The Clown Car

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Well, the Democratic Party’s candidates for President — or at least 20 of them — got to get out of what has increasingly looked like a clown car and actually talk to voters on TV June 26 and 27 in Miami, Florida. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) co-sponsored the debate with three NBC-owned TV networks — NBC itself, MS-NBC and Telemundo — and set up the rules by which the candidates would have to demonstrate enough nationwide support, either by poll numbers or donations to their campaigns, to qualify for the events.

That’s two events because the DNC decided to have separate debates on each night, with 10 candidates on Wednesday, June 26 and 10 more Thursday, June 27. The apparent intent was to avoid what the Republicans did with a similarly packed clown-car’s worth of 17 candidates in 2016 — pick out the 10 leading candidates for the main-stage, prime-time debate and relegate the others to a kid’s-table undercard debate in the afternoon.

But when four of the five leading candidates — former vice-president Joe Biden, Senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Kamala Harris (D-CA), and South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg (pronounced “boot-a-judge,” by the way) — ended up on the second-night stage, the first debate on Wednesday started to look like merely the warmup act.

It gave especially short shrift to Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) just when she was starting to rise in the polls from third place to second, behind Biden but ahead of Sanders. Though the DNC officials insisted that the assignments were “random,” it certainly seemed like the DNC, which in 2016 blatantly rigged the process against Sanders and in favor of Hillary Clinton, wanted to trash the chances of Warren, who’s just as progressive as Sanders but seems to know the political process a lot better and has done a lot more work to translate their shared left-of-center ideas into actual policy proposals.

Warren dominated the first hour of the first night’s debate but then barely got called on in the second half by moderators Rachel Maddow and Chuck Todd — though she recovered long enough to give an eloquent closing statement calling for an America where the economic and political systems aren’t blatantly rigged by and for the already super-rich.

What mostly got reported out of Wednesday’s debate was an arcane argument between two of the lesser candidates, both from Texas (a state so deep-red Donald Trump would have to be caught on tape having an orgy with a seven-year-old boy and a goat to lose it), former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro and former Congressmember (and failed U.S. Senate candidate) Beto O’Rourke over whether immigrating into the U.S. without proper documents should continue to be a federal crime or whether it should be reduced to the civil offense it used to be.

And what mostly got reported out of Thursday’s debate was a carefully prepared assault on former V-P Biden by Kamala Harris, who comes from an African-American background but frankly doesn’t look like it. (The first time I heard of her and saw her photo, I assumed from her skin color, her very un-Black hair and nose, and the name “Kamala” that she was [East] Indian.)

One of Biden’s talking points has been that he’s the candidate who can do the most to preserve and extend the legacy of African-American civil rights activism. Not only was he the vice-president to the first African-American President in U.S. history, his poll standing among Black Democrats is 45 percent — over 10 percent higher than his support among Democrats as a whole.

But Harris, following Republican strategist Karl Rove’s tactic of attacking the opponent where he (or she) seems to be strongest, tore into Biden for having opposed the use of busing to integrate schools in the 1970’s. Harris said that she herself had been part of the second class bused from Berkeley’s low-income Black neighborhoods to schools in more affluent white communities, and added that she believed she got better opportunities from that education that enabled her to go to college, become an attorney and serve as district attorney in San Francisco, attorney general of California and ultimately a U.S. Senator.

I missed the first 45 minutes of Thursday’s debate — I was still on my way home from work when it was going on — but I got home in time to hear the Harris-Biden exchange. My heart sank. Frankly, in the argument between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden over busing, the real winner was … Donald Trump.

As an elementary-school student in the mid-1970’s, Harris may not be old enough to remember the hideous damage “busing” — both the word and the concept — did to the Democratic Party. But I do. It tore apart communities in cities as different as Los Angeles and Boston and led to former liberal and progressive allies not only rhetorically but sometimes physically attacking each other. “Busing” was one of the key racist code words by which the Republican Party was able in the 1960’s and 1970’s to break apart the New Deal coalition and win the white working class away from the Democrats and towards the Republicans.

