A bit of explanation and advice up front: this chapter contains two
wildly divergent sections. They appear beside one another, in a contrast as profound as I can think of,
because that speaks to a truly wide view of the "hard AH" dynamics and phenomena at work in the TL. The ... persons who populate that later segment of the chapter appear very much as they were in life, the evil,
small bastards. Their debate, their views, their strategems, their language, express
their reality. After a taste of it I find a long soak in a 55-gallon drum of Bactine helps. It is the most difficult, unsettling, and distasteful writing I have had to do since I followed Dick Nixon down to about three degrees off batshit in "Think Big." But, like that, it appears here for necessary reasons. "Necessary" doesn't mean I like, accept, or God forbid endorse those reasons, though. History has horrors in all sizes, and while there is I hope much to uplift in this TL, for it to matter, to be real
enough, it ain't a bowl of cherries. Take it then as it is given and, again, disinfect thoroughly after.
For that matter, I'll dedicate that execrable couple of thousand words to a small historical presence dear to my own perspective: one of the United States' first counterterrorist forces, Kirk's Raiders. Raised amid the bloody half-wars that proceeded on through Reconstruction, Kirk's raiders were bold good men of the South true to their United States who, though they would be shot at, spat on, sometimes criminally charged, and shunned by kith and countrymen thereafter,
volunteered for the specific mission to bring the murderers of North Carolina's first prominent African American politician to justice. They did their work with honor and success, corralled the bastards, drove the Klan in retreat from Caswell and Alamance Counties, though the justice system failed them after. Many were veterans of Lt. Col. George Washington Kirk's old unit, the 3rd North Carolina Dragoons of the United States Army. As ever, the folks who
should have statues subsist in the margins of history. But we will remember them.
Conclave
There really are a great number of people in this country that
are a helluva lot more interested in whether the Dolphins beat
the Redskins than they are in whether Nixon or George
McGovern ends up in the White House.
- George McGovern
Ignore everything a politician says before the word But.
- Frank Mankiewicz
It’s come to a point where you almost can’t run unless you can
cause people to salivate or whip on each other with big sticks. You
almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to
survive in American politics.
- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, ‘72
This country is going so far to the right you won’t recognize it.
- Fmr. Attorney General John Mitchell
They shuffled in without a word. It was one of the bland, windowless, workmanlike conference rooms off an arterial hallway of the West Wing, painted in the mordant institutional beige of the day, designed to make anything done therein seem more a burden of schedules than a council of state. They’d done all they could to rob it of appeal: scheduled out past the lunch hour so there was only duty with no food, crammed calendars with staff meetings and departmental reviews, staged the fancier, more public event already that would generate enough leaks from Pat Cadell alone to put the hunting pack in the White House Press Room a ways off the scent.
The three-card monty of it was for West Wing digestion too, there being several folk intimate with the campaign last time ‘round in ‘72 who were not invited to this discussion. The most waspish and cussed of those by far were Cadell himself and Gordon Weil: Cadell a self-satisfied young prairie dog with slicked-down hair crammed in a suit, Weil all dour probity and pipe clutched in a misanthropic fist. Besides those quarrelsome pups they’d made provision against more substantial wolves at the door as well. In the past three days Frank Mankiewicz had turned first to a shift chief with the Secret Service he trusted from the days of Bobby’s campaign, then to an Irish Catholic Navy captain with the National Security Agency who seemed on the side of the angels, and asked each man separately to sweep the place for bugs.
The indispensables milled about for their pick of seats. Mankiewicz himself, no shevel not dissed, behind broad, thick glasses. Chief of Staff Gary Hart, the best-tailored scarecrow in the building. The almost Quaker self-repose and quiet of Gene Pokorny, still on the lean side of thirty and the youngest flag officer in the elections business. Jean Westwood, greyer now but eminent too, boss of Domestic Policy down two halls from this very room and the only woman present. Rick Stearns with his long Gallic face and suit fashionably askew, guru of caucuses and diviner of strategy. Not a lawyer yet though he aimed to be when this governing lark played out its string, Stearns kept a couple of big, good books on cross-examination atop his nightstand. The art intrigued him. Last there was Doug Coulter, ever reliable, lean and pointed down along his balding pate to the dagger nose and curt chin, there on Frank’s insistence that Coulter should make the devil’s case and also take notes.
Under a blue moon of like mind Mankiewicz and Hart thought five would about do it for now, before they needed to bring in principals — that would mean the President and Vice President directly — or anyone else in the practical mix of a campaign structure. First they had to sort out where the hell they stood.
As Mankiewicz again had put it, this was the other meeting. The week prior, just after the midterms and even before the voting machines had been wiped down and oiled, a larger scrum of McGovern lifers had sat down for what military types would call a “hot wash” on the results with Pat Cadell as concertmaster. Old Frank kept everyone on their best behavior, defined as the willpower to sit quietly and push through reams of micro-targeted data whilst you nodded with approval at anything Cadell said.
That was how you got through a dose of Pat: with fatherly toleration Mankiewicz said that Pat was very much one of those people to whom success had come at a young age, in other words a titanic pain in the ass. Gary Hart called Cadell an enfant terrible because Gary Hart was a showoff, but in the broad contours everyone in the room understood both the need for the data and the tax on emotion and energy involved as you steered around the pollster-impresario’s snits, self-satisfactions, eruptions, and fugues. Better to let the salaried professionals absorb Cadell’s bow wave of vigor fresh from the mainframe punch cards rather than drive terrified young secretaries out of the building. If you did that a few of them might, for a couple of C-notes, dish to the wire-service hacks about Cadell the unstable radical mastermind or whatever other adjectives said hacks thought would push copy.
You did it for the numbers, anyway. Cadell’s were so damn good even his moods paled against them, though the real difficulty was that he came at them with a solution in search of data. Mankiewicz said that was a little too French for his taste. Cadell burned with the certainty that something like Dick Nixon’s Silent Majority existed, though not sculpted with quite the same demographic contours. Rather than silent, Caddell reckoned that electoral center of gravity was alienated, cut off in deed and spirit from a sense that American institutions or American elites believed in American commoners, or had the public’s best interests at heart. Cadell preached a stiff dose of economic populism in response but his special ingredient was strident acts of what he termed authenticity, words and deeds that showed people their president was one of them, saw their horizons, felt their pain, their anger too, rather than turn out a bloodless elitist.
Cadell’s nostrums always had mixed results. In his strident and lawyerly heart Gary Hart didn’t especially want ordinary Americans making decisions about national policy. Jean Westwood thought there were quite a few solidly Democratic interest groups that had needs much more concrete than sincerity, grievances born of their own oppression and disadvantage. Mankiewicz thought one of President McGovern’s best qualities was his inclination to put the white horse out to pasture and keep his feet on the ground.
