01 March 2016

Put up your Duke

David Duke is one of those gifts that keep on giving. As this is a free country, Duke has as much right as anyone to make public statements of support for political candidates. Apparently he's too dumb to realize -- unless you want to use your imagination and think of him as an agent-provocateur -- that he can only make trouble for anyone he supports publicly. Add to that a confused Donald Trump, who had forgotten that he'd denounced Duke many years earlier,  and now we have rabid right-wing Republicans playing a race card against the GOP front runner. Trump, they say, has a moral obligation to disavow Duke's endorsement, and Trump has done so, though apparently not to the satisfaction of his rivals and some leaders of the party, who fail to see how this, like so many attacks on Trump, can backfire on them. Usually when Duke endorses a Republican, the Republican response to inevitable criticism is to remind people that until very recently a former Klansman was a very powerful Democratic U.S. Senator. This time Republicans are doing the criticizing,  while Democrats are waiting their turn, but Trump's supporters, who feel no need to apologize for anything this year, may find his Republican critics as hypocritical as they claim Democrats are.

Isn't any Republican -- especially any southern Republican -- hypocritical to demand that Trump disavow the endorsement of a white supremacist? Does anyone doubt that Sen. Cruz and Sen. Rubio received endorsements from tens or hundreds of thousands of white supremacists -- presumably holding their noses while endorsing Cuban-Americans, however redeemed by their Castrophobia -- during their senatorial campaigns? Yet neither man volunteered to have those endorsements stricken from his vote total. That's understandable at a practical level, since we can't know exactly which voters were white supremacists, but neither man can really believe that he received no white-supremacist votes. Of course, Republicans like to say that there aren't any white supremacists out there except for the pathological few who can't help advertising their bias with white sheets or brown shirts. If you're guileless enough to avow yourself a white supremacist, you can be disavowed, but if you keep it on the down low -- on the radio call-in line or on the Internet or at the bar, for instance, or nowhere but at the polls -- it's all good. Someone like Duke proves useful when right-wingers want to smear their rivals on the right, but Republicans will need to be careful about that tactic this year. Consistency may demand that if Trump can't have a white-supremacist endorsement, his rivals should refuse white-supremacist votes in advance. Normally that would be a no-risk tactic on the "no one's a white supremacist" principle, but this time people might actually take offense. This year the white supremacists probably are siding with Trump, whatever his own actual feelings on race, but their endorsing him for their stupid reasons shouldn't stop anyone else from supporting Trump for their own unrelated stupid reasons.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

His best response would be to ask why the GOP itself has NOT rid itself of members who are also members of known hate groups, such as the KKK or the various neo-Nazis running around.

Samuel Wilson said...

It's a good rhetorical question, but as you know it's very hard for any party in this country to purge itself at the rank and file level, given that the parties have no say in whether you can register with them or not. Perhaps if the GOP lived up to its principles and privatized itself it could be more scrupulous about its membership.

Anonymous said...

I find it amazing that the two parties can control who gets to run for president, but they can't control who they allow to retain membership. Seems a bit funny and not in a "ha ha" way. I also think it is complete bullshit. Considering that, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, every elected official at the federal level is a member of those two parties, so it seems a no brainer that they could easily pass laws or rules with the party allowing them to eject individuals from party membership. The real question, in that case, is "why don't they?" The answer, of course, being the same as why they don't pass laws requiring minimum sentencing guidelines for politicians found guilty of corruption and a loss of all benefits, retirement packages, etc. as a deterrent to corruption.

Samuel Wilson said...

The whole registration system is odd. Most people who are not elected officials or employees of a party presumably join solely in order to vote in the party primary. Because the government conducts the party primaries, it has a registration system that allows people to become members of parties with no questions asked. Republicans right now probably wish they had a system to filter out ideologically unreliable members (i.e. Trump voters), but as long as they want the government to pay for their primaries and caucuses they apparently have to accept unconditional registration. Since the parties are the government, as you note, there has to be some benefit to them in the current registration system, though from the way so many are moaning about Trump that benefit is hard to see right now. In the 21st century it should be possible for all parties to privatize, taking the government entirely out of the candidate-selection process, and have an actual screening process for people who want to choose each party's candidates, followed by a national online primary. Why not?

Anonymous said...

But since both parties control the government...the fact that no one has ever questioned it on Constitutional grounds leads me to believe they don't want control. That way they get the benefits without the responsibility. Perhaps a benevolently disinterested third party should take the matter in hand "for the benefit of both parties".