David Duke set the stage for the modern Republican Party

Gaetz, Gosar, Greene, and Boebert are his alien spawn

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It was 1989, and I was living on Dauphine Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans in an apartment I rented from the man who inherited the Progresso foods fortune.  The building used to be a spaghetti factory – four stories with a little parking area off to the right that used to be a loading dock.  It was a great apartment with a huge balcony with cast iron railings and a jungle of climbing plants that spread their tendrils happily in the tropical heat.

The French Quarter was full of artists and writers and interior designers and architects and just plain rich people that you’d figure would live in what was essentially the Greenwich Village of New Orleans.  The restaurants were extraordinary, as you would expect, and bars like the Napoleon House were colorful and convivial and filled with the kind of people you could talk to about art, or antiques, or sports – anything, in fact, including politics.  Because the politics of New Orleans were Democratic, and the French Quarter was even more liberal than other neighborhoods in the city.

But 10 miles west of New Orleans, and 10 miles east, and 10 miles north, and 10 miles south, politics were more conservative.  Out in the suburb of Metairie near the airport, in fact, politics had taken a turn even further to the right than they already were.  David Duke had been elected to the state house to represent a district that ran across the Mississippi River and through the swamps all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.  A legislative district couldn’t get much more southern than that, and now it belonged to the American Nazi and former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan, although Duke didn’t much like talking about that aspect of his political identity. 

Louisiana was a conservative state, but “conservative” could still mean Democrat, although the state had been changing little by little, as most of the south was, to the Republican Party.  Duke had run for the state house as a Republican, and in ’89 he announced that he was running in the state’s open primary for the Senate as a Republican, too. Word that a former Klansman and Nazi was running for the United States Senate reached New York, and I got a call from Esquire Magazine to write a piece about him.  You see, David Duke was an anomaly back in those days.  We had not yet reached the point where members of congress are caught by metal detectors trying to carry their Glocks on the House floor and are known to consort with members of armed militias like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. 

I called Duke’s campaign office, which was located on the second floor of his condo out in Metairie, and made an appointment to meet the former Grand Wizard.  Duke’s condo looked like it had been converted from a Comfort Inn, with a long balcony connecting units on the second floor.  There was a motel-style parking lot with spaces that faced the first floor units and concrete stairways leading up to the second floor.  Duke met me at the door of his condo. From the neck up, he was a miracle of modern cosmetic surgery.  He hadn’t even turned 40, and already his face had been lifted and stretched, and he had had some kind of hideous implant sewn into his chin so inexpertly you could see tiny scars under his bottom lip.  His hair had been colored with Grecian Formula or a similar self-applied product, so it was a shade of beige that is not found in nature, and it had been styled and gelled into what I thought of at the time as the Atlanta Insurance Salesman look:  the sides were combed back just over the tips of the ears, and the back just brushed the top of his collar.  It wasn’t long, it was long-ish, fashion-forward enough that you just knew he had picked it out of some hairstyle catalogue that promised styles to “impress the girls.”

David Duke turned out to be my first brush with a political type that is all too familiar now.  He was southern, he was suburban, he was youngish, he was white, and although he looked like what you might take as a normal Chamber of Commerce kind of Republican conservative, beneath his polished exterior (except for his shoes) was a right-wing Nazi nutcase.

Duke was eager to impress the guy from Esquire, so he made sure I tagged along when he went up north of Lake Pontchartrain to a little farming town called Folsom where a big rodeo was taking place.  People spotted him the moment we arrived and he was quickly surrounded by what can only be described, not as supporters exactly, but as fans.  To introduce the David Duke of 1989 and to set the scene, it’s worth quoting from my Esquire piece, which was titled, “Hate gets a haircut:”  “You’re going to like this,” Duke assured me as we approached the rodeo ring:

Blow-dried and coiffed, Duke is standing just outside the arena, near the gate end of the pens that are at this moment full of Brahma bulls . . . a gray one with a hideously black, flopping, fat neck . . . a brown one, snorting and pawing the earth, great gobs of drool dangling from his nostrils, black eyes like death pools. . . . Around Duke, the riders are strapping on huge, corset-like structures and taping their midriffs, wrapping straps around boot tops, wrists, and hatbands, and at the same time gripping Duke’s hand and pounding his back. “Go get ’em, David,” one young dude, sixteen, 150 pounds, a peewee Marlboro Man, drawls.