As I’ve argued in these pages before, the Republicans put together a Right-wing coalition that has mostly, though not totally, dominated U.S. politics since 1968 by tapping white working-class prejudices about race and culture and saying the Democrats had sold out the white working class to protect racial minorities, feminists, hippies and Queers. Every Republican who has won a Presidential election since 1968 — Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes and Donald Trump — has done so in part by manipulating white working-class anxieties with words like “busing,” “welfare queens,” “illegal immigrants” and the like.

In their attempt to unseat a President who managed to win largely by convincing working-class white voters — especially in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio that had particularly suffered from the deindustrialization of America and the mass export of jobs to lower-wage countries and low-paid “illegal” workers in this one — that he was on their side, the last thing the Democrats should be doing is dropping words like “busing” into their debates and thereby reminding white working-class voters why they stopped voting for Democrats and started voting for Republicans in the first place.

It’s 1896 All Over Again

One of the most bizarre things about modern-day U.S. political commentary is how every time there’s an open contest for the Democratic Presidential nomination, pundits and the chattering classes seem to “discover” all over again that there’s a conflict within the Democratic Party between moderate centrists and Left progressives. There’s a conflict, all right, but it’s nothing new.

It really began in 1896, when the Democratic Party was in the minority almost everywhere in the U.S. but the South, which was still essentially fighting the Civil War and saw the Democrats as their instrument for keeping African-Americans as close to slavery as they could. Elsewhere in the nation the Civil War’s victors, the Republicans, dominated politics so completely that between 1860 and 1892 the Republicans won seven Presidential elections to the Democrats’ two, and held Congressional majorities through most of that time as well.

In 1896 the incumbent President was Grover Cleveland, the Democrat who had won both the elections the Republicans had lost (as well as a third election, in 1888, in which he’d won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College to Republican Benjamin Harrison — sound familiar?). It was a time in which national politics were controlled almost outright by the giant corporations that ran the economy in the new industrial age, came together to form monopolistic “trusts” and destroy potential competition, and treated the political system basically as a store in which they could “buy” favorable policies by donating to politicians’ campaigns and often by running for — and essentially purchasing — elective office themselves. It was also the era in which the U.S. Congress passed its first restrictions on immigration, including banning a whole country — China — from sending us immigrants.

Indeed, I’ve been arguing ever since Donald Trump emerged as the alligator who ate all the other Republican Presidential candidates in the swamp in 2016 that the answer to Hillary Clinton’s rhetorical question to him — just when does Trump think America was “great,” and to which he wants to return to “make America great again”? — is the 1880’s. At the time there were no restrictions on corporations’ ability to pollute the environment, low-ball workers’ wages and subject them to dangerous conditions, block workers from organizing unions, merge into giant trusts to keep anyone from competing with them, or pay politicians what amounted to outright bribes to maintain their “freedom” to exploit everyone else for their own gain.

Though the Democrats had gained a Congressional majority in 1874 and the Presidency in 1884 largely by exploiting public revulsion over the Republicans’ political corruption, once in office they behaved pretty much the same way. Like his Republican predecessors, President Cleveland called out the National Guard and other federal forces to break strikes. He ran an economic policy that focused on keeping inflation low instead of expanding economic opportunity by putting more money in circulation. The result was a nationwide “Panic” — 19^th-century speak for “depression” — that hit in 1893 and lasted at least five years.

Americans who were getting hurt by these policies responded politically by forming the Populist Party in 1892 (which makes it especially ironic that a President like Trump who’s on the opposite side of all the major economic issues from the original Populists keeps being called a “populist” by political commentators who don’t know the term’s history). The Democrats of the 1890’s regarded the emergence of the Populists as an existential threat — could they annihilate the Democratic Party the way the Republicans had with the Whig Party in the 1850’s? — and they split over the question, beat them or co-opt them?

In 1896 the race for the Democratic Presidential nomination was between moderate Grover Cleveland and progressive William Jennings Bryan. Bryan has become one of the most misunderstood figures in American politics because late in life he embraced the cause of Fundamentalist Christianity and tried to block the teaching of evolution. But his 1896 campaign was a slashing attack on the power and privilege of giant corporations, and a call for coining silver in order to expand the money supply and therefore stimulate the economy.

