Shaking hands with Duke's legacy of intolerance

By Chris Mooney and David Mascari

When we were in grade school in New Orleans, our class took a field trip to the Louisiana Legislature in Baton Rouge. We were all waiting outside the House chamber with our chaperones when a charismatic, young, blond representative emerged. As students and the children of constituents, we dutifully queued up to shake his hand. This dashing representative was the ex-Ku Klux Klansman, David Duke.

That was 1989. Ten years later, after failed gubernatorial and U.S. Senate bids, Duke has declared his intent to replace Republican Bob Livingston as the congressman from our district. While fundraising in Washington recently, Duke addressed members of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a reincarnation of the White Citizens Councils that fought to preserve segregation in the South during the civil rights movement. Duke sold copies of his autobiography, My Awakening, which argues the scientific validity of racism, and promised that, if elected, he would crusade for the rights of white Christians. He concluded by remarking, "If we lose European-Americans, we lose America." In Duke's chilling rhetoric, America should be a homogenous religious and racial group, a tribe of Christian Aryans. Accordingly, preserving our nation means preserving the white race, through stringent immigration laws and the prevention of mixed marriages. Writes H. Millard, a columnist whose work appears on the CCC Web site: "Genocide via the bedroom chamber is as long-lasting as genocide via war."

Luckily for non-white Americans, Duke's campaign has not succeeded. The white supremacist label is, rightly, the kiss of death in politics. Duke will not win, but his candidacy has exposed a continuum in the extreme right-wing ideology, connecting racists with senators, members of Congress, and the religious right.

Last month, House Judiciary Committee member Bob Barr (R-Ga.) and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) were linked to the CCC by The Washington Post. When the Post story hit, both Republicans scrambled to distance themselves from the CCC. Yet Barr clearly holds an us-and-them outlook on America. When Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz testified before the House Judiciary Committee, Barr contrasted Dershowitz, two other law professors with Jewish-sounding names, and a black former judge, with his own idea of the "real America." Might Barr's "real America" resemble that of the CCC?

While conservative leaders run for cover, they nonetheless pay regular homage to another, equally intolerant group: "Christian supremacists." The tribalism of the Council of Conservative Citizens does not greatly exceed that of the Christian Coalition. For example, in the CCC's Citizens Informer, columnist Robert Patterson waxes, "Western civilization with all its might and glory would never have achieved its greatness without the directing hand of God and the creative genius of the white race." Compare this to an excerpt from Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson's 1991 book, The New World Order: "There will never be world peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place at the top of the world."

Indeed, for every terrifying sound bite from the white supremacists, one can be found from the religious right. Consider the words of Randall Terry, founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette of Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1993: "Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism." Leaders like Robertson and Terry crusade on behalf of a tribal identity just as the CCC does, except that they define the tribe to include "God's people" without reference to the "white race." Still, they want to make America just as narrow as they are.

Another similarity is that both groups suffer from a tendency to use historical revisionism to support their views. White supremacists deny aspects of the Holocaust; the religious right claims the U.S. is "a Christian nation," though the country was founded upon Enlightenment philosophy, which stressed freedom of conscience and toleration.

Tolerance for the views of others, according to "Christian nation" theorists, is not the virtue that most citizens believe it is. Another gem concerning this view comes from Terry, this time in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel: "I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good." Terry seems unable to limit his revisionism to history; instead he sets to work revising Jesus' teaching that we should love our neighbors, not hate them.

The "real America" is not a closed-minded tribe that elevates one group and excludes all others, but an open society, built on toleration of all points of view (even those of the religious right) and the contributions of all immigrant groups, from the Pilgrims to the present. The religious right could learn a thing or two about toleration, perhaps from children who shared a handshake—the symbol of civility—with the likes of David Duke.

Chris Mooney is a senior in Silliman. David Mascarni is a senior in Timothy Dwight.

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