Once you had the numbers, though, you could get on with the other meeting, run with a democratic air by Mankiewicz — just Frank, he said at times like this, just Frank — like a gangsters’ council in one of his uncle Joseph’s movies. So it was they’d kick off the next campaign, George Stanley McGovern’s last, with what Frank laid out as a kaffeeklatsch at work.
Just Frank played in like an idle after-luncheon chat just to smooth the mood. Gene, he rumbled inquisitively at Pokorny, what’d Tip’s kid bring over in the basket this week?
One of Majority Whip O’Neill’s pages usually brought over a basket of classically-trained D.C. freebies to the West Wing each week. It was Tip’s style — everybody liked Tip and that was the legal tender of his politics — also a quiet gesture of solidarity with the liberals in the White House. Tip knows the value of keeping things lubricated, Frank liked to say. Yeah, Gary Hart would add unbidden whenever Hart was in the room, just as much as Carl Albert knows the value of keeping Carl Albert lubricated. It was a rather graceless shot at the Speaker’s open-secret alcoholism.
Pokorny paused for thought. Couple of hot tips on the happy hours while we try to get this structured-trucking bill whipped — Tip always knew where specific members would choose to wet their whistles, especially if the administration needed to buttonhole those members — box seats at the Kennedy Center when Jacqueline du Pre plays the Elgar cello concerto, too. One of the IBEW execs is opening up their beach house down on Amelia Island for guests, must be nice this time of year. Oh, Pokorny said as if absent of mind, two sets of tickets for the Redskins this Sunday, forty-yard line. Tip’s doing all right since the midterms, added Pokorny with a friendly-persuasion smile.
Those ‘Skins tickets are worth something, noted Gary Hart, always glad to offer his opinion on the value of anything. They play Dallas this Sunday. It’s gonna be the rubber match for the division, Hart went on, mixing bridge metaphors with the gridiron as only a social climber who grew up in the Church of the Nazarene might.
Fourth time’s the charm? asked Just Frank, the wryness of it left to hang in the air past the murmuring quiet of the question. With a patchwork of cagey league veterans coached by that legendary authoritarian taskmaster George Allen, Washington had made the playoffs each of the last three seasons but never closed the deal. Indeed they’d boasted the league’s best record in ‘72 and been favored to take it all, but fell just short in a Super Bowl loss.
Frank’s hometown Los Angeles Rams, on the other hand, had bulldozed through the 1973 season with a perfect record to face, in the eighth Super Bowl thus far, another team that hadn’t lost a game, the Miami Dolphins. There, with the direction of first-year coach Chuck Knox and a star turn from the Rams’ longtime, Filipino-American quarterback Roman Gabriel, the Rams came away winners, confident that a strong showing this season might put them in line for a repeat.
Jurgensen’s had a hell of a run with Billy Kilmer out hurt, Hart went on. Save for your guys, Frank, Washington’s the class of the NFC. Wouldn’t that be a thing if we could get it on record during this administration. Most bipartisan thing we’d be linked to, said Hart with a winsome grin.
All due respect to the hometown heroes, Gene Pokorny put in, I just don’t see an NFC team — not even your guys, Frank — beating an AFC team at the moment.
That could be subject to change, Just Frank answered.
What’s up, Frank? asked Jean Westwood, who knew when Mankiewicz wanted a leading question. Frank replied: it seems Carroll — that was Rosenbloom, the Rams’ famed and flamboyant owner, Frank knew everyone who was everyone in L.A. — has an in to go fishing for Simpson after the season.
Holy hell, said Gary Hart with a stage chuckle. The Juice and McCutcheon and Capelletti and the rest in that backfield? Who’s going to stop that?
I’m thinking the Dolphins figure the third time would work for them, Pokorny answered.
Jets again? asked Rick Stearns with no more than a polite interest.
Namath’s done all right this season, said Hart, but their last hurrah was ‘72. Save for that kid Riggins they’re running out of gas.
Pittsburgh, said Doug Coulter. When you wanted a straight answer he could be downright laconic. This is the Steelers’ year, he went on. Gene’s point about the conferences stands. As for the AFC the Raiders have the offense, the Dolphins the experience, but the Steelers have the defense, which these days wins titles. For the Dolphins, once the Football Labor Relations Board has lodged enough findings they’ll end up dismantling that lineup by default because Joe Robbie refuses to pay market value for his stars. That’s another thing Pittsburgh has going for them: he’s an owner of course but Rooney is one of the closest things to a progressive force in the league on player relations. And Chuck Noll seems really to have figured it out platooning quarterbacks, those fast switchbacks between Bradshaw and Gilliam keep other teams on their heels.
Rick, said Mankiewicz drawing the mum Stearns back into the conversation, the weather’s supposed to be quite nice this weekend. Nice for November in D.C, anyway. I don’t know that anyone in Santa Monica would trade. Why don’t you grab those tickets and take your lady friend? It’s so hard this time of year to enjoy some sunshine in this town, she might love it.
Stearns thanked Frank then pivoted: we were thinking of getting out to see The ODESSA File on Saturday, actually.
Book’s better, said Gary Hart, safe in the knowledge that eminent critics had done his viewing for him.
Always happy to disregard Gary Hart, Mankiewicz talked right past the interjection. Jon’s very good in it, said Frank the undertoned scion of Hollywood aristocracy about Jon Voight, one of the administration’s gaggle of young, earnest friends in the movie business. Very good. He’s been on a streak of his own lately. Maximilian Schell’s good too. I still say you can’t go wrong giving a girl a nice day outdoors but the film would be break from all of this, naturally.
Surely you’re bringing her for Joni next week? prompted Jean Westwood in friendly fashion. As part of the White House’s traditional cycle of concerts and command performances, the Canadian songstress Joni Mitchell would appear a week from Thursday, just herself with a guitar and a microphone. President McGovern’s many daughters had, vigorously, talked him into it, saying it’d be a great change of pace after the likes of Pablo Casals and Rod McKuen. Stearns smiled and nodded.
That should close the transaction, said Gary Hart. Even Hart’s efforts to sound worldly-wise tended to come over awkward and tawrdry. Jean Westwood thought to herself that it was like watching a gawky boy in about the eighth grade try to stare into the girls’ locker room while he played it off as a casual glance.
Frank pivoted to business. Well folks, Just Frank went on, everyone surely has an opinion and we need to get into the details soon as we can so, what do we think?
Thus far it’s made the folks who wanted to see how far we’d fall awfully quiet, said Jean Westwood. We shouldn’t that go to waste with the DNC, or with leadership on the Hill.
