The New Yorker Radio Hour - In the Midterms, White Supremacy Is Running for Office

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

While the big story going into the midterm elections has been the possibility of a “blue wave”—an upsurge of Democratic progressives, including a high number of women and minority candidates—the divisive political climate has also given us the very opposite: candidates on the far right openly espousing white-supremacist and white-nationalist views.  Andrew Marantz, who covers political extremism, among other topics, says that these views have always been on the fringes of political life, but, in the era of Trump, they have moved closer to the center.  Candidates who used to “dog-whistle”—use coded language to appeal to racist voters—now openly make white-supremacist statements that Republican Party leadership won’t disavow. Marantz talks with David Remnick about the campaigns of Steve King, the incumbent in Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District; Corey Stewart, a pro-Confederate running for a Senate seat in Virginia; and Arthur Jones, a neo-Nazi running in Illinois’s Third Congressional District.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The big story going into the midterm elections has been the possibility of a blue wave, a democratic upsurge that's notable for the number of women running and for progressive candidates like Beto O'Rourke in Texas and Alexandria O'Casio-Cortez in New York. But another story in this election is the very opposite. The candidates who are running as extremists on the right, openly white supremacist candidates, even neo-Nazis. Andrew Moranz has been covering the movement known as the alt-right, and he's watching how it influences mainstream politics. Andrew, you've been reporting on the fringes of right-wing nationalism

and all the associated movements, people like Mike Sernovich, for example, who was involved in PizzaGate. And you've also written about the Nazi website, Daily Stormer, which is built on Dershtermer of Nazi lore. We've seen a lot of this on the internet, but it's been many years since really far-right white supremacists have been running for office in the United States of America. When did this all start? What are the origins of it? It's never really not existed. But in terms of the most recent resurgence of it, you know, Trump has a lot to do with it.

I mean, there's always been dog whistle politics, right? And we should definitely note that Democrats have engaged in it, Republicans have engaged in it. But it's not even really a dog whistle anymore. It's kind of just a whistle. You know, there's there's more and more openness with people just espousing white nationalist views. And that has a lot to do with Trump. Well, people would point out that when Ronald Reagan was first campaigning for president, he campaigned and gave a big speech in Neshoba County, Mississippi. And he talked there about nothing less than state's rights. And this was at the very least a dog whistle to the far right. Is that something different? And why? Because he vociferously denied it. When people asked him, he said, state's rights doesn't mean that. When people ask Nixon, what do you mean by silent majority? What do you mean by law and order? He vociferously denied it. They're not really denying it anymore. So people like, you know, Steve King, who is a congressman in Iowa, he's not flirting with the line. He doesn't believe that these lines should exist. So what is Steve King's history? What has he said and done? So Steve King is a congressman from Iowa. He's represented the western part of Iowa for 15 years at this point. He's running for re-election in November. And he's very clearly into, you know, dog whistle racism. He talks a lot about Western civilization and European heritage and that kind of stuff. But he always in the past would leave some plausible deniability. And then just in the last couple of years, partly because of Trump and partly because he has a Twitter account, he has been saying things.

like demographics are our destiny. And then he says, we can't restore our civilization with someone else's babies. There's no way to read that that doesn't take our civilization to mean white people. There's no plausible reading of it other than a white nationalist reading. Does he deny it? Well, not really. I mean, he kind of gets called to the mat and says, no, I don't regret saying that. He doesn't take down tweets. He doesn't delete them. He kind of says, oh, this, you know, PC culture, everybody gets called racist all the time. You know, you guys are always pearl clutching. and stuff. But he never walks back the actual substance, nor does he ever, like, explain how that could mean anything other than white nationalism. Well, let's talk about what we're talking about. Let's listen to one of Steve King's statements about diversity. This is from an interview that he gave to an Iowa radio program.

