Blood and Politics (88 page)

Unlike in 1992 and 1996, when Ross Perot polled significant numbers of votes, the so-called third parties failed miserably in this election. In fact, each third party’s count was more miserable than the next. The combined total of votes for all ten small parties did not reach even 5 percent of the electorate. As a Reform Party candidate, Buchanan received just 448,895 votes, 2.5 million votes fewer than he had received in the 1996 Republican primaries.
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Consider by comparison the Populist Party in 1992, when militiameister Bo Gritz won almost half as many votes as Buchanan did in 2000, but with only one-twentieth of the financial support. Further, by failing to pull the required 5 percent, Buchanan even lost the Reform Party’s future chance at automatic Federal
Election Commission funding, the sine qua non of a viable third party.

Several factors contributed to this abysmal drop in support, including the fact that Buchanan underwent gallbladder surgery after the convention and was forced to slow his campaigning.
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But the fight inside the Reform Party proved even more decisive, bloodying Buchanan to an extent from which he never recovered. The opposing Reform Party camp went to court after the convention, attempting to deny Buchanan the party’s federal matching funds. Although he eventually won the court case and received the money, the legal suit stymied his campaign until after Labor Day.
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He had planned to use a significant portion of the FEC funds to buy television advertising and thereby push his name up in the polls. With a significant enough standing in the polls, he believed he could win a place in the nationally televised debates. With years of television experience on his résumé, Buchanan reasoned that he would fare well in the debates. Instead, he sank to invisibility in the polls, and the debate sponsors deemed him a minor candidate and did not include him.

As a result, white nationalists came out of the election empty-handed. They had spent twelve months trumpeting Buchanan and volunteering for his brigades, hoping at least to inherit a viable third party apparatus. Instead, they received Ezola Foster. The election’s results begged for a sharp retrospective look by white nationalists who had worked hard on his campaign.

The Council of Conservative Citizens complained that a “liberal, country-club Republican rode to victory on the strength of conservatives.” If Buchanan had once represented a chance to construct a viable alternative to the Republicans, that possibility was gone for now, the
Citizens Informer
tabloid editorialized.
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The tabloid was then under the direction of Sam Francis, the one member of Buchanan’s inner circle who had most steadfastly promoted the idea of a third party campaign. Just a year before, he had described Buchanan as a courageous, effective, and articulate warrior. Francis did not shrink from his conclusions now. Writing under his own name in two different periodicals—the white nationalist newsletter
American Renaissance
and the paleoconservative monthly
Chronicles
—Sam Francis drew two slightly different, but related, sets of conclusions: For the Renaissancers, he faulted Buchanan personally for not appealing directly to the resentments of white working people. The candidate had emphasized trade and foreign policy issues, rather than the red meat of race and immigration. Plus Francis found the selection of Ezola Foster
inexplicable. Both moves sent signals to white nationalist sympathizers that Buchanan was a candidate much like any other candidate, willing to trade away his principles for the supposed acceptance of mainstream conservatives. As a result, these voters had been confronted with no real choice that November.
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To
Chronicles
readers, Francis contended that it was the masses of white people rather than simply the candidate himself who lacked the necessary racial consciousness to vie successfully for power. As proof, he cited the split votes by white men and white women, the gender gap, showing that white men usually vote for racially conservative candidates and issues in greater percentages than women do. If white people would only vote as a unified bloc, he believed, they could reclaim the culture and the Constitution for themselves alone. Francis restated his constant refrain: a direct appeal to race was needed to awaken this sense of white self-consciousness.
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Absent such a call by a credible political figure, he believed, white nationalism would likely remain a nonmajoritarian movement, without the ability to contest directly for governmental power. At election time it would remain a hidden force within the two-party system; although primarily located in the Republican Party, it was likely to remain subordinated to economic conservatives in the party. Outside of party politics, it expressed itself in civil society: in the conflicts between church and state, in policy debates about gun control and Confederate monuments and symbols, and in the growing angst over immigration and the fact that white people will become a demographic minority in a nation of minorities at mid-century.