Bryan’s religious conservatism informed and reinforced his political progressivism in ways that would seem inconceivable today. Running 10 years after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared that corporations were “persons” and therefore had political rights under the U.S. Constitution, Bryan argued that corporate personhood was literally blasphemy. If you believed, as the Declaration of Independence said, that people were “endowed by their Creator” with the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” it followed logically that only God-created persons — human beings — held those rights; not person-created “persons,” corporations.

Even Bryan’s opposition to evolution stemmed in large part from his political progressivism. In the 1880’s social theorists like Herbert Spencer argued that the human race was still evolving and that rich people were actually superior beings — the fact that they were rich, Spencer argued, demonstrated their superiority and therefore their entitlement to most of the wealth and income. Invoking Charles Darwin’s explanation of how evolution worked, Spencer said, “The millionaires are the product of natural selection” — and a horrified Bryan rejected not only Spencer’s gloss on evolution but the evolutionary theory itself.

When Bryan challenged Cleveland for the 1896 Democratic nomination, he won — but the Democrats ultimately lost to Republican William McKinley. The corporate bosses the Populists and Bryan’s Democrats were attacking fought back in the nastiest ways they could. Millions of American workers got notices in their pay packets saying, “Don’t come to work anymore if Bryan wins.” Between 1896 and 1928 the Democrats once again won only two out of nine Presidential elections, and Republicans actually increased the size and longevity of their Congressional majorities.

The Struggle Continues for the Democrats’ Soul

As the Republican Party controlled the U.S. government for most of the first three decades of the 20^th century, the battle within the Democratic Party over how to respond continued. In 1912 the Democrats finally elected their first President since Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, born in Virginia but a resident of New Jersey when he ran, largely because that year it was the Republican Party that split between progressive former President Theodore Roosevelt and conservative incumbent William Howard Taft. Wilson squeaked out a re-election in 1916 but his involvement of the U.S. in World War I and his desire that this country remain a player in foreign politics after the war helped Republican Warren Harding win in 1920 by promising a “return to normalcy.”

In 1924, after Harding died in office, scandals engulfed his Cabinet and vice-president Calvin Coolidge took over the presidency, the Democratic convention deadlocked between conservative William Gibbs McAdoo, another transplanted Southerner (born in Tennessee but a resident of California) who had been Wilson’s Secretary of the Treasury; and progressive New York Governor Al Smith. The convention went to 103 ballots before finally nominating John W. Davis, a Wall Street attorney whose final public action 30 years later would be arguing the racist side before the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Coolidge beat Davis in a landslide, and four years later the Democrats nominated Al Smith but split over Smith’s religion — Roman Catholicism — and his support of repealing Prohibition. Republican Herbert Hoover won an easy victory, largely on the strength of an expanding economy — only the expansion suddenly came to a halt in late 1929 with the stock market crash and the resulting Great Depression. The Depression and World War II would make the Democrats the U.S. majority party from the 1930’s to the 1960’s, and would tamp down the continuing controversy between the party’s moderates and its progressives.

But the struggle for the Democratic Party’s soul would erupt again in the 1960’s. Northern Democratic Presidents and Congressmembers took the lead in fighting for African-American civil rights and ultimately broke the power of the Southern Democrats — leading to an historic reversal of the two parties’ historical positions on civil rights. The Democrats, who’d been the party of slavery, secession, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 (with crucial support from moderate Northern Republicans) and established themselves as the party of civil rights in general and African-American rights in particular.

The Republicans responded with the so-called “Southern Strategy” of Richard Nixon and Strom Thurmond — the fiercely racist Senator from South Carolina who began as a Democrat, ran for President in 1948 as an independent and later became a Republican. The essence of the “Southern Strategy” was that, now that the Democrats had laid down the banner of Southern racism, the Republicans would pick it up. The “Party of Lincoln” thus became the party of racist reaction — and not just in the South. Northern working-class whites, horrified by the gains African-Americans were making (and convinced they were coming at their expense) and also by the 1960’s counterculture, began abandoning the Democratic Party and voting for Republicans.

