2023.10.12 The speaker of the house that is supposed to represent you
I was going to post this on Tuesday. But given that Representative Steve “David Duke” Scalise has withdrawn his bid for speaker, it’s lost some of its relevance. But what motivated me to write this yesterday before Scalise dropped his bid still applies today. So here you go. I’m off to Southern Utah to glimpse the eclipse. But I’ll leave you with my question of the day. With 222 Republican men and women in the house, most of whom are there to do their job for the American people, why does the party keep flirting with those who themselves flirt with racism…the thing that tears this country apart?
And with that, Penelope and I are out of here! Off to the eclipse.
Penelope
As the house struggles with their self-imposed lack of leadership and forced inability to take care of business since giving the boot to Kevin McCarthy, LA representative Steve Scalise, among others, has thrown his hat into the ring. The Republican party just cannot seem to just get away from their pandering to White supremacy, White fear, and White resentment. And to be clear, I’m not making this stuff up out of some desire to bring down the GOP. I just want a better country and I believe strongly that we need a center right Republican party to help accomplish that.
But the current GOP is a long way from the center right where they could actually do the country some good. I don’t know much about Scalise. But what I do know is that back in 2008 when he was first beginning his legislative career, he described himself as “David Duke, but without the baggage.” I have no idea what that means. Duke was pretty one dimensional. A trim, handsome, charismatic Louisiana state representative who ran for and almost won the governorship and was the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan from 1974 to 1980. So I don’t know what Scalise is talking about when he says, “Without the baggage”. Duke, the country’s best-known Klansman, doesn’t really have much without his KKK baggage.
But combine this with the Republican party’s long history of using race to gin up fear and votes. In 1980 , Republican Party hero Ronald Reagan campaigned from the Philadelphia Mississippi state fair. Maybe he chose that spot because of the extraordinary beauty or the perfect acoustics. Or maybe he chose that spot pandering for the White vote. Maybe it was a coincidence that Philadelphia Mississippi – think of the movie Mississippi Burning – was the exact spot where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner - three young civil rights workers registering Black voters were killed by the local sheriff’s deputy and his cohorts and then buried in an earthen dam that was under construction. That was Reagan code talking. White southerners got the message and understood where Reagan stood on “The Negro problem.”
Damn Burial Site
Spiro Agnew was governor of Maryland when Doctor Martin Luther King was murdered in 1968. Baltimore exploded into a race riot. Agnew flew in under the guise of quelling the riot. He invited all of the Black leadership into a church to discuss ways to move forward. What he actually did was place the entire blame at the feet of the Black pastors and other Black leaders. Agnew’s “This is all your fault” approach received national press and came to the attention of presidential candidate Richard Nixon. Nixon liked what he saw – a politician who successfully used “The Negro problem” to gain national prominence - and recruited him as his running mate.
Agnew served from 1969 until 1973 when he was forced to resign after being indicted for federal tax evasion. Years later Agnew would brag. “I am often accused of dividing the American people. That is an accusation to which I not only plead guilty, but of which I am proud.”
Dividing the American people. Sound familiar?
In 2016 Harper’s Magazine published a 1994 interview with John Ehrlichman, key advisor to President Richard Nixon: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House had two enemies; the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or to be Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Lying. Sound familiar?
Lee Atwater, senior political consultant to Reagan and later to George H.W. Bush. In 1981 he coached Reagan on how to use race to gin up votes: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract….‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger’.”
To this day Republicans will deny what was known as their “Southern Strategy”. But in 2005 Ken Mehlman, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, went before the N.A.A.C.P. and apologized for the Republican Party's decades-long Southern strategy. "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."
“The Southern strategy meant much more than some members of the G.O.P. simply giving up on African American votes. Put into play by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the mid- to late 1960's, it fed like a starving beast on the resentment of whites who were scornful of Blacks and furious about the demise of segregation and other civil rights advances. The idea was to snatch the White racist vote away from the Democratic Party, which had committed such unpardonable sins as enacting the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and enforcing desegregation statutes.” [1]
This week saw the passing of Kevin Phillips, the architect of the Republican “Southern Strategy.” “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.” That insight was the brainchild of Kevin Phillips, the longtime political analyst who passed away this week at 82 years old.
greach out to disaffected White southerners. For Nixon, that was “law and order,” something Ronald Reagan used to great effect along with stories about “welfare queens.” George H.W. Bush’s campaign ran the “Willie Horton” ad, which played up fears of Black criminality.
Trump picked up this rhetoric. He launched his campaign on the ideas of Mexican migrant and Muslim criminality — that all these minority populations needed to be under much stricter surveillance.”[2]
The racist-baiting Southern Strategy was responsible for Republicans winning every single state in the South in the 1972, 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. The strategy that Phillips helped popularize worked just as well with some northern White voters as it did with southern White voters. It helped solidify the Republican Party’s base as almost exclusively White even as the nation has grown more diverse.”[3]
I’m not saying the Republican Party is bad. I am saying that they’ve exploited race and led the country towards racial hatred for a very long time…a path that has gotten us to the hate and polarization that we now experience every day.
I’m not saying that Steve Scalise is a secret Grand Wizard or even a racist. I don’t know. But I know this and so do you: Race has been used to damage our country and damage our democracy. Let it end here. Call your Congressperson. Urge them to not vote for men or women who foment hate and discontent, regardless of their “true values.” I don’t know what Scalise’s true values are. But claiming to be a David Duke is not a good sign.
I don’t know what Jim Jordan’s true values are either, the other guy running for speaker. But being a Trump and MAGA sycophant is also not a good sign. We can all probably agree that we want a better country, better politicians, better leadership. Find your Congressperson. Let your Congressperson know.
And pass these posts along. It’s a painless way to fight America’s race thing.
[1] The NYT July 18, 2005. An Empty Apology
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/12/southern-strategy-kevin-phillips-republican-party-trump/
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/12/southern-strategy-kevin-phillips-republican-party-trump/