Blood and Politics (68 page)

The footnotes proved even more interesting, as a constellation of forces gathered on the Republican Party’s right flank. In local and state races from Texas to Idaho to California, the Reverend Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, the gun lobbies, and the Buchananite white wing
each provided critical extra support to winning candidates and state referenda.
⁴
The Christian Coalition laid claim to victory in its monthly tabloid. Of the fifty plus new Republican seats, it said, “religious conservatives” won thirty-nine. “This was not just a Republican landslide,” the coalition’s executive director declared. “It was a landslide for a certain type of Republican.”
⁵
The coalition believed that “type” was “pro-life” and antitax. According to this analysis, these new pro-life Republicans were replacing “liberal and moderate Republicans.” The split inside the Republican Party’s ranks was much noticed and discussed, even if not completely understood.
⁶

A
National Review
article argued that those claimed as “religious conservatives” during the election were actually revolting against social and political elites—not exactly the usual stuff of “conservatives” per se. According to this report, these “elites” were government insiders, in the media and at universities, and Republicans as well as Democrats.
⁷
In this analysis,
National Review
failed to mention that this same opposition by white middle-class voters to “elites” was often accompanied by a parallel antagonism to the aspirations of dark-skinned people they considered “below” them on the social ladder. In fact, this constituency had grown significantly since Pat Buchanan’s 1992 run at President Bush. Antiabortion politics and opposition to gay rights, à la the Christian Coalition, were not the only issues on its agenda. A segment proved to be protectionist on trade issues as well, isolationist in foreign policy, passionate about its supposed constitutional right to carry guns, and—most significant in 1994—opposed to immigration.

Washington State Senator Jack Metcalf’s ascension to a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives was one among several examples of this new confluence of forces. Metcalf had been in and out of the Washington legislature, winning his first house seat in 1960.
⁸
In 1980 he was reelected to the state senate, and he soon began a campaign against the Federal Reserve Bank.
⁹
As a state senator Metcalf represented a district in northwestern Washington where commercial and sport fishing was more significant than commodity grain production. His campaign against the Federal Reserve proved less important to his voting constituents than his opposition to Indian tribal governments. In the legislature he opposed treaties and Supreme Court decisions that reaffirmed the sovereignty (and fishing rights) of tribes in the region.
¹⁰
Among other venues, he accepted an invitation to speak at the Washington State Populist Party’s founding convention in 1984.
¹¹

Metcalf’s speech in 1984 to a small meeting at a Christian Identity
“library” near Velma, Oklahoma, provided a broader view of his actual political ideas. Although several people in the audience pushed him to talk more explicitly about Jewish banking combines, Metcalf was circumspect. “I’m going to give you a little lesson in practical politics. And I really think we in this movement should think about this,” he told the group. “If you talk about a conspiracy coming to Congress—and we all know it was a conspiracy—if you talk about a conspiracy the average person is going to turn that off. I talk about a Special Interest. Everybody knows what a Special Interest is.”
¹²

Note that Metcalf left open the nature of this alleged conspiracy. It could have been a Jewish banking conspiracy or some other, but the salient point is that he argued for separating his own private beliefs in a “conspiracy” from his public explanation of the Federal Reserve. If voters chose not to decode his rhetoric, his movement aficionados certainly understood, and Metcalf was the subject of several puff profiles in
The Spotlight
during the mid-1980s.

Metcalf’s age and tenure gave him a free ride with the press and the public. In 1992, he ran for the U.S. Congress. He won the Republican primary but lost the general election. When the Democratic incumbent retired in 1994, leaving the seat open, Metcalf took another turn. He ran as a fiscal conservative, a friend of the Christian right, and an opponent of “special privileges” for Native Americans. Despite his long tenure as a Republican ultraconservative, in this race Metcalf developed a following among environmentalists who also opposed Native Indian fishing rights. Suddenly Metcalf’s long association with ideological anti-Semites and racists disappeared as a concern.

He sailed through the Republican primary and general election. And he received little negative press coverage. In fact, while a Seattle daily newspaper reminded its readers that Metcalf had “forged connections . . . with a right-wing organization [Populist Party] blasted by critics as anti-Semitic,” the reporter also noted Metcalf’s claim that such “connections” no longer existed. Then the paper’s editors turned around and officially endorsed his candidacy.
¹³

For its part, during the campaign, Liberty Lobby and
The Spotlight
acted as if their onetime favorite state senator did not exist. After the votes were counted on November 8, and Metcalf was borne into federal office on the shoulders of angry white men, the weekly tabloid changed tack and finally remarked on his election.
The Spotlight
claimed that the newly minted congressman would “undoubtedly” listen to its counsel “when decisions are being made.”
¹⁴

Jack Metcalf’s transformation from a marginal anti–Federal Reserve state senator into a U.S. congressman was not particularly a sign of organizational
strength by groups such as Liberty Lobby. Rather, it was one more sign of increased radicalization in a sector of the white populace. That change was even more evident with the anti-immigrant voting bloc that emerged in the Republican mainstream that year.