Nixon’s victory in the 1968 election — and the emergence of a Right-wing voting bloc that got 57 percent of the vote that year (between Nixon’s 43 percent and racist independent candidate George Wallace’s 14 percent) to the Democrats’ 43 percent — reignited the internal conflict within the Democratic Party: move to the center to win back the white voters they’d lost over race and culture, or embrace the Left? In 1968 they chose the former, nominating Hubert Humphrey in Chicago while police in a city with a Democratic mayor beat protesters to bloody pulps — and Humphrey lost by a margin that, when Nixon’s and Wallace’s votes are added together, indicated a broad rejection of liberal politics in general and the Democrats in particular.

In 1972 the Democrats nominated progressive South Dakota Senator George McGovern after the most promising moderate, Maine Senator Ed Muskie (Humphrey’s running mate in 1968) was knocked out of the campaign by Nixon’s dirty-tricks operation. McGovern lost in a landslide, with just 39 percent of the vote to Nixon’s 61 percent, and the Democratic Party responded quite differently from the way the Republicans had when Right-winger Barry Goldwater had lost to Lyndon Johnson by a similar margin in 1964.

The Republicans decided after the Goldwater loss that the problem hadn’t been with their policies, but with him as a spokesperson for them. Instead of retreating from the extreme Right-wing positions of Goldwater, they embraced them and in 1980 won the Presidency with Ronald Reagan running on what was essentially Goldwater’s program. By contrast, after 1972 the Democrats decided that the problem was McGovern’s policies, and the people running the Democratic Party decided to rig the rules to make sure nobody that progressive could get nominated again.

Among the devices they used to do that was the so-called “superdelegates,” party leaders who would be guaranteed slots at the convention and would form a powerful voting bloc against anyone they perceived as too progressive. The Democratic establishment was able to beat back progressive challenges from Senator Edward Kennedy in 1980 and Senator Gary Hart and Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1984 largely through their control of the delegate selection process. But the bland centrists they ran against Reagan in 1984 (Walter Mondale) and George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice-president and anointed successor, in 1988 (Michael Dukakis), also went down to humiliating defeats.

What’s a Party to Do?

While the Democrats were for the most part abandoning or compromising their most hard-core progressive supporters to appeal to “the center,” the Republicans were doing the exact opposite. During the 1990’s the Republican Party, its corporate funders and a Right-wing media complex they were able to create largely due to Reagan’s deregulation of broadcasting became a devastatingly effective propaganda machine designed not only to keep winning elections for the Republicans but to build a hard core of public support from people who relied on Right-wing media — particularly AM talk radio and Fox News — to tell them how to think about politics and whom to vote for.

So Democrats in general, and progressive Democrats in particular, have waited with frustration while Republicans have managed to push the terms of U.S. political debate further and further Right. Ideas like privatizing Social Security, which were considered totally beyond the political pale when Barry Goldwater proposed it in 1964, have become serious threats. Republicans haven’t won every Presidential or Congressional election since 1968 — far from it — but they’ve adopted a policy of waiting out every Democratic President or Congress and using the anti-democratic features built into the U.S. government by the Constitution to block the Democrats from advancing a progressive or even a liberal agenda very far.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. When I was in grade school, high school, and college (where I majored in political science), the conventional wisdom was that the American political system punished parties that tried to be too ideological. If either the Republicans or the Democrats went too far to the extreme — the Republicans too far Right or the Democrats too far Left — the voters would punish them by removing them from office, thereby bringing the overall political system back to the center.

That hasn’t happened partly because the Republicans have built up a political-media complex that has kept their base mobilized, energized and committed. Also, the Republicans have cunningly exploited the anti-democratic features of the U.S. Constitution — the Electoral College, the equal representation of each state in the Senate, and the near-total control of election laws by state government (including the absolute right, recently endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court, to draw blatantly rigged and uncompetitive political districts so Republicans can stay in power even when overwhelming majorities of voters cast their ballots for Democrats) — to become and remain what historian Leonard Schapiro, writing about the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, called “a minority determined to rule alone.”