Despite Sam Francis’s description of the Republican Party as the “Stupid Party,” most of the voters who supported one aspect or another of white nationalist politics decided not to vote for an ultimately inconsequential third party—whether or not that party represented their most deeply held beliefs. Consider the evidence from South Carolina. In that state Buchanan received only thirty-five hundred votes. Yet just the previous January, almost double that number had rallied to defend the Confederate battle flag’s flying at an official state site, meaning that most of the Confederate flag wavers had either not voted at all or pulled George Bush’s Republican lever. (They were unlikely to have voted for the Democrats.) North Carolina too had long been abuzz with prominent organizations such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, National Alliance, and Christian Identity churches. Wilmot Robertson, Kirk Lyons, Ben Klassen, and Eric Rudolph all had lived there. Yet when voting day came, Buchanan received fewer than nine thousand votes in that state. George Bush, on the other hand, beat Al Gore among North Carolinians by a landslide of thirteen percentage points. In the Deep South, as in
the rest of the country, the largest slice of white-wing voters belonged to the Republicans.
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In this regard, the numbers in Alabama were even more instructive. A referendum proposing to amend the state’s constitution to abolish the prohibition of interracial marriage had been on the ballot.
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Written in 1901, the proscription had been rendered unenforceable by civil rights legislation and the 1967 Supreme Court decision in
Loving v. Virginia.
The ban was removed from the state constitution in 2000, when 801,725 Alabamians voted yes on a referendum to delete it. It should be noted, however, that 545,933 voted to keep the language in place.
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Two social scientists, Micah Altman and Philip Klinkner, conducted a study of those no voters and found that 49 percent of whites and about 8 percent of blacks voted to keep the (unenforceable) exclusionary language in place. “[M]ost Alabamians understood the ballot language,” they wrote, and concluded that “support for keeping the anti-miscegenation provisions is difficult to explain absent of racial bias.”
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In other words, on the basis of this referendum vote alone, Pat Buchanan might have expected to receive hundreds of thousands of votes. Yet he won a mere 6,364 votes instead. Where did the other votes go? Bush received 944,409 votes in Alabama to Gore’s 695,602.

Whether or not George W. Bush spoke Spanish or had kin with brown skin, he was the candidate who pulled the largest number of votes from white people opposed to interracial marriage (and other forms of integration). Similarly, those “racial conservatives” who supported the official display of Confederate colors did not waste their votes on a third party candidate.

For its part,
The Spotlight
responded to Buchanan’s failure at the polls as if it had never happened. After the election the three-time candidate disappeared from the tabloid’s pages as fast as he had (re)appeared the year before. A self-reflexive second thought never graced its pages: not about Pat Buchanan, or about the Populist Party or any other of a half dozen similarly forgotten projects and certainly not about the years of needless litigation that now brought Liberty Lobby itself to the verge of extinction.

July 9, 2001.
Forty-six years after Willis Carto had founded Liberty Lobby in his San Francisco apartment, it went out of business. This had been his central fortress, the one he had protected above all others, but it finally collapsed under the weight of the multiple deceits he had purveyed in its defense. Twenty-six years after
The Spotlight
’s first edition, the headline announced the end in ninety-point bold type: “FINAL EDITION! A Federal Judge Has Ordered This Populist Newspaper Shut Down.”
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The headline and accompanying story were half right. A short set of turns in the road had led to the last
Spotlight
tabloid. After the July 1999 bankruptcy hearing, Liberty Lobby had quickly settled out of court with the legion-IHR rather than face a trustee appointed by a judge. A forbearance agreement was signed that included two major points: Liberty Lobby was to pay a reduced sum over time, and neither party was to engage in any more lawsuits. Payments began, and Liberty Lobby remitted more than a million dollars to the legion. It looked as if the matter would finally be resolved. Except that Carto and Liberty Lobby had not kept the bargain. They reneged on payments and filed another in their long line of lawsuits. In response, Weber and the legion had gone back to court. On December 15, 2000, a judge ruled that the agreement had been breached. Six weeks after the election, both Carto and Liberty Lobby were once again liable for the entire original judgment, throwing the case back into bankruptcy court, where it awaited resolution.
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The bankruptcy judge then dismissed Liberty Lobby’s Chapter Eleven filing, closing the last remaining legal loophole.
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Either Liberty Lobby paid off its remaining debt to the Legion for the Survival of Freedom–Institute for Historical Review, or it would be forced into dissolution and its assets
seized. The choice had been Liberty Lobby’s to make. Nobody “ordered”
The Spotlight
to cease publication. But thirty lawsuits and countersuits had finally come to an end. Liberty Lobby closed its doors, simply refusing to pay off those it regarded as upstarts and usurpers in California. Step by step, it had boxed itself into a legal corner. Now, it was truly history. The end was anticlimactic. Only the parties directly involved seemed to notice.