We ought… we really should, Gary Hart chimed in, thank our stars for that Senate map. To break even, that was a real feat, I mean not even break even, we’re well rid of Allen and Talmadge. That really points in the direction that the older generation of Boll Weevils have got to watch themselves, the Republicans and AIP both intend to replace them and without Nixon and his truce in place they’re not gonna screw around on that.
As for the House … Gary Hart shrugged his arrowhead shoulders. Cuts and bruises, we lost fewer people than Nixon did in 1970 and his press flacks crowed about that for months. Neither one of these cycles has been like those awful beatings Eisenhower and Johnson took in their midterms, question is what does that signify that’s of use for us next cycle.
The best thing you can do if you arrive in this town an outsider, said Jean Westwood, is govern. I mean, all the doomsaying that was done when it looked like we’d win, and right after we did, we then showed up as sober people who wanted to run the government and change things, change not wreck them. Once people saw the sky didn’t fall, and I mean ordinary people in their lives and work, they became more — she searched a moment for the word — transactional.
They might start treating us like grownups now, said Hart acidly, never afraid to put his neuroses to the fore. We’ve had enough to deal with as it is, said Gary Hart, between the economy and investigations and the goddamn Boll Weevils, this whole self-crucifixion with Nixon. All of it.
Sufficient unto the day, said Doug Coulter off the cuff as he scribbled on his legal pad.
The real partisans are hard to budge, said Jean Westwood; for everyone else we’ve worked very hard to make it possible for them to make I think fair judgments, about what we have or haven’t gotten done. I think that was reflected at the polls.
We need to know, volleyed Hart, who out there voted for and who voted against? Hart rubbed a bleary eye. Jean Westwood had noted Gary looked more wrung out than his usual tailored Ichabod Crane of a morning, and brought it up to Mankiewicz in the corridor on the way over. Mankiewicz said Gary’d been up to the hour of the wolf bashing out a think piece on throw-weight issues for Clark Clifford away on CART duty at Rambouillet. Throw-weight? replied Westwood. Does that cover how far the latest secretary he’s jilted wants to chuck him? Mankiewicz smiled a Cheshire smile and spoke no words.
Sure there was plenty of “against,” said Gene Pokorny. In some cases probably it was about whether people were more against the President or more against Dick Nixon — who, he’s one of those guys like Wallace who as long as they draw breath they won’t ever truly be absent from people’s minds when they mark a ballot. Maybe that’s not a bad thing for us. Some people motivate themselves by voting against. I do think there’s a lot of what we could call “for” voting, I suppose, in this case, people with positive reasoning.
That has to do with two things, Pokorny went on, that I know from working with voters and also working with people in this town, and on a good day they’re things we can do very well. The first really comes down to probity, to an ethical and open approach in what we do. A lot of Americans have been angry for years now, but angry because the government, big corporations, other institutions… because they did the wrong thing in very specific cases. Then they covered that up or, I think worse in many people’s minds, acted like ordinary people had no right to complain.
The other thing’s equity. If you now have a system designed to make sure the rich and corporations pay the taxes they ought to pay, design the kinds of social and economic supports ordinary people need, run an economic policy that generates productive work, that all gives people cause to consider that, well, maybe the McGovern folks aren’t wild-eyed incompetent hippie lovers, maybe we’re pretty practical and concerned with the common good.
So the to-do list wins direct votes, Frank summed up.
It gets people more disposed to see us in a positive light, Pokorny answered. I come from Polish Catholics and Nebraska farmers: when they live more securely with earned-income credit money and get something out of farm policy or factory policy that creates work, they may be more likely to see what we do for women and minorities as helping other regular people instead of something that cuts their slice of the pie thinner. Or they could see defense cuts as keeping a lid on inflation, or converting industry to the regular economy, wherever we can pull that off. Show ‘em what we’ve done: in farm country smart politicians used to put up lists of things they’d done for the community or brought to it so people could see a return on investment.
Smart policy matters, said Gary Hart, happy with a bias he could confirm.
There’re limits to everything, said Pokorny, but yeah, much of the time it does.
A propaganda-of-the-deed approach, echoed Doug Coulter.
Pokorny put up fingers as he numbered them off. We get EICP rationalized and cover the gaps, he said. We do a full press on labor law, publicize aggressive prosecution when corporations break the rules. Don’t piecemeal industrial policy, go the kitchen sink with steel, roads, rail, energy, telecommunications, whatever else we can boost that has, or can have, a union label attached. Fight like hell for the ERA. Really wouldn’t hurt if we could give minimum wage a bump but I doubt the Treasury wants to hear that right now.
Buy support with comprehensive proposals, said Gary Hart in a transactional way.
Win support, said Gene Pokorny, whenever we show people that we’ll fight for what they need. Pat’s whole performative authenticity parlor game, just give that up; always show people we’re fighting, otherwise what they hear is just hippies and inflation.
I think that’s useful, said Frank. Useful perspective, thanks, Gene. Frank looked toward the well-tailored quiet of Rick Stearns. Said Frank: Rick, we put you on to poring over the internals so we can scope that back out to the big picture.This might be a good time to go into that.
Okay, right, said Stearns, who looked only a little like graduate student who’d been asked to present a thesis a week early as his cufflinks flashed with motion and he pulled papers together. Let’s see where this data takes us.
Stearns looked back and forth between the conclave and the papers he moved around his desk like a wary bird at a trough feeder, and spoke with the rattling energy of nerves and fascination. We ought to start, Stearns said… really we ought to start where Pat starts, on favorables. Because there’s something I want to show you there, I look at it a different way than he does, maybe the opposite way really.
This leaves aside some of Pat’s other metrics and concentrates on the base approval rating — where the President is concerned it does, I’ll get to the comparisons. If you look of course there’s movement but there also seems to be a general trend, a zone really, inside which approval for President McGovern tends to fall. Not always, now, not always. We had a bit of a honeymoon, not a really powerful one but a honeymoon relative to the overall approval rating and that went, probably, went about four weeks from when he took office with the advantage of not being Richard Nixon and we undertook most of the work on ending our role… getting out of Southeast Asia.
There’s a bump also right as we announced gas rationing and the control measures in response to the OPEC embargo. Pat would call that a “strong leader” fluctuation which is his academic kind of way of saying it’s a rally-round-the-flag effect. People perceived President McGovern well in that moment, then we regressed to the mean when there weren’t any quick fixes. Let’s talk about that mean.
