The Politics of Losing

by Rory McVeigh

  By 2011, the number of Americans over age twenty-five with a college degree reached 30 percent.32 In 1980, that number was only 17 percent. And those with degrees have always been more likely to turn out at the polls than those without.33 Trump’s supporters also tended to be older, and the growth of the millennial generation posed yet one more threat to their political power. At 31 percent of the electorate, the millennial generation now equals the Baby Boomer generation in size.34 Turnout rates among millennials remain lower, but are rising. The values and interests of these younger voters appeared to older generations of white voters out of step with their priorities, and they interpret this shift as a decline in their ability to shape the national political agenda. “I am seventy-two years old, and I have seen our country absolutely fall apart,” said a Trump rallier in Florida. “Our economy is depleted, our military forces are depleted. We’re a country that’s in trouble. What culture do we have anymore?”35

  Changes in the composition of the electorate created pools of voters—older, rural, white, less educated—who responded to Trump’s unconventional campaign. Because a group’s capacity to influence politics depends on its ability to court the attention of elected officials with their votes, shifts in the composition of the electorate inevitably advantage some groups while marginalizing others. In the 1920s, a growing population of immigrants living in cities diminished the political power of native-born whites, who were excluded from the industrial economy. Just the same, demographic changes today work against older, white, non-college-educated Americans, who believe politicians care more about attracting minority voters and advocating policies that cater to the younger, better-educated workforce. It is not hard to imagine why Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” resonated with them. His nostalgic vision turned back the clock to a time before multiculturalism and globalization when, in his supporters’ view, they still enjoyed a privileged position in politics.

  “America was founded as a white Christian republic,” wrote Pastor Thomas Robb in his endorsement of Trump for the Klan’s contemporary newspaper, The Crusader. “And as a white Christian republic it became great.”36

  * * *

  In the early 1920s, their eroding economic and political power prompted a group of white Americans to embrace a political social movement that promised to agitate on their behalf. The Klan successfully advocated to curb immigration, which severed the supply of unskilled workers and pushed back the tide of those who would eventually vote in national elections. The Klan’s success in recruiting millions and bringing their complaints to the voting booth forced presidential candidates to respond to the movement.

  In early 2015 there was not yet a strong social movement looking for a remedy to the injuries of those who would eventually become Trump supporters. Then Trump arrived, and he ignored the standard playbook for winning a Republican nomination. Outside of an explicit promise to overturn Roe v. Wade, he otherwise bucked conventional wisdom: He did not work particularly hard to convince evangelical voters that he understood their faith or would advance their values; he ignored neoliberal trickle-down economics; and he offered nationalist and protectivist prescriptions that promised to bring good jobs back home to struggling workers. “Make America Great Again” meant pushing back against the sources of economic and political slippage that plagued his base. Instead of reaching out to win support from nonwhite voters to, at least temporarily, keep the Republican Party from succumbing to demographic trends, Trump aimed to capture the Republican margin of white voters so completely that it offset the opposition he provoked from minority voters.

  The success of this strategy depended, of course, on the question of whether orthodox Republican voters—those who turned to the party to protect their class advantages—would line up behind him after he secured the nomination. He posed a dilemma for Republican voters and legislators who did not want to tie themselves to his bigotry and behavior and who disagreed with his nationalistic economics but who feared a Hillary Clinton presidency for other reasons. A widely read essay published by the conservative Claremont Institute referred to this dilemma as the “Flight 93 Election.” Flight 93 was the plane hijacked on September 11, 2001, by Al-Qaeda terrorists, who intended to crash it into the Capitol. But the passengers revolted, fought the hijackers, and forced the doomed flight down into a Pennsylvania field, killing all on board. The choice, according to the essay, was this: “Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.”37

  And this turned out to be true. The majority of orthodox Republicans were willing to risk Trump rather than the prospect of Hillary Clinton in the White House. Sixty-six percent of respondents who voted for Trump had voted for Romney in 2012, while 13 percent voted for Obama, 1 percent reported voting for someone else, and 20 percent either didn’t vote, didn’t know, or refused to answer.38

  To make this decision even easier for orthodox Republicans, Trump signaled that, in spite of his protectivist and populist rhetoric, he would still promote policies that disproportionately benefited wealthy Americans. In late 2015 he released his proposed tax plan. Among other things, it lowered the tax bracket for the wealthiest Americans to 25 percent. It eliminated the Alternative Minimum Tax, allowing many wealthy Americans to use deductions to reduce or even eliminate their federal income tax burden. It eliminated the estate tax—as of 2017, a tax only applicable to estates larger than 5.5 million dollars—and stipulated that no business of any size would pay more than 15 percent of business income in taxes.39 “We’re going to cancel every needless job-killing regulation,” he said, “and put a moratorium on new regulations until our economy gets back on its feet.”40

  In America’s two-party system, the Republican Party must cobble together and nurture alliances among constituents who are drawn to the party to protect different kinds of privilege. Trump appealed to voters who were not rich but who turned to Republicanism because they believed it was committed to protecting the privileges of race, nativity, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. When they met Trump, they sensed that this was a new sort of candidate, starkly different from his competitors for the nomination, and maybe from any Republican nominee ever. They were willing to overlook a host of shortcomings, and they supported him with unusual fervor. Traditional Republicans, who were primarily concerned with protecting their class privileges, on the other hand, felt they could stomach Trump if he would advance their agenda and protect their wealth. If an uneasy coalition of die-hard Trump supporters and traditional Republicans could secure Congress and the White House, they could enact the economic policies that Obama had hampered.