Donald Trump is not, as Joe Biden has called him, an “aberration” in American politics. He is the culmination of over 50 years of Republican political strategizing aimed at imposing an orthodoxy on American politics consisting of Libertarian economic policies (an end to government regulation of corporations, including laws protecting workers’ health and safety; an end to environmental protection; an end to all attempts to restrict campaign contributions and all restrictions on rich politicians personally profiting from their offices) and a highly interventionist “big government” upholding “traditional family values” and the tenets of Right-wing Christianity by controlling people’s personal lives in general and their sex lives in particular.

The Democratic voices we heard at the debates are deeply committed to combating this agenda but equally deeply split on how to do so. One of the impressions I got from the debates, particularly Wednesday’s, was that as many differences as there were between the candidates, their similarities more than outweighed them. As Virginia Heffernan put it in the June 30 Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-heffernan-debates-20190628-story.html), “No one attacked FISA judges, Peter Strzok, the corrupt FBI, crisis actors, the satanic media, Sasquatch or the women President Trump doesn’t consider attractive enough to rape.

“No one called the climate crisis a hoax,” Heffernan continued. “No one dismissed the Fourth Estate as fakery. No one used daft playground nicknames that wouldn’t pass muster with Nelson from The Simpsons. Instead, we heard insight and resolve about the humanitarian crisis in Trump’s border camps, about Roe v. Wade as the law of the land, about gun violence and income inequality as clear and present dangers.”

The Democratic debates indicated that America really is two different countries — as the late columnist Murray Kempton noted as early as November 1968 when he commented on the Nixon-Humphrey-Wallace election and called Nixon “the president of every community in America that doesn’t have a bookstore.” Not only do Republicans and Democrats have different positions on issues, they have different sets of values and different ideas of what constitutes “truth” and where you go to find it. Democrats see climate change, income inequality, lack of access to health care, gun violence and authoritarian countries like Russia and China as threats.

Republicans, with Trump as their spokesperson, see the real threats as immigrants, Muslims, people of color and those pesky countries in Western Europe that insist on clinging to the values of liberal democracy. If Trump were a strategic thinker — which he isn’t — he would not only be fêting the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea but working with them to organize a “Black International” to crush the whole idea of representative government once and for all and organize the world on the basis of personality-driven dictatorships.

Trump isn’t that sort of thinker. He’s not Adolf Hitler, who not only wanted to wipe democracy (as well as Jews, Communists, Gypsies and Queers) from the face of the earth but came chillingly close to doing so. But he’s a reflection of an American id that Republican politicians have been appealing to and building as their political base for over 50 years. Anyone who’s listened to Right-wing talk radio heard the “Trump voice” long before Trump himself was anything more than a minor-league developer in the outer boroughs of New York City.

From Joe Pyne and Pat Michaels in the 1960’s to Morton Downey, Jr. in the 1980’s and Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levin and Roger Hedgecock in the 1990’s and since, talk-radio hosts not only follow the same scripts but speak in the same tones, denouncing their opponents with snippy nicknames and proclaiming that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is an idiot and deserves no consideration whatsoever. Trump won the election at least in part because he was the first Presidential candidate who talked like a Right-wing talk-radio host — and talk radio and Fox News remain powerful propaganda channels and motivators for the Right-wing base.

The threat is that the Democrats will blow the 2020 elections by refighting their old ideological battles and splintering even in the face of the existential threat Trump’s re-election poses not only to the Democratic Party but American democracy itself. This happened in 2016, when all too many of the Democratic base’s voters either threw their votes away on third-party candidates or just stayed home. The Russians didn’t elect Donald Trump — though their online efforts did pour some extra gasoline on the fires already consuming the Democratic Party. The Democrats did, through overconfidence and inaction.

The worst thing that could happen in 2020 is that the Democratic primary campaign goes on so long and becomes so bitter that the eventual nominee can’t unite the party and appeal to the country. It’s entirely possible that Trump could win in 2020 the way he did in 2016 — with a laser-like focus on voters who still feel disaffected by the Democrats and respond to racial and cultural attacks in enough states to get him an Electoral College victory even if he loses the popular vote (again).