Stearns drew back to the broad canvas: we’ve spent most of the last two years — this goes back to the presidential transition, election campaign polls come under special conditions but we can track this back into the space between the electoral victory and taking office — in that mean somewhere in the forties. It dips, sometimes the signal boosts a bit, generally it’s there. What looks even steadier we can see in degrees of support. Pretty consistently you can look and see about forty percent, right about forty, of the respondents aggregated from these approval-rating samples use words like “strongly” and “very strongly” to describe their approval of President McGovern. That really firmed up with getting us out of the war and it’s remained consistent. Probably that’s our floor: it’s a stronger floor, better, than the one Johnson had or Nixon had, though of course we haven’t had Vietnam hung around our necks.
Look, now, on the other side of the coin. Pretty consistently also, you look at disapproval and you get somewhere from about forty to about forty-four percent out of all these samples who say they strongly or very strongly disapprove of the President. We can’t really seem to crack that at least not the low end of it. Often it’s higher than the low end. Very hard to crack that. Which is around that proportion of the voting public that we could say honestly seems to hate us on principle. That’s a lot sharper as a number, a lot more solid, than we’ve seen with past presidents other than the later stages of Truman’s presidency. Nixon had his patch, however brief, where he was on top of the world just before it came unstuck, really we go back more than twenty years to find a ceiling that hard.
So we have this range and approval tends to ebb and flow there. Let’s look at issue approval and disapproval. There are ten of them here, all of them ours. I don’t mean party platform stuff or members’ bills we endorsed, each of these is our policy work. There’s Revenue Reform, FFRA, Galbraith controls, two-dollar minimum, MECA, a whole kit and kaboodle. You can look at levels of support on these issues. Lots of non-farmers don’t get FFRA in the details but don’t seem to mind it, controls still scrape a majority, MECA’s in the high sixties, the GOP have called the Revenue Reform Act everything but a child of God and you’ve still got fifty-plus for that and a good chunk of undecideds who probably like it all right but worry about what their betters would say. All good things. Then you look at us and track presidential approval.
If you ask Pat, of course we did just that, he’ll tell you the policy stuff is all leading indicators. People like the policies, once they get that those are our policies they will in turn like us. Well, they lead, but we rarely follow. Now we did get the boost with MECA, that got us into the fifties briefly, but still we didn’t crack our ceiling and the effect wore off as other things remained more or less equal. There may be a bit of pull with economic indicators but the standard deviation on that gets wobbly, it’s a loose correlation at best. Even in a couple of bad patches it hasn’t dragged us far.
What all this seems to say is that people want what we want, they like what we do reasonably well, in some cases that may have translated to support for congressional candidates who took up those positions. But it does not move our needle far. We need more MECA-type moonshots, big things that track with high native levels of support, that’s clear. Beyond that though we need to recognize that the people who approve or disapprove of the President, in our case that’s a very deeply partisan thing.
What we have done is shore up our partisans, said Stearns. They’re not just people who would have supported a President George McGovern who wasn’t out of the box yet, so to speak, but they are people who would support an effective, liberal, Democratic president.
But think on that. The Humphrey and Muskie ticket that lost in ‘68 and our ticket that won, each got between forty-three and forty-four percent of the popular vote. Our geography was much better distributed. Also the groups who voted for Humphrey and who voted for us aren’t altogether the same people, we’ll get to that. But against a racist demagogue and Richard Nixon, Humphrey and Muskie polled a little over forty-three percent.
Then we get to 1972. Against the same racist demagogue and the same Richard Nixon only under a public investigation this time, we polled a little over forty-three percent. We might even do better than that now with the right kinds of voter mobilization. Still not enough. We still trail national, generic Democratic numbers and not just because enough Southerners in Congress have figured out how to pull off voting for our bills while they badmouth us back home.
How does that relate to the midterms — that’s the next thing we should take up, said Stearns with a waggle of his pen. I had… I’m not sure what you’d call it. Probably a hunch, really. One of the things Pat gives us in these reams of data is some state by state breakdowns on major questions, which includes favorable-unfavorable. Also he has some latitude to get into side issues that may have importance. With all the legal matters and the court case and the rest, at one point not too long ago he brought in favorable-unfavorable out in the states on Dick Nixon. So a really very good secretary and I got those data sets and we looked at them.
Now I’m not saying it’s a strict correlation, Stearns demurred. It’s not, but there’s a definite relationship. A relationship between the relative popularity of the President and of Nixon in a given state and outcomes in the midterms. Sometimes we have even a better breakdown than that, where we can get into cities or regions and get a look. But we have state by state all over the place and that tracks, mostly. In a midterm year with an economy that’s got some trouble, probably we overperformed in states where President McGovern polls better. We did worse in the states where he does not. There are places, especially places in the South and also some patches in the inter-mountain West, where neither of them — that’s President McGovern and Richard Nixon — poll very well and that probably is much more down to local factors. I’d note that where we saw those AIP representatives elected, in Georgia and in southern Missouri, those are two of the places where neither the president or Nixon tracks that well.
That’s not so much, I think, what we were just talking about, the “for or against” thing. It’s a broader kind of partisanship. Consciously or unconsciously sufficient people leaned towards one side or the other, in a given state, given region, strongly enough that this drove their voting. Now, we don’t have much on the interior details of that. We don’t for example know whether what Gene was saying holds true. Don’t know if people reached that kind of partisanship because they were persuaded by concrete things we’ve done. Or on the other side, that they recoiled from them, or whether it’s preexisting loyalties that they feel more strongly in this high contrast between McGovern and Nixon, or some additional factor. But the partisan lines we’ve seen take shape in the last two presidential cycles, they look even sharper now after these midterms.
There’s an additional point about partisanship I want to make, said Stearns as he held a pen in the air like a tour guide to flag the statement. I want to note that there are places, election races, where we saw what looks to us like unexpected good news and maybe, instead, we need to look more carefully at the dynamics there. Races that may not mean what we think they mean.
Take, said Stearns, Bill Roy. The Senate seat in Kansas. Obviously we’re all glad he won, and he was a popular governor before so he’s got his own record, his own legs under him for the future. I hear the New Republic plans to brag about it next month, something about Dick Nixon bringing the country together around traditional liberal principles — not like we’re ever going to get much credit ourselves from the New Republic. Apparently The Ripon Report has a whole long-form planned asking what’s wrong with Kansas that voters should punish “one of the most thoughtful traditional conservatives in the GOP” — I know, but it’s The Ripon Report, they’ve got fences to straddle — in favor of what they’re calling a big-government Democrat. Especially since this also leaves the Goldwater wing with relatively more of their people in office than the moderates or liberals. That gets at the point I want to make.
Bill Roy ran a good campaign. FFRA is a major piece of policy, it can change American farming to the good, and Roy helped make that happen without getting too joined to our hip for the taste of most Kansans. But I don’t think that’s why he won.