  And so Trump made it to the White House. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” he said in his inaugural address. “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished—but the people did not share in its wealth.”41

  7

  STATUS AND WHITE NATIONALISM

  “The word ‘Protestant’,” wrote one Klansman, “should be emphasized on the next to the last syllable. It is one who protests, no matter whether against religious, civil, social, or educational conditions.”1 Religion has a central role in social movements—even those that are ideologically distant. The church was an organizational base for the civil rights movement in the 1960s,2 but served the same purpose for the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.3 “We avow the distinction between the races of mankind as same as has been decreed by the Creator,” wrote Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, “and shall be ever true in the faithful maintenance of White Supremacy and will strenuously oppose any compromise thereof, in any and all things.”4

  Religion is a shared identity, a social glue that coheres people into a common cause.5 In the 1920s, the Klan weaponized the bonds among Protestants to wage their
economic and political battles. The first organized reaction to waves of Catholic immigration had come in 1850, in the form of the Know-Nothing Party. The Know-Nothings believed that every Catholic foot stepping on American soil diluted their values just a little bit more. They took up the same issues that the Klan would battle for into the 1920s. They advocated immigration restrictions and deportation of Catholics involved in crime. They insisted on Bible reading in all schools and aimed to bar Catholics from public office. They opposed alcohol. And they claimed that the Protestant faith, unlike Catholicism, represented the true American values of independence, self-reliance, and diligent work.6

  In the 1920s, anti-Catholic sentiment, led by the Klan, spiked once again, as the social standing of Catholics was on the rise. New immigrants, largely from southern and central European countries like Poland and Italy, started at the bottom of the ladder, working in unskilled jobs. But the middle class swelled as second- and third-generation Catholics, largely from Ireland and Germany, became upwardly mobile.7 To discredit the rising Catholic class, in late 1924 and early 1925, the editor of the Imperial Night-Hawk and the Kourier published a series of articles comparing the Ku Klux Klan to the “primitive Christian Church originated by Christ.”8 The articles—with titles like “Paul the Protestant” and “Jesus the Protestant”—revisited the doctrinal grudges that Protestants held against Catholicism. Central among these was the criticism of priests interceding between God and man. Jesus “had no place in His religious scheme of things for obtaining salvation by the correspondence course method. It must all be individual; it must all be personal; it must all be voluntary. With Jesus, it was not so much what the fathers said, nor what the priests declared, as it was what the Father said.”9

  Underlying these doctrinal complaints was the fact that Klansmen saw Protestantism as a tool of resistance to Catholics climbing the status hierarchy. They looked to the apostle Peter: “Because of the intenseness of his nature he became a fighter. He was aggressive for the truth. He was usually the one to voice protest against error or against any interference that might come from the opponents to the ministry of Jesus.”10 Just as Protestants in the 1920s suffered as Catholics ascended to the middle class, the Klan reminded themselves how Christ and his disciples—these “early Protestants,” as they called them—were ridiculed, disdained, and crucified. “Before [Jesus] was born, His mother was subjected to stinging insults. His very birthplace was an insult. He was threatened with death while still at His mother’s breast…. His public ministry was challenged at every turn. He knew nothing but hard knocks.” So, “as He protested, so must His followers protest.”11 And protest they did, as millions of men and women donned hoods and sheets and marched through the streets of their towns, searching for respect as much as they did economic and political power.

  * * *

  This sense of defiance rooted in religion persists. Exit polls show that 81 percent of white voters who identified as born again or evangelical supported Donald Trump. That’s more than supported Mitt Romney in 2012, John McCain in 2008, and George W. Bush in 2004. Trump also fared better than they did among white Catholic voters (60 percent).12 Trump, as a man, clearly did not model conservative Christian values. So how did he win their votes?

  After the election, evangelical leader Franklin Graham, son of the legendary evangelical preacher Billy Graham, wrote, “While the media scratches their heads and tries to understand how this happened, I believe that God’s hand intervened Tuesday night to stop the godless, atheistic progressive agenda from taking control of our country.”13

  Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the evangelical Liberty University and a son of another famous televangelist, compared Trump to his own father: “Like Mr. Trump, Dad would speak his mind; he would make statements that were politically incorrect…. He even had a billboard at the entrance to this campus for years that read ‘Liberty University, politically incorrect since 1971.’”14

  Ordinary Trump voters seemed to admire these same attributes. One supporter interviewed on CNN said he would trust the word of Trump over Jesus Christ when it came to allegations of Russian collusion. “I believe in him. He’s a good man,” he explained. “He has taken so many shots for us.”15

  What explains this? In the 1920s, Protestant resentment toward an ascendant Catholic class reached fever pitch. America was in danger of losing its place as a white Protestant republic, or so they feared. This resentment spilled into two public policy debates: education and the enforcement of Prohibition. The Klan seized on these and manufactured crises about foreign influence in American education and an epidemic of bootlegging and racketeers. As moral crusaders, Klansmen in the public arena pushed new laws as a means of legally oppressing Catholics and immigrants, and night-riding Klansmen savagely punished those who transgressed them.

