Ex-Klansman Duke: How’d He Get So Far? : Louisiana’s neo-Nazi candidate for the U.S. Senate

It is a measure of the Founders’ genius that the system they bequeathed us continues to create opportunities for man’s better impulses, while restraining his worst. It is a measure of their realism that they never imagined it could maintain this balance on its own.

We fall back on such first principles when contemplating neo-Nazi David Duke’s campaign for one of Louisiana’s U.S. Senate seats. After all, like hanging, the brimstone whiff of genuine evil concentrates the mind wonderfully. And beneath this candidate’s blow-dried cant lurks as squalid a man and mind as our system has thrown up in many decades.

For most of his 40 years, Duke has migrated through the shadows of America’s lunatic fringe--from the science-fiction racism of the tiny American Nazi movement to the bare-knuckled white supremacy of the Ku Klux Klan and, finally, on to anti-Semitic populism in Louisiana’s state Legislature.

Saturday, to the horror of regular Republicans everywhere, he will be one of two GOP candidates vying with incumbent Democrat J. Bennett Johnston in an open primary for his U.S. Senate seat. Polls put Johnston’s support at about 42%; Duke’s at slightly more than 25%. If neither wins a majority, they will go to a run-off in November.

It is a chilling prospect, in large part because Duke seems so aberrant. What is remarkable about the South today is how quickly and completely it has thrown off the vocal white supremacy that was its political orthodoxy for nearly a century. But Louisiana is exceptional in several respects: It has an unmatched history of corrupt, ineffectual, demagogic state politics; its economy is the worst in the nation with no relief in sight. These are the classic antecedents of political extremism. However, for the moment at least, Duke suffers the American radical’s classic disability: The source of his support is its limit. If he disavows his views, he will lose his base; if he does not disavow them, he cannot gain new adherents.

Still, the ease with which he has melded his own bigotry with the language of the respectable conservative social agenda should give this nation pause.

Something has become debased in our national dialogue, and people of goodwill must bear the responsibility of self-scrutiny.

The GOP’s Southern strategy has too often made the Party of Lincoln the party of racial anxiety. Duke is running as a Republican for a reason. Ronald Reagan and George Bush have forthrightly denounced him. But it can be argued that the former’s mythic welfare queen and the latter’s wretched Willie Horton are mother and father to the black caricatures Duke dangles in his Punch-and-Judy show.

In Duke’s hands, demands for a “color-blind society” are cover for something else. Similar hands employed “unbiased” literacy tests, constitutional comprehension requirements and poll taxes to forestall implementation of the 15th Amendment for generations.

Moreover, the studied and continuing antipathy of too many political leaders to affirmative action (“quotas”), school integration (“forced busing”) and equal opportunity (“racial set-asides”) has provided a vocabulary of civility that, on Duke’s lips, is a code for hatred.