If we get into the internals, just before the election and for the actual election itself, when they asked voters about policy, about their views on politics and the country, there’s a whole little chunk of what look to be Dole people from before the vote who just drop off the map when the election starts. You get the pre-election polls and there’s this definite slice of very conservative voters who back Dole because of course he’s conservative, and the Republican too which always helps in Kansas. Then that slice is notably smaller when you’ve polled people who actually showed up to vote.
What it looks like, to me, is that a lot of people on the right-hand end of Kansan politics sat on their hands. They didn’t show up. My guess is that this was to punish Dole for doing business with us. On farm policy, food subsidies, infrastructure, wherever we did any deals to which Bob Dole was a party. Roy ran a good race, FFRA works, and he tied Dick Nixon around Dole’s neck for sure. But I don’t think that’s why Roy won. He won because people who think Bob Dole isn’t conservative enough…
Let that sink in, folks, said Frank, whose bit was straight-man all the way.
Stearns carried on: those folks didn’t vote. They were ready to put up with Bill Roy for a bit in order to get someone more to their taste in six years. That’s strategy, for one thing. It also disturbs me because it says there’s a very real faction of GOP voters, who can influence elections, that wants not just conservatives but real no-surrender types. People who won’t deal with us, who want to make us fail because of who we are. They don’t just hate us and vote for the conservative in a race, they’re willing to go to work so they can get a… a murderer’s row of no-surrender types in Congress. Sometimes they can make that happen. The more conservative the state, overall, the more they can make the play and make it work.
We do, Stearns went on with a placating tone, have our own loyal voters as well. I don’t mean the swing section of the electorate, what we could call persuadables for either side, I mean the coalition of voter categories that offer us the strongest, most consistent support that we get. If what we have on the other side is a mixture of some persuadables, a lot of voters who really dislike us, and a subset of voters who hate us and will go out of their way to create GOP representation that will fight us every step of the way, we have to mobilize our own partisans. We’ve got two election cycles now where we can see who that is and it looks pretty consistent, really quite a bit like the proposal Ambassador Dutton made back early in ‘72.
Frederick of Arabia strikes again, said Frank. Dutton, in the first rank of D.C. power lawyers and a Kennedy confrere of many years, had proposed to the McGovern staff a coalition of supporters that looked quite different from the old New Deal Democratic model. With more minorities, women, professional types, and young people, most of all it brushed aside the party’s old ties to blue-collar Southern whites.
What we get, said Stearns, is this. With youth, which was a key category for Fred Dutton we’re … if you look at the total population under age twenty-five in the country, it’s not what a lot of people probably would expect, even people in this room. But among people in that bracket who vote we do have some important advantages. We have very real and very large advantages with minorities out in the country, all the more so when their income’s low. We do pick up more professional people than a number of our predecessors although it’s interesting, we tend to do that mostly at the lower and at the upper bounds of the income brackets for people, also households, with professional jobs.
There are some larger blocs we pull too. We continue to do better with registered union members than folks predicated back in ‘72 especially so if they come from what we could call a “political” union background. We also have an advantage we hadn’t necessarily foreseen and that’s with women. It’s not huge, but it’s definite and it’s very different from what we’ve seen just with party-based voting where there doesn’t seem to be much shift between the sexes. When you put President McGovern into it, you get both more women overall who support him and more women than men. Especially true if they’re poor, or tied to unions, also some — really important “some” there — professional women.
All right, these people vote for us disproportionately. What do we do to get practical use out of that? Let me just say that’s not by itself a majority of voters. It’s a plurality, we can turn it into a good plurality, the question for us is how efficient can we be with those votes. How can we use our voters to improve our chances for reelection?
Stearns unrolled a map on the table in front of him. It was of middling size, and on each state with a fat black marker Stearns had noted down the Electoral College votes alloted to them.
There are six states, Stearns began as he traced a finger across the map, six states that between them contain more than half the registered and reported union membership in the whole country. At least the Bureau of Labor Statistics says so. They also contain very large numbers of minorities often concentrated in the cities. Plus large numbers of women who fit one of three categories: they’re minorities themselves, they come from union households, or they are middle-class women in professional households, increasingly some of those are professionals themselves. If we go coast to coast, those six states are New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and California. Between them they add up to one hundred eighty-five Electoral College votes. That’s just over two-thirds of what a candidate needs to be elected president.
In full flow now, Stearns carried on. To those six states we can add D.C.as a matter of course, not a very big deal but it’s another three electoral votes. More than that we can add six more states to make a dozen. South Dakota, the President’s home state: our work on farm policy and reform on behalf of American Indians makes a real difference there and despite the big Republican vote they’d be loath to turn against a sitting president from back home. Second there’s Massachusetts, where we took our widest margin of victory in the whole country in 1972 — yes, even now, Stearns said as he shot a quick look towards the expression shaping up on Gary Hart’s face. Next door we get Rhode Island, good margins there too and really very heavily unionized for its size, against one of the more conservative Republican candidates especially that’d be very solid ground for us.
Stearns’ index finger traced into the upper Midwest. Also there are Minnesota and Wisconsin, the latter of which is perhaps the least settled of the dozen but we’ve consistently outperformed expectations there. Last we come to Hawaii, which did go for Nixon in the last cycle but by temperament it’s a Democratic state, and now that we’ve actually banked time in office and shown we’re not incompetent flower children or Soviet sleeper agents there’s been a turnaround out there. Even the military cutbacks there have been balanced out by some expansions — these days fewer Army folks in Hawaii but more Marines, for example.
In those states we have what I’d call strong structural opportunities, based on who it seems our supporters really are. If you win those twelve states plus D.C., you’d receive two hundred thirty-five electoral votes. That nets you just over eighty-seven percent of what you need to win. To get over the top I’ve identified eight other states where different combinations of several — not all — would do it. My personal favorite would be to take Oregon, Missouri, Connecticut, and Maryland which puts you at two-seventy-one with sixteen states. Off a couple of legal pads when I sat down with the state election totals for ‘72, we could maybe achieve that with just over forty-six percent of the popular vote.
Let’s be clear, said Stearns as he took in the room. We’ve always known where we stand with this. It’s not what Pat peddles about uniting the country with some kind of canned sincerity plus a big scoop of protectionism. To win in ‘72 we understood that we needed to find and mobilize a winning plurality against the Silent Majority. We did. We did that. We won most of the key primaries and we ran the best organization in the country to take the caucuses and run the table on delegates for Miami. That fall we won the kind of three-way race we envisioned back in ‘71. Just enough people thought we were the most trustworthy and upstanding campaign left in the race.