In retrospect,
The Spotlight
had represented a significant advance for Liberty Lobby. In addition to becoming the organization’s chief propaganda outlet, it had generated revenue like a mail-order catalog, advertising every kind of Liberty Lobby merchandise, from coins to books and pamphlets. It also reinforced other fund-raising efforts by the organization, including direct mail solicitations. At the moment of conception and for a number of years thereafter,
The Spotlight
and the revenue it generated turned Liberty Lobby into the largest (and thereby dominant) force in its movement. And the tabloid’s propaganda outreach had enabled Carto to spin off other projects, such as the Institute for Historical Review and the Populist Party.

At the same time,
The Spotlight
had been indispensable to the white supremacist movement as a whole—particularly during its first decade of publication. Organizations and causes as diverse as David Duke’s Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1975, the defense of the shooters at Greensboro after 1979, and Gordon Kahl’s 1983 gun battle with federal marshals had benefited from the tabloid’s coverage. As late as the Randy Weaver incident in 1992, publicity in Liberty Lobby’s house organ had been central to generating sympathy and support. It helped turn a serial aggregation of organizations and individuals into a single movement, reading a common literature and self-conscious of its unique identity. Liberty Lobby had been the largest and most significant voice for the mainstreaming tendency; it had also been an essential part of the infrastructure for the entire movement. But its position and influence had been declining for years.

Liberty Lobby’s response to George W. Bush’s ascension to the presidency was decidedly less significant than it would have been twenty or thirty years before. Unlike in the period when Carto’s outfit successfully courted segregationist congressmen, it now commanded little attention on Capitol Hill. The new president was not going to select for any high-level post someone publicly associated with Liberty Lobby, as the newly elected President Ronald Reagan had done in 1981. Just as the days were gone when Liberty Lobby had exerted some influence outside white supremacist circles, so too was the time over when it could make or break an issue or an organization within the movement. Just ten years
before, David Duke had bought the
Spotlight
mailing list as a first step toward generating significant nationwide support for his election campaigns. Now the weekly’s circulation figures had reached a twenty-five-year low. Longtime subscribers from Carto’s World War Two generation were dying off, and the attempt to bring Generation X readers into the fold (by adding Resistance Records subscribers to
The Spotlight
’s list) had largely failed.

Carto’s longtime rival William Pierce, on the other hand, had mastered a variety of media outlets intended to reach new generations of young people. The National Alliance broadcast a weekly radio program via shortwave, and its active Internet sites and successful music business provided powerful alternatives to print-only publications. In fact, the Internet’s role inside the movement had grown in parallel to its impact on general society, undermining established media outlets, reinforcing niche markets, and desocializing interactions in physical space even as it resocialized them in cyberspace. As noted earlier, white nationalists set up chat rooms, sold merchandise, and published on the Internet, using it to facilitate communication across the globe. The same Internet that enabled young people to establish their own cybernet-works also pulled them out of contact with older movement veterans and organizations, such as Willis Carto and Liberty Lobby, that did not easily adapt to the new medium. Simply put, they did not need
The Spotlight
’s classified ads to sell white power music. They could advertise themselves on the Net. The multiplicity of sites tended to undercut the hegemony of any single-source outlet, including Liberty Lobby’s mash of tree pulp. By 2001,
The Spotlight
had dropped to 60,000 subscribers from the 150,000 it had had when Bob Weems had spoken fifteen years earlier in an Arkansas meeting hall.
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