“I’ve got to shake that man’s hand,” says a bronc rider in his twenties. “I’m from over to Texas, and man, if we had more people like David Duke back home, we wouldn’t have no more problems with the niggers ’n’ wetbacks . . . hell, we wouldn’t have no more problems!" Duke shakes his hand happily.

A rodeo announcer wearing blue-and-gold chaps and a hat the size of a pop-up umbrella straddles a gray mare and shouts into a cordless mike, introducing the day’s main attraction:

“We ain't gonna disappoint ya,” he yells. “We got somebody here y’all been waitin’ for. Come on out and do your thing, State Representative David Duke!”

Duke, in a surprisingly cheap blue business suit and black loafers scuffed gray, but wearing a smile as wide as a Brahma’s mama, strides into the dusty arena. As he hits the middle of the field somebody throws the lights, and the crowd rises as one, fists shooting upward, a steel chant chilling the hot air:

“Da-vid! Da-vid! Da-vid! Da-vid!”

Duke drinks the applause for a moment, then raises his hands in mock surrender.

“If Governor Roemer’s words about the welfare, the set-asides, the affirmative action . . . if Governor Buddy’s words were out here on this ground, I sure as hell wouldn’t step in them, would you?”

The stands erupt: “No-o-o-o!"

“We don’t mind helpin’ out people who deserve our help!” roars Duke. “If they've got enough money to buy drugs, then they don’t need our money!”

“Da-vid! Da-vid! Da-vid!”

“You know, there’s a popular song out now, I don’t know by who, and it goes . . . I won't back down, no, I won't back down, they can stand me up against the gates of hell, and I won't back down.'"

Cheering, craziness.

“Well, I won't back down either!”

The stands explode.

“Don’t stop, David!”

“Thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you . . . thank you,” says Duke, backing out of the arena. The crowd quickly engulfs him.

“We got a philosophy out here,” a house-of-horror-size man in boots and spurs confides to Duke. “You see that road back there, right where you turned off?” The cowboy points across a grass field rapidly filling with pickups. “Right where you turn off there, you drive onto here, well, we own it. That’s our philosophy. We own it, we run it.” The man leans in like a Parris Island drill instructor. “You get what I’m sayin’ to you?”

“I think I do,” says Duke, nodding enthusiastically but turning with some relief to shake the hand of a stout woman who is approaching at good speed.

“Got me out of the kitchen to meet this man, my husband did,” says the woman. She reaches up to kiss Duke on the cheek. Duke leans down. The woman grins widely, exposing both teeth. Duke recoils slightly, but manages a glancing peck.

Her husband steps up to shake Duke’s hand, too, after struggling to free his fingers from the handle on his cattle prod, a wand-like electric shocker that will later coax bulls and broncs from pen to pen.

“I need one of those up to the legislature,” says Duke. “Maybe then we’ll get something done.”

“I hear that!” barks the stout woman’s husband. “Take this one here!”

Duke laughs and turns toward a pickup truck laden with T-shirts, baseball caps, and plastic Mardi Gras doubloons bearing his name.

“How we doing?” he asks the mousse-frizzed volunteer who had hauled the stuff fifty miles up to Folsom.

“Great! Great!” she exclaims.

Duke fingers a sack of doubloons and then thrusts it at the girl.

“Fine. Then take these out in the stands and distribute them, why don’t you.”

“Yes, sir,” says the girl, her smile wilting. Duke is frostily handsome, and, Dukettes being a distinctly unliberated group, they tend to sigh when the great man passes by. The girl sighs and trundles off with her burden. She’d hoped for a cheek-pat at least.

Duke pushes through the crowd, shaking hands as he goes, but another fan quickly approaches, this one bolder, in her thirties, her stride announcing: I’m between husbands.

“You know what your goddamn problem is, David Duke?” she asks in a husky voice, hands pressing Levi-clad hips.

Duke looks quizzical.

“Your problem is you got too big a set of balls and you ain’t afraid to speak your mind.” She grins like a great white shark with a mouthful of bather.

“Where you from?” asks Duke.