  A sense of lost status created a bedrock of support for the 1920s Klan, and later a similar sense would do the same for Trump. In the 1920s the Klan’s response was to advocate for public education and Prohibition; Trump supporters today link their status to race, gender, and religion. Status is rooted in exchange relationships in which people trade cultural traits and behaviors for esteem. It may decline as supply increases or as demand decreases. Protestantism would offer little esteem in a nation where everyone was Protestant; at the same time, esteem would diminish when the non-Protestant population reached a tipping point, when enshrined Protestant values might be superseded by new and different values, like Catholicism.

  In the last ten years, a new sense of loss metastasized in those who would eventually vote for Trump. Christian identity and traditional family structures were on the wane; the culture wars were mostly lost causes; and epidemics of opioids, meth, and suicide gripped rural white America. The status and esteem of the working-class white rural Christian traditional family was in tatters, and the first candidate to exploit this would capture the White House.

  HOW TO CREATE A CRISIS

  In the 1920s, Klan leaders manipulated anti-Catholic prejudice to recruit members. The Klan, of course, did not create these divisions. Protestant hostility toward Catholics is rooted deep in American history. Commenting on the traits Americans inherited from their British colonizers, Catholic historian John Tracy Ellis wrote, in 1956, “Certainly the anti-Catholic bias brought to this country with the first English settlers has proved one of the sturdiest and most lasting of these qualities.”16 In the 1880s, only a few decades after the Know-Nothing Party’s heyday, the American Protective Association organized to stoke anger over Catholic influence in schools, politics, and the workplace.17 The Klan simply had a knack for invigorating these prejudices and linking them to the problems of their supporters.

  The Klan’s rhetorical attacks on Catholics often resonated strongly in communities where the population was overwhelmingly Protestant, where any local threat posed by Catholics was minimal at worst. It was here that the Klan spread farthest. Sociologist John Moffat Mecklin, a contemporary of the 1920s Klan, seemed bewildered by how rapidly the Klan grew in Oregon. “Here is a state,” he wrote, “composed of eighty-five percent [native-born] Americans. It has no race problem. It is predominantly Protestant in faith, the Catholics forming but eight percent of the population. It is not torn by industrial conflict. It is not threatened by radicalism in any form. It has progressive laws, an admirable educational system, less than two percent illiteracy. Yet this typical American state has been completely overrun and, for a time at least, politically dominated by a secret oath-bound organization preaching religious bigotry and racial animosity and seeking primarily its own political aggrandizement.”18

  In Oregon, it was public education, more than any other issue, that riled up citizens and carved out a foothold for the Klan. In the spring of 1921, Klansmen entered Oregon and began connecting with churches and fraternal lodges.19 There they discovered an ongoing fight over the nature of public education. Many Oregon Protestants did not want Catholicism in their education, either in the form of Catholic instru
ctors in public schools or through the very existence of private Catholic schools. The issue, according to one, was “not a question of Catholics having the right to follow the teaching of their Dago Pope … but the right of Protestants to educate their children by the best school system in the world.”20

  Voters were considering a ballot initiative called the Compulsory Education Law, which would mandate public education for children between eight and sixteen. By outlawing private education, the bill not-so-subtly aimed to wipe out parochial Catholic schools. The Klan, operating at first under the guise of the Scottish Rites Masons, mobilized to back the initiative.21 Catholic organizations organized to protest the bill and allied with Lutherans since they also had a stake in protecting private schooling.22 By the time the bill came up for a vote, the Klan had become a force within the state. The Klan had established a chapter in nearly every town with a population more than one thousand, and by 1923 the Klan claimed to have about fifty thousand members in the state.23 But Portland was the heart and soul of Klan power. The Klan repeatedly filled Portland’s five-thousand-seat auditorium for rallies, Klan lecturers riled up crowds with anti-Catholic diatribes, and Fred Gifford, the leader of the Oregon Klan, drew the police force into the Klan ranks, so that hundreds of policemen joined the Invisible Empire.24

  The election turned out to be a clear victory for the Klan. The education bill had been a central issue of contention in the state, and it provided the Klan with an opening to establish itself as a strong presence. In November 1922, the bill passed with a 4 percent margin.25 Even more remarkable, the Klan elected a Democratic governor in a state where two-thirds of voters were registered Republicans. The Democratic candidate, Walter Pierce, endorsed the compulsory education bill, a signal of his support for the Klan: “I believe we would have a better generation of Americans, free from snobbery and bigotry, if all children up to and including eighth grade were educated in the free public schools of America.”26 He declared himself to be a ninth-generation American Protestant. And America, he argued, must remain American.27