And when you start accentuating the differences, then you end up with people that are at each other's throat. And he's adding up Hispanics and blacks, and he predicts will be in greater number than whites than America. I will predict the Hispanics and the blacks will be fighting each other before that happens. What do you make of that? I mean, there are much more extreme examples of his rhetoric than that. But basically, that's kind of a turning the tables of saying by talking about, you know, the black voting block or the Hispanic voting block, anyone doing that is therefore the racist. Paul Ryan, you know, the Speaker of the House, was asked, where do you stand on this? And he waits three days or something.

And then I forget how long he waited. But Paul Ryan puts out this very carefully worded statement that doesn't mention Steve King's name at all that just says we abhorred racism. So in other words, it's not like he's such an outlier that the rest of the GOP can very comfortably wash their hands of him and say he's not our guy. He is their guy. They're not pulling funding from him, at least not in a way that they're making public. So what does it suggest about American politics that the most powerful leader in one of the houses of Congress, Paul Ryan, feel they cannot afford to reject somebody like King? Yeah, it's terrifying. It's, yeah, it means that they've read the tea leaves and they know that this is too big a part of their support base to give up on.

You've spent the last year marinating in the juices of what one could call cyber proto-fascism. Yeah, fortunately. You're talking to a lot of people who are the very most active players and voices in what you're calling proto-fascism. And what does it tell you about American political life? Look, I think it's not that everything has utterly transformed and, you know, we weren't, we weren't close to the brink and now we are. I mean, we're closer now for sure. But what is the brink? Well, it can't happen here.

You know, that notion that, you know, yeah, fascism could have happened in Europe, but it can't happen here. I think we're now all starting to see that there's no law of nature that says that. That walls off the United States. Yeah, that we are an extremely. extremely flawed society with an extremely dicey racial history that perhaps uniquely so among the countries we're talking about. Democracy is a very delicate, tricky thing, right? If Steve King is now going out there and just essentially saying to the people of Iowa, hello, I'm a white nationalist, do you want to vote for me or do you want to vote for the other guy? There's no guarantee that they want to vote for the other guy. Well, let's talk about the other guy. His opponent, King's opponent is a Democrat, a former baseball player named J.D. Shulton. Does Shulton have a chance?

And what are the dynamics of that race look like? He's much taller. So that's generally a good thing in politics. He's 6'6. And he's driving around the district in a Winnebago and, you know, shaking everyone's hand and being very fulksy. He's out fundraising King. He's still down in the polls. I mean, incumbency is a very powerful thing in House elections.

And King has been there for six terms. What's the district like? It's deep, deep red, as they say. And King, you know, it's, you might not know this from looking at his Twitter feed, but racism is not his own. thing. You know, he also, you know, wants ethanol subsidies and he also, you know, says he wants to support farmers. Now, he's been in Congress for 15 years. He has sponsored exactly one bill that passed, which was to rename a post office in Iowa. So he's not the most effective legislator. Now that we live in the age of Trump, are there new politicians on the scene who seem to be

entering the stage or coming onto the stage in a way they might not have before? Yeah, I think someone like Corey Stewart. He was someone who the Virginia the GOP just thought would fizzle out. And he's running for Senate. He's running for Senate against Tim Cain, who will probably win. But, you know... What's his level of support? He's doing better than one would expect.

I mean, he won the primary, and his whole national image is based on standing up for these Confederate monuments. We can't tear them down. There are our heritage. He was born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota. Not the heart of the Confederacy. Not the heart of the Confederacy. And Steve King, by the way, used to have a Confederate. Confederate flag on his desk in the Capitol building, which, by the way, Iowa sent a lot of soldiers

to die to fight against the Confederacy. So it's like, gee, I wonder what that flag means to you. In New Jersey, in the state of New Jersey, a New Jersey congressman, Seth Grossman, was dropped by the Republican Party after saying that diversity is crap. Is that an outlier incident? Is that a very rare instance of the party standing up to some of its extremist voices? Yeah, I think he, I think the Seth Grossman thing was a bit of an anomaly. I mean, you have even more anomalous cases than that. You have a guy named Arthur Jones in Illinois who is literally a Nazi who stands in front of Nazi flags and give speeches. And he won a GOP primary in a district where it's heavily democratic and so they don't bother to run a lot of Republicans in these races. So he's not going to win the