That — Stearns waggled a pen in the air for emphasis — that gets to another point. We absolutely cannot underestimate the third-party dynamic now. Third, fourth, there could be more than one movement or more than one splinter. Very possible. That’s most true among the most conservative voters, and in the most conservative parts of the country. We need to look very hard at that, it’s about twenty-eight percent when you look at the aggregate, the twenty-eight percent of the total polled on presidential approval who say they very strongly disapprove of President McGovern. If they can’t get a nominee into the presidential race who’s enough of a fire-eater on us and our issues, they’ll go find a different one.
Think of it this way, said Stearns. If you went out in the street and asked someone that walked by who it was won the last two presidential elections, probably they’d look at you funny and then say Richard Nixon and George McGovern. No. Not really. George Wallace won the last two presidential elections. He won in 1968 by pulling the electorate towards Nixon and was rewarded by many of the policies Nixon pursued in office. Nixon even felt he had to… there’s the whole IRS thing, prosecution of Gerald Wallace or the threat of it, from Nixon, because Nixon needed leverage with the governor. In 1972 Wallace won because he pulled support away from Nixon that gave us an opening to win. That meant we got in, but while we’ve had real successes even those have often been qualified in different ways because Wallace emboldened Southern conservatives to sandbag us.
It looks now — based on how hard his reelection was and some of his personal issues — it looks as though Governor Wallace is in something of a fix now. But he’s gotten out of those before. Even if he doesn’t, it’s especially true in Georgia but not just there, we had some definite signs this cycle that the AIP may have more life in it than just Wallace’s vanity slate. You’ve got some arch-conservative politicians, ones who used to be Democrats, who’re using the AIP as a platform so that they can leave what they would call McGovern’s party but not have to join the Republicans either.
They’ve got more leverage, said Gary Hart, a swift and terrible foe to the obvious. They’re not swallowed up so they can trade on their own voices outside a large caucus.
There’s that, said Stearns. The question is whether there are any larger goals, more coherent goals. I don’t think this is just a new States’ Rights Party, strictly speaking. They’ve got levels of support in places all over the map. If this turns out to be a trend for what happens next with the AIP it seems to point to an ideological party not purely a regional one. There’s been talk for a long time about a true national conservative party, not just separate lists in places like New York but a third force trying to pull it all, the political sphere of the country, to the right. That might be one outcome. Might, qualified Stearns.
There’s also the matter, Stearns tacked again, of our own coalition. In some cases we’ve given power — because they helped us gain the presidency, yeah — gave power to people who haven’t had it before. Also people who very much sought it and suddenly they have more success than they’ve ever had. A lot of people in that situation want to press ahead, and feel like their support entitles them to certain things from politicians to whom they’ve given that support.
The purists certainly can get antsy, added Frank.
Exactly, Stearns replied. Exactly. We have a lot less margin for friction with our voters. We can’t afford to shear off too many people over conflicts of principle. I think we certainly can gain voters over and above what we had in ‘72 based on our record. But even then I worry that there’s no real cushion, not if you look at the kinds of people most likely to vote for us and, simply, how many of them there are — or aren’t — out there. Even the threat of a primary challenge or some kind of issue candidacy through a minor party, those are things we’ve got to take very seriously.
We can’t afford voters who think they have something better to do that Tuesday, said Gene Pokorny.
Does that get us back to your point, Gene? asked Jean Westwood. It’s “fight and be right” ?
Stearns answered first: in some ways we’ve got more freedom, not really latitude but maybe we could say ideological freedom, where we can stick to our guns because we can’t afford to lose the voters who are loyal to us. We fight for them all the way because we need them loyal and motivated, also the act of fighting for them means we’ve stuck largely with the principles we’ve embraced. So that’s a kind of upside. An awful lot is always going to depend on who we find ourselves up against.
Chuck Percy scares the hell out of me, Gary Hart said earnestly. Well he should, answered Stearns.
Frank shrugged with his face as only he could do, then added: he looks bigger on TV. It was a tidy shot at Percy’s flyweight size and central-casting persona.
Percy’s a real concern, Stearns carried on. I think actually that we could beat him in California, partly because the really hard California right would either turn against him or stay home. But Percy’s from Illinois, we could make that a turnout battle but he still has odds to win it. He’d make life hell for us throughout the Steel Belt and in places like Oregon, Missouri, Connecticut. He also looks… dangerously acceptable to some important parts of the institutional party — I’m talking about our party here, the Democratic Party — the ones that haven’t forgiven us, and probably won’t, for jumping the queue in ‘72 or for some of our policy positions. Best bet with Percy is to undermine him on the right, build up some kind of third-force challenge, but even that would take a hell of an effort. And we could still bleed enough support in his direction in key states that an, an escapade of that kind wouldn’t end up mattering.
I would say there’s Reagan to consider as well, said Frank.
But he’ll run about three degrees to the right of Genghis Khan, said Hart.
I remember his debate with Senator Kennedy, Frank answered, using the form of address he preferred when he needed Bobby to remain safely an object of the past, especially since Frank had talked Bobby into that disastrous venture. Then Frank delivered his lede: Reagan has conviction, and conviction sells. Also, there goes California from Rick’s plan.
Gene Pokorny piped up. Question then is can we keep the factory guys in the Midwest away from him; if we can make him declare on MECA and Social Security and the rest during the primaries there’s a chance we can pull it off.
There’s Ed Gurney, said Doug Coulter. All the ideology of Reagan but with the rough edges sanded down, also quite a war record while Reagan was keeping the MGM lot safe from the Nazis.
Frank nodded along. Then he added: Ron’s folks don’t like to say this out loud, but at times Governor Reagan has gotten along with the legislature in Sacramento. Senator Gurney prefers his earth scorched.
Hell, added Gary Hart with an existential shrug of his voice, these days we’ll have Governor Westmoreland, I guess he is now, if they really want a man on a white horse.
I don’t know that the GOP wants to re-litigate Vietnam quite that badly, said Jean Westwood. That said I would not be surprised at all to see him on the ticket, they certainly mean to box us out of the South.
The South does its own boxes these days, answered Gary Hart with dour disdain.
There was an industrious pause. As he fiddled with his pen Gary Hart carried on. Maybe we should work backwards, he said, get a good look at their primary calendar as it comes together — the GOP’s primary calendar — and figure out where the likeliest paths to victory lie. Then perhaps we can develop a better picture of potential opponents.
That’ll always need to correct for fog and friction, said Doug Coulter, the one-man murder board.
There’s a unifying theme in this, I think, said Rick Stearns. It’s not one I like but I should point to it.
