontal lobotomy?

Probably not. In fact, the problem is not particular to this state or even to the South in general. Sure, the latent racism that continues to frustrate attempts at U.S. racial harmony as a whole is a little less latent in Louisiana. And in some rural areas, it's a lot less latent.

But the basic problem is deeper--and perhaps more worrisome than Duke alone. The basic problem is the American version of the nationalistic turmoil dominating global politics since the Cold War's end. It's the American version of the internal conflicts plaguing the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Unlike the current struggles in those regions, however, the American version isn't about distinct ethnicities with different languages and cultures fighting for extrication from a contrived union. It's not even about Black versus white. The Duke phenomenon and the politics surrounding it go beyond limited debates about racism in Louisiana. In the U.S., the struggles are about getting elected.

DUKE REPRESENTS only the extreme end of a change in American politics that began with the initial ease of U.S.-Soviet tensions. Just as the independence-hungry nationalists of Eastern Europe were invigorated when they stopped worrying about a nuclear attack from the West, America's own nationalists got a lift, too.

Just as Serbian jealousy of the rich Slovenians perked up once both groups did not have the West as a common enemy, many Americans started questioning the domestic economic policies that held the Cold War coalition together.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was the mastermind of this coalition. In simple terms, it meant guns and butter. Johnson figured that most Americans wouldn't want to fight the expensive battles for democracy. So to keep them in the Democratic-dominated, internationalist camp, he gave them goodies: expanded welfare, unemployment benefits, Medicare. And to woo Blacks into the coalition, civil rights legislation and eventually affirmative action.

And now, the fallout. All those goodies cost lots of tax dollars--tax dollars that Americans want back. The Cold War which justified them has disappeared, and the coalition which supported them has disintegrated.

SO NOW the David Dukes will fill the political vacuum. Duke carries a banner bashing "tax-'n'-spend" liberals, "Big Government" and affirmative action. He calls on welfare recipients "to work for their welfare checks." He laments that "there is no room in the jails." And he wraps himself in the rhetoric of the working middle class.

None of this is outrageous in today's political discourse. (Obviously such ideas did not begin with the end of the Cold War, but for years Democrats felt that the only way to win popular support for that war was to beef up social programs. Now that rationale has disappeared.) Less extreme versions of Duke--those without the racism stigma, that is--are winning support all over.

On the Democratic side, Gov. Bill Clinton (D-Ark.) and the "mainstream" Democratic Leadership Council advocate almost identical reforms. Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder talks about a "fiscal conservatism" calling for similar spending cuts under the rubric of a "New Mainstream." And it seems that "George Herbert Walker Bush" doesn't stand firmly for "the hard-working men and women of America," as Sen. Thomas Richard Harkin (D-Iowa) reminded us last Sunday.

These politicians are latching on to the tendency in American politics to find blame. The same tendency exists overseas--it's the anger that causes other Yugoslavs to blame the Slovenians for their economic malaise. Here, it's the blame that was for 45 years hoisted on Communism: Fighting the Reds cost us precious resources, the argument goes.

And now blame will fall elsewhere. On the Japanese for Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.). On welfare recipients for the DLC. On Blacks for David Duke.

The point is that David Duke's success does not mean Americans--or even Louisianans--are sliding into racism. At most, they've found a temporary excuse to support a has-been racist with ideas that appeal to a broad group of young Americans and their leaders. Duke is a political lightweight, a gimmick politician who will move no closer to the governor's mansion than his seat in the state legislature--despite what the polls say.

So for now, pass the jambalaya and warm up the bread pudding. We've got bigger things to worry about than David Duke.