Hiltzik: The return of racism and antisemitism in politics

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks at a microphone

By Michael HiltzikBusiness Columnist

Oct. 21, 2022 10:17 AM PT

The fact that the Republican Party has a vacuum for its policy platform isn’t necessarily a problem for the U.S., even if the GOP does manage to take control of one or both chambers of Congress.

The real problem is that instead of a platform, what the party has offered America is a torrent of unalloyed racism and antisemitism.

Experienced political observers are struck by the degree to which overt racism and antisemitism has moved into the mainstream Republican and conservative discourse.

Politicians know that this works. People watch Tucker Carlson. Marjorie Taylor Greene wins primaries.

— Peter Loge, George Washington University

“It would be wrong to think that what’s happening today is completely unprecedented or a complete aberration,” says UCLA political scientist Dov Waxman. “What has shifted is the way in which this has become increasingly legitimized.”

The outbreaks are everywhere.

At an Arizona rally for Donald Trump earlier this month, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) stated, “Joe Biden’s 5 million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you — replacing your jobs and replacing your kids in school and coming from all over the world. They’re also replacing your culture, and that’s not great for America.”

Greene’s words referenced the notorious “great replacement theory,” a white supremacist conspiracy meme that combines racism and antisemitism in holding that “inferior” non-white populations are poised to displace the white majority in America.

At another rally in Nevada, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) linked Black populations to crime:

“They are not soft on crime,” Tuberville said, referring to Democrats. “They’re pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”

Trump himself, in a post on his Truth Social media platform that upbraided Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for cooperating with Democrats on spending bills, included a racist slur against McConnell’s wife, Taiwan native Elaine Chao, calling her McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow.”

Chao served in Trump’s Cabinet as Transportation secretary for almost the entirety of his presidential term.

In another Truth Social post, Trump asserted that American Jews should support him because of his putative support for Israel — echoing the antisemitic notion that American Jews owe their loyalties to Israel and its regime. That post closed with the menacing words, “U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel - Before it is too late!”

Fox News star properties Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have been pushing the great replacement theory for years.

In 2019, Carlson groused on the air about “waves of immigration” of people “with high-school educations or less.” He added, “Our leaders demand that you shut up and accept this. We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor, they tell us, even if it makes our country poorer and dirtier and more divided.”

In a broadcast last year, Carlson was more explicit. “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate... with new people, more obedient, from the Third World... That’s what’s happening actually.”

Ingraham’s version, voiced in a podcast, was that Democrats were “for replacing the current American population, or swamping the current American population, with a new population of people who are perhaps more hospitable to socialist ideals.”

The agent of change who moved this sort of rhetoric from the fringes to the mainstream of the Republican Party was plainly Trump. From the moment he announced his presidential candidacy in 2015 with a rant about Mexican immigrants — “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists” — overt bigotry had the imprimatur of a leading Republican.

Once in office, Trump implemented policies based on invidious ethnic, religious and racist distinctions — for example, his Muslim ban barring travel into the U.S. of people from seven largely Muslim countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen) and the suspension of Syrian refugee resettlements, as well as the family separation policy wielded against immigrants at the southern border.

Trump in effect licensed his followers to express bigoted views more forthrightly. Voicing views that had not been heard for years in social settings became acceptable, if not exactly respectable.

Trump tapped a vein of inchoate social anger by allowing his followers to train it on the “other” in ways that brought it out of the shadows.

“A lot of who we are as Americans is antisemitic, anti-Catholic, racist, xenophobic,” says Peter Loge, director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University, “and Trump articulated it in a way that resonated with a lot of people who were feeling threatened. You’ve got 9/11, the war in Ukraine, school shootings, climate change, and in the face of this, people want an answer to: What the hell is going on, whose fault is it?

“Unfortunately, the easy answer for a lot of people is that its ‘their’ fault — the Mexicans’ fault, the Jews’ fault, the Blacks’ fault. ‘Those people’ are trying to take our stuff.”

As Waxman observed, bigotry in American political discourse has historical roots.

In the 1930s, the pioneering radio priest Charles Coughlin drew record audiences for his broadcasts from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Mich., even as he began to lard his sermons with explicitly antisemitic content.