To me, said Stearns, it seems like the thing is this: we’re going to have to scare people. If the Republicans nominate someone fairly moderate, we’re going to have to help scare the right — the Southerners, the Goldwater folks, even people like the Birchers — that this moderate will sell them down the river so they need to take a principled stand against them. If the Republicans go to the right, whether that’s Gurney or Reagan or whoever, we have to scare the middle of the electorate that they’ll undo the good work for ordinary people we and other administrations have done. We can work for positive change to shore up our voting base but in the end I’m afraid peeling off that margin of victory from the middle… that probably takes fear.
On that uplifting note, said Frank, we maybe should get into some of the technical details before we get out of here.
Before we do that, said Doug Coulter — without a glance up from his legal notepad and in a cadence unchanged since he was quizzing Operations officers before dawn ahead of a long chopper flight and a morning stroll along the Ho Chi Minh Trail — I wanted to bring up a set of possibilities we ought to consider.
Just Frank gestured agreeably in Coulter’s direction, so Coulter carried on: the first is this. Just a bit to the right of us, if you drew a line across American politics described from left to right, to the right of us but not a great distance, you get to a large patch of relatively common ground. There are some specific distinctions, sure, when you get in among people like Scoop Jackson or Bob Strauss or among people like John Connally or Governor Rockefeller. But there also are a lot of points in common, for them and for people clustered in their direction — probably on the left-hand side of that cluster you’ve got folks like Senator Humphrey, out on the right folks like Connally and Strauss, in the middle say Chuck Percy, some of the liberal Republicans… anyway. That cluster probably represents as close as you could come right now to a rough consensus in American politics.
For the last two years, in a number of ways, we’ve done what you could call their dirty work for them. Things from which they benefit, things that if you sat them down and really pressed them with a choice between what we’ve done and some of the stark alternatives they’d probably accept, if not our policy, then the results we got from it. But these are things that they’d have considered too controversial, too leftist, too damaging to their public image, simply too risky to do themselves.
We made real, substantive Medicare for all happen. We’ve pushed through the new tax regime probably at some real political cost, in terms of favors we owe and congressmen who lost seats. We’ve done what had to be done dealing with inflation and with getting the federal government involved to relieve unemployment, not just backing Humphrey-Hawkins though we did but also an actual, coherent industrial policy instead of a lobbyist’s spoils system that isn’t really even a system. We put a woman on the Supreme Court. We cut the defense budget and overseas military commitments, not as much as we wanted to but real cuts. We gave amnesty to the draft evaders. We got out of Vietnam.
That puts us at the hinge of a dialectic, Coulter went on. Many of the things we’d list as accomplishments are not things any of those other politicians, or the people associated with them, would have taken the risk to pursue. But they’re broadly acceptable, the results that is, to those people. On one hand if we put a lot of energy into those kinds of policies, those projects, we might manage to pull undecided voters from that political middle the papers talk about in our direction.
On the other hand we may have less time, energy, attention — inclination — for some key elements of policy that are more our own, things only we would carry forward. We might get that pull from the middle our way. We might also, and instead, create a set of circumstances that makes it easier for politicians who lay claim to that middle to say they’ll keep the things we’ve done that the folks in the suburbs like, but they’ll stop or leave aside all the hippie bullshit about truly equal rights and economic equity and open democracy so people can carry on with their football and handguns and air pollution.
On the other other hand, we could focus on the things that only we are really willing to go after, seize the moment we’ve been given to accomplish things only we, among real or probable administrations, have the conviction to pursue. We may even owe that to some of our strongest supporters. It might win us points — I mean actual percentage points of the popular vote — for honesty and the strength of our principles. But probably not enough for us to win reelection.
A different way to consider it, said Coulter, would also be this. When we pursue the policy goals to which we’re most committed, there are strong forces and strong incentives on the other side to move to the opposite of our position, to contrast, fight us from the other pole rather than the middle. There was some of that to our own campaign in ‘72 and our own ideals about governing. When we do what we do, likely we help create a reactionary response because it’s just that — a reaction against us. That may actually help us. It could convince more moderate or just undecided voters that they prefer us overall, at least that we’re the devil they know by now rather than another untried extreme.
But we shouldn’t take that for granted. An awful lot of Americans want to believe in individualism and rugged anti-communism and the manly violence of the frontier and that whole damned mess. We have no more control over future events than anyone with a plan has; the first rules you learn mapping out plans in the service are that your enemy gets a vote in the outcome and then blind chance gets half a dozen or more.
My views are my own, Coulter went on. Those have much to do with being able to look myself and the country in the face when we’re done. But we should consider both the possibility that our choices have the seeds of our undoing in them, and also that all this is complicated enough we may not be able to reason our way to a perfect outcome, or even a good one. At the end of the day what we do, we have to live with. That might be a truer guide.
Thank you, Doug, said Just Frank. He glanced over the room. If we can get two hundred and seventy members of the Electoral College to look in the same mirror we might be on to something. Anyone like to talk through incorporation structures for the fundraisers before we get out of the fishbowl and grab some coffee?
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The late autumn in Idaho had turned up lovely. Crisp breezes drifted down the evergreens across the surface tension of the lakes, the hardwoods turned yellow and vermilion and umber, there was a lightness to the air. In the minds of the men who lounged in chairs on a broad porch at Richard Girnt Butler’s property outside Coeur d’Alene the bright majestic surroundings hallowed this spot where they meant to conjure an Ayran future.
Yet, whatever shared and iron millennium they saw in White Power, the meet was anything but brotherhood week. The worthies of whiteness and Judenhass — the old German word for it, Jew-hatred, clothed them much more closely than the angular legalism antisemitism — held their own views white-knuckled against their rivals and it was, entirely, a cast of rivals each of whom looked over the rest like competitors in tooth and claw for mastery of the pride.
Butler himself, burly and slab-faced like a Steel Belt alderman, was in fact a successful aerospace engineer, a longtime Lockheed man with a patent for tubeless tires. H’ed pledged the cause in quiet since shirts were silver, then ridden anti-communism in the wild spaces of Southern California’s right wing as far as he could go, until he decamped to Idaho where he could follow his dream, the Christian Identity klavern of sanctified narcissism and weaponized hate he called the Aryan Nations. Right across from him on the breeze-touched porch sat slender little William Luther Pierce, bloody-minded prophet of white struggle, a former physics professor and acolyte of George Lincoln Rockwell who’d built up his own following in the deep hills that hovered over Washington, D.C. Each man saw their parts in the play as pope and anti-pope, with himself the hero, ready to jab and cut for advantage.
