The Year the Clock Broke
“The end of history will be a very sad time.”
—Francis Fukuyama
AS 1992 DREW CLOSER, A SPECTER HAUNTED the Republican Party establishment—the white-robed specter of David Duke. The former grand wizard of the national Ku Klux Klan had literally gotten a facelift for the television cameras and managed to make a credible run for the governorship of Louisiana. Even though he was soundly trounced in the state’s November 1991 runoff, which delivered the office to the comically corrupt former Democratic governor Edwin Edwards, who dodged a racketeering conviction in his previous term, Duke was still out there lurking on the fringes of the American right, threatening to primary George Bush.
“We’ve been sending a message,” Duke said in his concession speech. “Next year, you’ll have the message being expanded all over the nation.” In Washington, D.C., a group of disaffected hardline right-wing political operatives heard his message loud and clear. They saw in David Duke the path to reshape America, formulating the brand of backlash populism that would finally come of age in the era of Trump.
The Louisiana gubernatorial election of 1991 was indeed a fight over that great floating signifier of American political life—populism. But in Louisiana populism was not just a vague label; it was institutionalized, both in style and substance. The remnants of Governor Huey P. Long’s “Share Our Wealth” redistribution program from the 1930s remained on the books. Edwards was certainly closer kin to Long’s rollicking, drawling bonhomie. He was still a “laissez les bon temps rouler” guy in the laissez-faire world of Reaganomic austerity.
Both candidates had legitimate claims to the legacy of Long’s populism. After Long’s assassination in 1935, “The Share Our Wealth” banner was taken up by America Firster anti-Semites like Father Coughlin and Gerald L.K. Smith. While Duke railed against welfare that he said mostly benefitted blacks at white expense, he defended a cornerstone of Louisiana’s populist policy regime, the Homestead Exemption, which made the first $75,000 worth of property tax free. The exemption was the material foundation of the largely white, small property-owning lower middle class—those hardy, self-reliant people of American populist lore. ...