Listed on California ballots as “Save Our State,” Proposition 187 mandated strict and punitive measures against undocumented or illegal immigrants. If it were enacted, entire families would be barred from receiving any public assistance, including routine medical care, and their children would be ineligible for public schooling. The initiative required teachers to screen their classrooms for students whose parents did not have papers. Similarly, medical personnel were to report any patients without documents. And the law promised to punish those caught in the production, distribution, or use of forged immigration papers with a stiff fine and prison. A federal court blocked the measure from immediate implementation, and ultimately its most stringent clauses were declared in violation of existing federal law.
¹⁵

Yet Proposition 187 passed overwhelmingly, with 59 percent of the vote. Not surprisingly, the measure garnered little support among Latino voters, and less than one in four supported it. Asian American and black voters were almost evenly divided; 47 percent of each group came out in favor. With these numbers the proposition would not have passed if white voters had not overwhelmingly voted yes. According to exit polls, 63 percent of white voters, who were already an outsize majority of the electorate, supported the measure, demonstrating that by any count, a racial fault line separated most California voters.
¹⁶

When considering the meaning of Proposition 187’s popular support,
The Almanac of American Politics
described Californians as “marvelously tolerant” voters who had taken a turn toward “strong principles.” They “just wanted the rules to be obeyed.” Accordingly, “The important lesson here is that 187 was not a vote against immigration, but against illegal immigration.”
¹⁷
Race and culture were not even mentioned in this commentary.

An alternative view, more common among liberals, decided: “Displaced workers, along with others who fear for their livelihood, are fertile ground in which to sow anti-immigrant sentiment, since angry and frustrated people often seek some target on which to blame their problems.” In this view, “immigrants make a convenient scapegoat and a very tangible target for people’s anger. [And] racial prejudice is often an encoded part of the message.”
¹⁸
While this analysis recognized a racist
component to the vote, it focused on economic fears as the most proximate cause of the proposition’s passage. These “frustrations” were supposedly then transferred over to immigrants. In this context, scapegoating meant that voters had misplaced blame onto immigrants for other complaints, real or imagined, that had sources elsewhere. Immigrants were accorded the status of virtual bystanders, while most actual grievances were considered based in personal economic distress. Thus a vote for 187 was supposedly not a complaint against brown-skinned Spanish speakers as such but actually a misplaced protest of economic forces felt by the voters. It was a vote against job competition.

After social scientists ran the data from this election through statistical programs, other analyses were proferred.
¹⁹
One study was unequivocal, finding no evidence of a relationship between individual-level economic circumstances and opinions toward immigration: “Income and Personal Financial Situation—have no impact on the vote choice.”
²⁰
Another study parsed this question further. It also concluded that “personal finances” were not “statistically significant” in explaining (white) voter behavior, but that concern over the state of California’s overall economic health “had an extremely strong, if not determining, effect.”
²¹
At the time the California economy was unquestionably in a slump, and the state’s revenues were problematic.

When scholars analyzed the data further, they found that what an individual voter thought was the solution to the state’s fiscal difficulties was influenced by a combination of factors. These included the voter’s ideological disposition—e.g., whether he or she regarded him or herself as liberal or conservative.
²²
Conservatives were more likely to oppose government expenditures in general, and Prop 187 would have cut social service costs, and they voted for it at slightly higher levels than did liberals. By this account, a gubernatorial contest that ran concurrently with the referendum on Prop 187 also affected the vote. The Democratic candidate opposed 187. The victorious Republican incumbent emphasized the difficulties facing the state and urged voters to support 187 as a matter of fiscal responsibility. In sum, solidly middle-class white votes without individual economic stresses passed the anti-immigrant proposal as part of a larger fiscally conservative agenda.

But scholars found additional factors, such as social contact and political competition, that also proved to be decisive. As noted earlier, whites had voted for David Duke at higher ratios when they lived in counties and metropolitan areas with proportionately higher numbers of black voters. For white Louisianans, race had been the number one factor determining their vote. Political power was regarded as a zero-sum
contest, seen in black-and-white terms. In California, however, the black-and-white divide was augmented by brown and yellow tones.

At an aggregate level, white voters living in counties with higher percentages of immigrants apparently voted yes on 187 in proportionately higher numbers.
²³
When the data were broken down further, however, it became apparent that white voters did not react uniformly to all the different immigrant populations. When the new Americans were of Asian origin, for example, whites were more likely to favor immigration and vote against 187.
²⁴
Similarly, when whites lived in communities where they had regular social contact with Latinos, they tended to vote against 187 in greater numbers. Conversely, when white voters lived in enclaves surrounded by high percentages of brown people but with little actual contact, they supported 187 in greater numbers. Regardless, the implication of all these analyses showed that no significant difference between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants mattered to white voters.

When all the votes were counted and all the numbers crunched, the voting patterns in California on 187 shared several characteristics with the Duke vote in Louisiana, although they were not identical. In both instances a majority of white voters acted as a distinct bloc. Once again, the concept of race showed itself at the center of the contest over the nature of American nationality. “What the vote for 187 tells us about whites is that they are now starting to vote for their own interests as a racial group, in opposition to the interests of other races,” Sam Francis wrote in a particularly trenchant analysis of the 1994 elections.
The Washington Times
columnist predicted the election’s effects would be felt far into the future. “If that trend continues, and there is every reason to believe it will, what it logically implies is the emergence of an overtly racial politics . . .” he concluded.
²⁵
Although others expressed the same sentiments less forcefully, Francis’s analysis anchored the views at his end of the political spectrum. Unfortunately for the Populist Party, these developments
within
Republican Party ranks virtually doomed any third party electioneering
outside
it.

The Populist Party could claim a number of accomplishments in its ten years of existence. During its first moments it had drawn together individuals from across organizations into one association, a necessary precondition for any independent electoral action. By casting itself as “populist,” it had made a claim, however bogus, on a venerable American tradition. The party had served as a springboard for David Duke’s
election (as a Republican) to the Louisiana House of Representatives. David Duke’s success had in turn pointed to the path subsequently taken by Pat Buchanan. The party had also given Bo Gritz a platform of potential significance.