There were the Posse Comitatus boys, fiercely independent in the fashion of their movement, who loved the mental landscape of White Power but bore a persnickety small-town outlook about the right of others to talk strategy at them. Coiffed and manicured there was the boy prince of the Klan, David Duke, still fashioning his mustache just so; nearby Duke’s ostensible West Coast lieutenant Tom Metzger, older and harder, who had the muscled, square-jawed look of one of Sam Yorty’s LAPD enforcers. They had common cause in the political triangulation of the Klan’s historic machinery with the National Socialist White People’s Party and insurgent subcultures like the Skinheads, but when it came to it Duke thought Metzger was an uncultured Left Coast thug, while Metzger looked right through Duke as a dilettante pretty boy.
What we should do, said Metzger, is talk about the election.
Again you want to talk up this whole entryist line, said Pierce, waspish as usual. Doesn’t seem to me that gets us at what is to be done about the immediate crisis for our race brethren, what we do when all the legal instruments and privileges in the defense of white America are being systematically dismantled…
Duke cut in with that politician’s smile. Tom has a fair point, said Duke, always ready to leapfrog Metzger with tolerant indulgence especially if it got under the big man’s skin along the way. We’d be well served to look at both the last two elections, Duke added: there’s a lot to see here. You go to ‘72 and you have twenty-six states where Wallace won at least eight percent of the vote. Twenty-six. Twenty where he won at least ten percent. Now, these are extraordinary numbers for us. Consistent, too, that’s all in the neighborhood of the ‘68 water mark. If we can reach those people, educate them, breathe some life into their natural instincts and concerns, that’s a political force like White Power hasn’t had in forty years.
The Posse worthies rumbled a little, inherently suspicious of engagement, convinced the pure expression of white sovereignty was separation.Pierce had helped bring Duke up in the movement, turned him from a self-important social irritant at Louisana State into a new face of the movement, but still thought Duke liked the spotlight better than the struggle.
There’s been a lack of focus, said Pierce, all this political distraction leads it on, we have not focused on the need to fuse the disparate parts of white-power feeling into the most effective force for change. A lot of localism, some backsliding even.
This is a work in progress, said Duke. Pierce, you and I know this, we’ve talked over it together but I want to remind him again, it’s a matter of acclimating people. A lot of the old boys, a lot of rank and file Klan, these fellas go back to the war and it can shake them up a bit when they’re in a room with swastikas. It takes some relearning. They know the crisis, they feel it in their bones, they know time’s short. So they can learn to adapt. But we need to give ‘em the space, show some respect while they get right in their heads. You can’t just shove them in a box with a movement they fought against when they were young.
Then, Pierce retorted, those Klan boys of yours need to wake up as to who’s fought — fought, even died, Pierce added as his voice caught at the memory of Rockwell — for our imperiled race and our misbegotten country while the klaverns palled around in their sheets and sold each other down the river to the FBI.
Metzger leaned forward in his chair bringing his big boxer’s shoulders with him. Richard Girnt Butler, whose porch it was, figured the moment a good one to reassert himself and take Pierce down a peg as he did. What we need, said Butler, is coordination. We all have our habits and our hopes and our concerns but we can’t build a true white homeland in the face of that faggot McGovern and all his Jew-bought satraps in politics, not unless we find some common methods, integrate our vision, for a free Aryan homeland pulled out of this wreckage.
I respect our Posse brothers for their discipline and attention to freedom, said Metzger as he jumped in ahead of Duke’s next polished abstraction. But I’m gonna come back again to the notion that we should follow two tracks to a White Power outcome.
First track — a meaty finger shot up as Metzger held court — we take the AIP opportunity seriously.We get into a dialogue with core AIP voters and give them straight talk, give ‘em the real truth. We teach a lot of our people out there in the field, who don’t have the background, don’t know how to do much but cook up schemes or rumble with the local spics and niggers, give them a real political education. Teach discipline, organization — they’re gonna need these skills to run the movement, run the homeland when victory comes. Get press and attention as a political movement, not something the Jewish media can write off, something they have to take seriously in the mainstream of American politics. Walking away from that, it’s foolish. Be where Zionist-occupied government can’t ignore. Get ‘em to watch our left hand, watch so well that then we hit ‘em blind from the right.
Metzger put up another finger: so there’s the second part. We engage. Not just scattershot stuff, egos and tempers. We need a disciplined network that can do confrontation, do sabotage, up to armed engagements when there’s agreement on the strategic value of the move. Compartmented, dedicated. Like that mick Kennedy said they throw the cap over the wall. They move the goalposts. Shift rank and file, the political, the organized, the curious, farther and farther in our direction. We need the extreme not just because these are extreme times for white survival. We need it because they change what the ordinary folks, those casual AIP voters who get it but don’t know it, what they’ll understand, what they are ready to do. Direct action opens the political window of opportunity in our direction. And we use this third party between the big, Jew-driven ones, for our cause. Our truth.
Duke chimed in again. The third-force approach is an approach of creative destruction, said Duke. We can throw the norms and the assumptions of Zionist-driven politics into total confusion. We can drive the outcome of elections — hell, I say give George McGovern four more years! The more he drowns decent white citizens in racially inferior neighbors, racially inferior workplaces, steals their money by law and passes it around the mud-peoples, runs some kind of dictatorial nanny state, he makes the real state of things clear to decent white citizens. Let’s have the Right to be Different! Because when that little experiment fails terribly we can take that right and use it to build a strong white nation.
But the engines of that change, said Pierce, the men who build our world, they will have to fight to take it. Without warriors we can’t seize the moment here in our own time, our own reality. Structural change and historical examples only take us so far. White power must be taken and proven by force. We must … expunge those who would destroy us.
Masterfully vague, Butler stepped in: we’re going to learn the path back to the True White Israel as we go, said he. We learn by experience and revelation. Can’t have experience unless you stop writing and proposing — his glance touched just slightly on Pierce — and roll up your sleeves to work.
It seems to me, Butler went on, the Posse Comitatus community are going to be a lot happier with deeds than words. Fine, we have multitudes in us, they have a valued part to play. For the rest we should talk about these two prongs. The pastoral work — I don’t think it’s too much to call it that, said the self-appointed pastor of ethnic cleansing — and the, ah, the direct action. There’s some diligence and care we need there.
Need to keep it ahead of McGovern’s boss kike, sure, said Metzger — the reference to FBI Director Mikva was lost on no one.
I must stress again, said Pierce, the need for us to be ever mindful, ever focused, on the defeat — the eradication — of the mortal, direct, Zionist-driven threat to white survival.
David Duke smiled. Pierce, he answered, there’s plenty of opportunity. Plenty of opportunity. We’ve got a wide berth here to talk through stringin’ up the Jews while the rest of us get down to work. It’s a big tent we have here.