Coughlin railed against “Jewish bankers” and accused Franklin Roosevelt of being “dominated by crafty Jews,” and quoted from “The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious tsarist forgery setting forth a supposed Jewish plot to achieve world domination. Coughlin’s Catholic superiors finally forced him off the air in 1942.

The shadow of war seemed to encourage antisemites in the U.S., such as Charles Lindbergh. “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration,” the world-famous aviator and spokesman for the isolationist America First Committee said in a speech in September 1941.

Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into World War II forced Lindbergh into silence. The antisemitic views of Lindbergh as a fictional president later became the backbone of Philip Roth’s 2005 novel “The Plot Against America.”

Then came the 1950s, when the Republican Party was defined by the activities of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisc.). Among the few voices raised against McCarthy within his own party was that of Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who said in a memorable 1950 speech, “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”

That era is gone. “In the past, some of those bigots would have been considered beyond the pale,” Waxman told me. “They would have been strongly criticized or condemned for making even veiled antisemitic remarks. Nowadays, when we hear politicians engaging in coded antisemitism or even blatant antisemitism there is very little condemnation. Even if there’s a moment of hand-wringing and condemnation, there are no real political consequences.”

Still, what works for the Republican Party remains anathema for Democrats. That’s evident in the responses of the parties to outbreaks of racism or antisemitism in their ranks.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) unburdened herself of overtly antisemitic tropes in 2019, including suggesting that GOP support for Israel was all about Jewish financial contributions and accusing American Jews of “allegiance to a foreign country.”

The response from party leaders was swift and explicit: “Congresswoman Omar’s use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israel’s supporters is deeply offensive,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and members of her leadership team said. “We condemn these remarks and we call upon Congresswoman Omar to immediately apologize for these hurtful comments.“ Omar apologized.

By contrast, no mainstream GOP voices have been raised about Greene’s remarks, or ties between Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and white nationalists. After Trump issued his racist slur against Elaine Chao, not even did McConnell, her husband, respond in public.

“Politicians know that this works,” says Loge, a former staff member for congressional Democrats. “People watch Tucker Carlson. Marjorie Taylor Greene wins primaries. If this were to stop working — if Rep. Cheney handily won her primary, a lot of this would go away,” he says, referring to Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who lost her primary for reelection in August after emerging as the leading Trump critic in the GOP. “A lot of clever and enterprising politicians would say, ‘Aha — if I want to win office I have to stop speaking to the worst of who the American people are and speak to the best of what they can be.”

Nor can one overlook the role of the changing informational media ecosystem. The problem is not limited to the tendency of social media to magnify controversy; it’s also the tendency of all media to magnify controversy.

In decades past, the extreme and ignorant remarks of a back-bench congresswoman like Greene, from the exurban Atlanta area with no responsibilities in the House, would be largely ignored in her own party and the opposition.

Today, her remarks are repeated and amplified by sources across the spectrum, everyone for their own purposes. Republicans embrace Greene as an effective foil for Democrats, while Democrats see her as an emblem of the far-right’s capture of the GOP; both parties have an interest in giving her statements play.

A reader of progressive-leaning websites will be inundated by Greene tweets, as well as those of such other right-wing Republicans as Gosar and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

The complacency underlying the mainstreaming of bigotry may underestimate its dangers. Waxman warns against being too alarmist about whether it presages the decline of American democracy, a la Germany in the 1930s, as America still has strong democratic institutions.

The “normalization of hateful rhetoric does lead to real-life consequences,” however, manifested in a rise in hate crimes and their increasing violence, Waxman says. Conspiracy theories such as the great replacement, election fraud and QAnon become echoed by perpetrators of acts of violence.

The great replacement theory alone has been linked to four massacres: The killing of 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018; a gunman’s killing of 23 shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso in August 2019; the killing of 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019; and the Tops Market massacre in Buffalo, N.Y., in May this year, which took 10 lives. The targets were, in order, Jews, Latinos, Muslims and Blacks; the suspects all left writings or internet postings bristling with great replacement rhetoric.

In other words, the politicians and media figures who voice this poisonous rhetoric, and those who sit by silently as it spreads, are complicit in a very dangerous trend. Complicit, and responsible for the consequences.

Column: Overt racism and antisemitism have become part of our political discourse. How did that happen?

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