“St. Bernard Parish.” (“White.”)

“Where you work?”

“Metairie.” (“Safe.”)

“You want to volunteer in my office?”

“You damn sure straight I do.”

“What’s your name?”

The girl shifts her pose, working the entendre until it sweats.

“Cherry.”

“Cherry? That’s real nice. Let me have your phone number. We can definitely use you.”

Cherry carefully prints her number on a matchbook cover and twitches away into the warm breeze. Duke watches her.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” he says, sounding as sexless as Vice-President Quayle. “This happens everywhere I go. You have to see it to believe it.”

David Duke didn’t win his primary race for the United States Senate in 1990, left his seat in the state legislature after only one term, but he was right back then, and if only accidentally, he’s right today.  You have to see it to believe it.

You have to see Marjorie Taylor Greene, the newly-elected member of Congress from Georgia, to believe her.  There she is on our television screens, standing in the House of Representatives giving an unhinged speech about a fraudulent election stolen from Donald Trump that wasn’t either fraudulent or stolen, and chasing Parkland Florida shooting survivor David Hogg down a street in Washington, calling him a “coward” and a “liar.”  And there she is in excerpts from her Facebook feed and other online platforms saying that putting “a bullet in her head” would be a good way to get rid of Nancy Pelosi, claiming that the shooting at Parkland, Florida was a “false flag” incident, saying that Pelosi “needs another school shooting” in order to bring on gun control, and claiming that the Camp fire in California in 2018 was caused by a Jewish laser shot from outer space.

And there is Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz inviting a notorious Holocaust denier, Charles C. “Chuck” Johnson to be his guest at Trump’s 2018 State of the Union Address, wearing a gas mask on the floor of the House last year to mock the severity of the COVID crisis, then coming down with the disease himself several months later, and flying all the way to Cheyenne, Wyoming to stand in front of the state Capitol to attack Congresswoman Liz Cheney, a member of Republican House leadership, for saying Trump bore some responsibility for the attack on the Capitol on January 6.

Then you’ve got Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona meeting with far-right activist Ali Alexander allegedly to help plan the “storming” of the Capitol by right-wing militias like the 3 Percenters and Oath Keepers Gosar is said to be close to.

And let’s not forget Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who recently stormed around the security barrier outside the door of the House of Representatives in an attempt to carry her handgun on the floor, a right she claims she has from both the Constitution and “God.”  She’s another of the loons picking a fight with Parkland victim David Hogg over his support for gun control.  She ran for office in her hometown of – yes, you’re reading this correctly – Rifle, Colorado on a platform endorsing Qanon, “because it only means America is getting stronger and better.”

What these four have in common besides being right-wing lunatics is that they all ran for seats in the United States Congress in their respective states and won.  David Duke was able to win one term in what I referred to in Esquire as “morass of polyester leisure jackets and post-martini Sen-Sen breath that is the Louisiana State Legislature.”  But his ambitions for higher office, including governor of Louisiana and president of the United States didn’t get very far.  

That’s what distinguishes the politicians of the 1990’s with the carnival barkers of 2021:  These fucking loons are able to win. Ten Senators and 140 members of congress voted to overturn the legitimate election of Joe Biden and hand it to the Carnival Barker in Chief immediately after Trump had sent thousands of his shrieking miscreants and killers to attack the Capitol and break into the House and the Senate.  Gosar and Boebert and Greene and Gaetz and Cruz and Hawley and all the rest of them cowered under their desks in fear for their lives while a mob of Trump’s followers tore into their offices and stole their papers and laptops and beat dozens of Capitol police and killed one.  And then they crawled out of their hide-holes and took to the floor and did exactly what the mob wanted them to do:  they tried to disenfranchise millions of voters and hand the presidential election to the man who lost it, Donald Trump.

Duke’s Wikipedia page says he is the only neo-Nazi ever to hold elective office in the United States.  I say that’s wrong.  The only difference between David Duke and the Republican Party of today is that Duke put on a Nazi uniform with a Swastika and walked around on the street wearing it a few times.  Today’s Republicans may wear suits and ties and Ann Taylor ensembles and pearls, but they salute the same man Duke supported for president in both 2016 and 2020:  Donald Trump.  He is fucking Nazi scum, and so are they.