before Trump came along, conservatives have had a complicated relationship with extremism, both encouraging and shunning it. William F. Buckley, founder of National Review and the most prominent early conservative figure, began his political career denouncing Dwight Eisenhower and atheist professors at Yale. His magazine published several pieces defending Jim Crow and South African apartheid.
Over the years, he often told supporters that they should always support the “furthest right” candidate that they believed to be electable, setting up a perpetual cycle of GOP candidates who constantly assert that they, alone, are the “true conservatives” out to save the nation from Republicans in Name Only (RINOs).
In fairness, Buckley strenuously opposed the John Birch Society, a conspiracy group funded by Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch, which was highly popular among the conservative grassroots. And National Review eventually relented and came out against segregation and apartheid.
Former president Ronald Reagan also had a decidedly mixed record on racial matters, spending decades opposing sanctions on South Africa for apartheid and the creation of a national holiday to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr. but eventually taking liberals’ positions on the two matters. He was also recently revealed to have privately referred to African United Nations delegates as “monkeys” who were uncomfortable wearing shoes.
Conservatives were also more than willing to welcome Strom Thurmond, the one-time segregationist senator who broke from the Democratic Party as it began supporting civil rights for African-Americans. Young Americans for Freedom, the group that preceded today’s Young America’s Foundation, hailed Thurmond as a “Man of Courage” in 1964 before he broke with his racist positions.
Many conservatives also had no problem with George Wallace, the Alabama Governor who ran for president on segregationist platforms. Richard Viguerie—who still is raking in the GOP direct-mail money today—handled Wallace’s fund-raising in 1976.
In light of the many ways in which conservative leaders were willing to side with them on particular issues, white nationalists have sought to openly enter Republican politics for decades. Jared Taylor and his American Renaissance magazine were big promoters of Ron Paul’s presidential runs. As I’ve written previously, many alt-right activists were also strong Paul supporters before branching off to start their own movement. Former Klansman David Duke has repeatedly run as a GOP candidate in his native Louisiana but been rejected by party leaders.
Progressives have long accused Republican strategists of trying to communicate indirect messages of support to white racists through the party’s infamous “Southern Strategy” which succeeded at turning the South away from its decades of loyalty to the Democratic Party. Few GOP strategists have ever been transparent about these efforts, but one who discussed them honestly was Lee Atwater, the widely successful consultant who passed away in 1991.
Ten years before his death, while firmly ensconced within the Reagan White House, Atwater gave an anonymous interview (the audio recording was published posthumously) in which he stated definitively that Republicans used race to appeal to Southerners but did so in an effort to gradually wean them from bigotry in favor of small-government appeals.
According to Atwater, the idea only worked because whites favorable to segregation understood that cutting the government would disproportionately harm African-Americans.
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*****, n*****, n*****,’” he told interviewer Alexander Lamis, a Case Western Reserve political scientist. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*****’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N*****, n*****.’”
More recently, numerous reports have exposed the role of the late Thomas Hofeller, a redistricting expert who worked for many Republican organizations over the years, in masterminding GOP state legislatures’ successful attempts to use race as the primary factor in congressional redistricting. Journalists have also exposed Hofeller’s covert advocacy for a new Census question about citizenship which he believed would suppress Hispanic responses and thereby harm Democrats.
The ascension of Donald Trump from wrestling sideshow to the heights of Republicanism has greatly increased the prominence and power of racists within the party. The 2015 launch of his presidential campaign with portrayals of most Mexicans as rapists and murderers electrified the white nationalists who had formerly supported Ron Paul’s quixotic efforts and they began flocking to the billionaire, producing hundreds of thousands of memes and trolling comments in his favor.
“White nationalists have always sought to inject their ideas into conservative politics, Fuentes is just the latest person to be doing it,” Howard Graves, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center told me. “What’s different now is that is that they feel emboldened by our commander-in-chief.”
Steve Bannon, who eventually became Trump’s campaign chairman, very carefully nurtured the online fascists. Referring to them as his “killing machine,” he threatened to use them as a force against any faction hoping to deny Trump the presidential nomination at a brokered convention. Bannon also boasted that he was fashioning Breitbart News into “the platform for the alt-right” as his editorial protégé Milo Yiannopoulos allowed racist activists to line-edit articles.
Once in office, Trump pandered to extremist supporters in numerous ways including his efforts to ban all Muslims from immigrating to the United States, break up families of unauthorized immigrants, and enact legislation exempting far-right Christians from any law they felt restricted their freedom to discriminate. Most infamously, Trump, acting on Bannon’s advice, repeatedly claimed that “very fine people” had attended the fascist-organized Unite the Right rally in support of Confederate memorials.
Recently, Stephen Miller, Trump’s top adviser on immigration was revealed to have regularly promoted white nationalist talking points to a Breitbart News reporter. He is one of a number of Trump staffers who have been revealed to have ties to racist groups.
