COLUMN LEFT : A Poison Presented As a Cure : Democrats and Republicans alike betray the working class and use race as a red herring.

In the end David Duke went down, and newspapers headlined his “landslide defeat” by Edwin Edwards. But there will be plenty of David Dukes running in electoral contests across the United States over the next few years. Unencumbered by D.D.’s Klansman robe and copy of “Mein Kampf,” they will probably fare even better than he in capturing the attention and loyalty of poor and middle-income whites mad at everything and everyone, and ready to blame their problems on black people.

As it was, Duke got 55% of the white vote in the Louisiana runoff for governor and was sunk partly because the business people in the state, though they loathed Edwards, feared that with Duke as governor the state would suffer damaging boycotts by conventioneers and tourists.

Duke had adroitly tapped the vein that any populist will seek, the fury of the little guy. The little (white) guy has done increasingly badly over the past 20 years, just as any little (black) guy has. The genius of American politics has been to set the underdogs at each other’s throats rather than have them jointly turning on the overdogs; to persuade little white guys, for example, that their real income and living standards, relentlessly abasing since 1973, have been depleted because undeserving black guys got handouts.

A book now being reverently passed from hand to hand by Democratic politicians and pundits is Thomas and Mary Edsall’s “Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics.” This argues that elite liberals running the Democratic Party through the 1970s and ‘80s disdained blue-collar white workers in favor of ethnic and sexual minorities. Implication: Get with Joe Sixpack, throw blacks and gays over the side and the White House will be yours.

Actually the Democratic Party, just like the Republican Party, exists mainly to serve the rich, which means disdaining blue-collar white workers while throwing a few crumbs at inner-city constituencies to garner votes and keep the peace.

To serve a blue-collar constituency would mean promoting labor, making it legally possible to conduct successful union drives and win strikes. It would mean redistributing income and promoting large schemes of public investment. It would mean converting the Democratic Party into a party of labor, to serve the interests of working people.

Anyone who reads the Edsalls and thinks electoral success is a matter of denouncing affirmative action and homosexuals needs their head examined. It was George Meany and not George McGovern who refused pleas to organize and finance big union recruiting drives. Meany, just like the big Democratic chieftains, never wanted a widened working-class base. He just wanted access in Washington, realizing much too late that to hang on to the latter you need the former.

The Edsalls are certainly right in saying that the white working class has been sold down the river by both parties. The result is that politicians have near-zero credibility with large slabs of the populace.

In the vacuum that should be occupied by a party of labor, articulating a sound program of economic redistribution and reform, all sorts of pathologies take up residence. In Louisiana and in Mississippi (where a Republican, Kirk Fordice, swept into the governorship by saying much the same sort of things as Duke, or Bush) the pathology is all about race.

But race doesn’t have to be the lightning rod. Earlier this month, Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton), on the campaign trail for a Senate seat, traveled to the heart of the Redwood Empire and told local businessmen assembled in the Eureka Inn that the most awesomely powerful political force in the country was something called the “Environmental Party.” This party, Dannemeyer confided, “has as its objective a mission to change this society, to worship the creation instead of the creator.”

Charging that environmentalists “don’t believe in a hereafter” and are therefore more likely to “get excited” about trees and birds, Dannemeyer invoked an ongoing cultural war in this country between paganism and Christianity, with paganism causing inflation, since it was after the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s that America unhooked the dollar from gold.

This kookiness was cheered lustily by Eurekan businessmen who will listen to any dirt on environmentalists, just as poor whites in Louisiana will listen to any dirt about blacks.

In a political vacuum, amid declining living standards, people are more apt to swallow any poison in search of a cure. Given the popularity of the Edsalls’ book with Democratic strategists, it looks as though they, too, will be stamping along the path blazed by Duke and Bush.