Much Too Close for Comfort : When Duke lost by only a little, the nation lost a lot

The best thing that can be said about Louisiana’s primary is that David Duke lost. At least Americans have been spared the disgrace of seating a neo-Nazi, racist anti-Semite in the U.S. Senate.

What they have not been spared is the soul-searching that ought to flow from the realization of how near a thing this was. Pre-election polls put the former Ku Klux Klan leader’s support at about 25%. In the end, he received 44% of the vote. A clear majority--perhaps as many as 6 in 10--of all the white voters who cast a ballot voted for Duke. As a result, his opponent, incumbent Democrat J. Bennett Johnston, escaped being forced into a runoff by just four percentage points.

The worrisome thinness of that safety margin can be explained, in part, as another manifestation of the anti-incumbent sentiment that last month swept social conservative John R. Silber to the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Massachusetts. But that analysis is insufficient when one recalls that Duke trails behind him the political equivalent of an entire baggage train.

Nor is it enough to ascribe the breadth of Duke’s support solely to the anger of working- class whites struggling to make a living in a state with a depressed economy. The district that already has elected Duke to the Louisiana Legislature is in a relatively affluent New Orleans suburb. There may be a lot of red necks there, but there are few blue collars.

What Duke has managed to do is to rub populist politics against the rougher edges of the conservative social agenda to grind a lens through which he focuses America’s darkest racial and ethnic hostilities. American populism--with its assumption of secretive, controlling interests--always has had a paranoid streak. That is why most of its leading adherents have ended as racist xenophobes ranting from the political margins. Populists in search of a wider constituency--George Wallace, say--always have begun by renouncing bigotry. Duke is the first of his type to attempt to enter the mainstream with his bigotry intact.

Californians might think this sort of poison remote. Think again. Imagine if, at the end of a long and degrading recession, a demagogue arose to claim that it all would have been different if government hadn’t sold the state to the immigrants. It’s a mistake to believe that it can never happen here.