David Duke and Donald Trump and the long ties of history
What happened in Charlottesville didn't start with Donald Trump.
It didn't start with David Duke either, but there's a long, durable thread from Duke to Trump that's worth thinking about.
Despite his dubious Twitter profile claim to be "one of 100 most read and quoted people in the world," Duke may be an obscure character to many people these days.
But his dying fame has flickered back to life in the Trump era, and there he was on Saturday in Virginia, in the thick of the white nationalist protesters, talking to the media.
"This represents a turning point for the people of this country," he said, shortly before the protest turned violent. "We are determined to take our country back, we're going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump, and that's what we believed in, that's why we voted for Donald Trump."
Duke is 67, older than his surgically rejuvenated face and his beefcake Twitter photo suggest, no longer the jaunty young Hitler wannabe I first met at a Mardi Gras parade in 1989.
On that long-ago Tuesday, Duke was in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, campaigning for a seat in the state legislature. Metairie was almost entirely white, filled with people who fled New Orleans when the schools were integrated. I was covering the South for the Tribune.
As Duke marched — past the flirty women, the awestruck boys and the men who clapped him on the back — he tossed doubloons inscribed with his campaign message: "Equal Rights for All. Special Privilege for None. The Courage to Be Different."
His campaign had roiled Louisiana, where the economy was depressed and white people's fear of black people ran deep, but he was barely known in Chicago or much anywhere else. The story I wrote for the Tribune, the first time he rated more than a mention, ran on page 23.
A few days later, Duke won the race. That story — about the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who had been a Republican for only a few weeks — ran on page one.
Reading those old stories the other day, after a white nationalist drove a car into a crowd of Charlottesville counterprotesters and killed a woman, I was struck by how similar Duke's surprise rise was to Trump's a generation later.
In 1989, there was no Breitbart News, no Fox News Channel, no Drudge Report. The word "alt-right" hadn't been invented. And yet the old stories on Duke sound thoroughly contemporary.
"We've finally found somebody who's brave enough to say what everybody thinks but won't say," one Duke supporter said at the Mardi Gras parade.
Sound familiar?
"What you have here," a New Orleans political scientist told me, predicting a trend that would extend well beyond the South, "is the roots of fascism as we know it — the middle class and lower middle class besieged by difficult economic conditions, people who are finding their skills made obsolete by computers, people having trouble paying for college for their *******."
Sound familiar?
Some people fretted that Duke's election would be fodder for "Saturday Night Live."
A lot has changed since then, and Trump and Duke aren't the same guy. Trump is rich and powerful. Duke is neither. Trump tries to downplay his debt to white nationalists. Duke has proudly built his life on being one.
And yet the two men, like the eras that enabled them, have a lot in common.
Both were Republican interlopers, both repudiated by the party's mainstream, a rejection that turned into an advantage. Both exhibit a grandiosity they seem to confuse with greatness. Both have built their power by exploiting racial fears and economic insecurity.
A lot has changed since then, and Trump and Duke aren't the same guy. Trump is rich and powerful. Duke is neither. Trump tries to downplay his debt to white nationalists. Duke has proudly built his life on being one.
And yet the two men, like the eras that enabled them, have a lot in common.
Both were Republican interlopers, both repudiated by the party's mainstream, a rejection that turned into an advantage. Both exhibit a grandiosity they seem to confuse with greatness. Both have built their power by exploiting racial fears and economic insecurity.
Duke, who long ago traded his white KKK robe for a stylish dark suit, was a pioneer in the modern art of whitewashing white nationalism. Trump benefits from the generation he helped cultivate.
After that Mardi Gras parade, I drove with Duke to his white frame home — he was an erratic driver — and sat in his cluttered basement, next to books on Adolf Hitler and the Klan, while he explained his theories on race and the persecution of white people.
He said he didn't think black people were inferior. They just have their own kind of music. They're better than whites at many sports. They don't do as well on IQ tests.
A week later, he was elected.
Duke's political career quickly fizzled, but he kept his brand going long enough to help elect the current president. Even if he takes more credit for that than he deserves, and though Trump tries to distance himself, the lineage is real.
On Tuesday, after Trump stirred another storm by saying agitators on the left were also responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, Duke's approving tweet made the rounds of the mainstream media:
"Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville."
Trump again blames 'both sides' for Charlottesville violence
Aug 15, 2017 | 8:45 PM
Racial fear and bigotry are baked into our history, transferred through generations by people who cling to a misbegotten view of honesty, courage and truth.
But the resistance to those views is strong and loud, filled with people, young and old, of various skin colors, who know better. Many of them were in Charlottesville too, and because of them we can believe that what happened there Saturday wasn't a move backward.
It was a display of what it looks like to move forward, angrily and hopefully, lugging the past with us.
mschmich@chicagotribune.com
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