general election. It's very scary that a literal Nazi is running for office in Illinois and that this guy, Seth Grossman, is running for office in New Jersey. But those are outliers. I mean, so I don't want to paint the picture that, you know, this is happening everywhere all the time. But again, the fact that someone like Seth Grossman in New Jersey, in New Jersey, would have, you know, concealed his feelings a little bit more of just a few years ago, just a couple of years ago. But now he's unleashed. He's unleashed. He's linking to this blog post, you know, calling black people inherently dangerous. And, you know, he's just posting this on his website. And then he says, says, oh, well, I'm Jewish, so I can't be racist.

So, um... False. Yeah, I can falsify that one with personal. Andrew, a century ago, there was a second flowering of the Ku Klux Klan. And there were Ku Klux Klan members in Congress, Kuklux Klan members in every business organization and Chamber of Commerce in the country. Um, it was like a social movement in some ways. Kukluxlan barbecues and block parties and all the rest.

It was somewhat different from the, the, um, first flowering of the Ku Klux Kulks Klan but it was the clan nevertheless. Is that kind of mass acceptance of white supremacy, organized white supremacy, a possibility? Yes, I think it is. I mean, this is, I do think it ebbs and flows, and I think it's important to note that when the year anniversary march happened,

there was no one there. I mean, literally like 15 people there. The year anniversary march of Charlott. Of Charlott'sville, right. So Jason Kessler tried to go to D.C. and do it again, and no one went with him. Things do change. I do think it is possible for this kind of broad-based, you know, racism as a fun social club thing to take off again.

You know, the proud boys are a social club. The proud boys are this group of, you know, they call themselves Western chauvinists. They deny being a white pride organization, but they're a quote unquote Western pride organization. And the proud boys just this past weekend were in the street. streets of Manhattan beating people up. And they brand themselves as a social club, but they're also a violent street gang. So that is happening. What's the importance of the midterm elections in this story, in this ongoing, very perilous story about American political feeling, but also the fragility of American political institutions? I think it'll be a test of a lot of things.

in this conversation we often want to say Donald Trump is a black swan he's a once in a lifetime candidate he can say things that no one else can say all of which may in a sense be true but there's another sense in which he he blows the door off the hinges and allows other things to creep in

but also on the larger you know sort of 30,000 foot view these deep strains of playing to xenophobia playing to fears that stuff doesn't go away so you know, I think we are at a high ebb of how open it is right now. Because it's not that hard to hide this stuff.

The dog whistle is not that hard to get across. The fact that they don't even feel the need to conceal it even that vaguely. What do you fear most? Well, I fear that, you know, there will be one or two people in every state who start winning congressional races who say, yeah, why can't we just go back to being a white country? You know, why is that so wrong? And to fight that is to be PC. Right. You know, part of what what Trump is able to do is just by lying so aggressively and so full-throatedly and so shamelessly about stupid things.

He's able to put people in this mindset where, oh, racism is a meaningless word. You know, I'm seeing the racism right in front of me and yet I'm not registering it because it's my team, right? Because I have an R next to my name and they have an R next to their name. I mean, I strongly believe that there are a lot of people in Iowa who, if you ask them, to think clearly about this, they would not stand for it. But because politics has turned into a team sport, they don't want to think, oh, can I really belong to this coalition that includes this guy that I actually find odious?

They don't want to go there. Andrew Morantz writes about many things for the New Yorker, including the far right and white supremacist movement. Thank you very much. Thanks. I'm David Remnick, and next week, we're going to follow a gas pipeline that's redrawing the political map in parts of the state of Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania, and we'll peek over Daniel Radcliffe's shoulder as he gets a lesson in fact-checking to prepare for his new role on Broadway. That's next week on The New Yorker Radio Hour. I hope you'll join us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Rianin & Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, and Stephen Valentino,

with help from Rhonda Sherman, David Ohana, Bradley G., Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.