In the same issue of the Los Angeles Times in which Virginia Heffernan published her paean to the sense of normality she got from the Democratic debate, Doyle McManus published the sort of article we should get used to seeing in the remaining 16 months of the campaign (https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-democrats-presidential-campaign-21090630-story.html): one tsk-tsking the Democratic candidates in general, and the more progressive ones like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in particular, for allegedly getting too far ahead of the American people by advocating Medicare for all, health coverage for undocumented immigrants and a $15 per hour minimum wage.

In 1964 Phyllis Schlafly published a book called A Choice, Not an Echo in which she said that if the Republicans rejected the moderate New Deal consensus at the time and nominated a hard-line Right-wing candidate, they would win in a landslide and fundamentally reshape American politics. She was wrong about the immediate battle — Barry Goldwater lost big-time — but right about the overall war.

There is a struggle for the soul of America between the Right’s exaltation of wealth and privilege, corporate power, whites over people of color, men over women, straights over Queers and short-term profits over environmental protection, and the Left’s desire to break down the walls of power and privilege, preserve the environment, use government to safeguard the physical and economic health and safety of the overwhelming majority of people who don’t own the means of production, and make society more equal economically, racially and sexually.

It’s a struggle in which the Left has achieved some small victories but the Right is far ahead in the overall war — so much so that a second term for Trump, especially if the Republicans also regain control of the House of Representatives (which became far more likely after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week giving states the right to gerrymander without fear of being held to account by the courts), will probably end the few gains we’ve won and return women, people of color and Queers to second-class citizenship (or worse).

Which way the Democratic Party goes in this year’s struggle — whether it tries to be “centrist,” compromising, appeasing the forces of reaction; or whether it stands firm but also stands smart and avoids getting sucked into the race-baiting of the past — is key not only to whether they can win next year’s elections but whether they, the American people and, indeed, the whole human race have a future.

The Lavender Scare (Full Exposure Films, PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, as part of their celebration of Queer Pride, PBS showed a fascinating documentary called The Lavender Scare, produced and directed by Josh Howard and with some familiar names to me (including former Zenger’s cover boy Kevin Jennings of GLAAD and Andrew Tobias, multi-millionaire financier and author of The Best Little Boy in the World, a memoir of growing up Gay which he signed with the name “John Reid”) on his production staff, based on a book of the same title by David Johnson which would be worth reading. The film apparently premiered in a theatre in New York’s Greenwich Village on June 7, 2019 (in a 77-minute version, longer than the one we got on TV), but according to imdb.com was actually made two years earlier.

The story really begins in the 1930’s, when under the Franklin Roosevelt administration and its New Deal response to the 1929 Depression, the size of the federal government zoomed upward and Washington, D.C. attracted a lot of America’s best and brightest with the promise of making good livings and serving the public good. A lot of those people were Gay, Lesbian or whatever in the ridiculous alphabet-soup identifier our community now goes by (I’ve seen “LGBT,” “LGBTQ,” “LGBTQ+” and even “LGBTQQIAA” — the last came from the Queer student group at UCSD and means “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual and Allies” — the last being the current term of art for straight people who support Queer rights), and freed from the social and sexual constraints of their small towns and adrift in the big city, they found out that there were others like them, met, hooked up, formed relationships and did the other things adult humans do together regardless of their sexuality.

Then in 1941 the U.S. got involved in World War II and a lot of people who hadn’t necessarily known they were Queer before ended up in military service, rigidly segregated by sex, and being in single-sex environments brought out their natural inclinations and they started to act on them. (As late as the 1980’s and 1990’s Queers in the U.S. military were telling me when I interviewed them that they hadn’t realized they were Queer until they were in the single-sex environment of the military — the obvious comeback to the homophobes who asked people in the days of the military ban and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy which followed, “Why did you join the military when you knew we wouldn’t accept you?”)

But these advances were threatened and ultimately stopped by the highly repressive political, social and sexual climate of the Cold War and the so-called McCarthy era, which began an era of witchhunts not only against actual or suspected Communists (or liberals who could be framed as Communists, since part of the Right’s objective in the McCarthy era, as now, was to ensure themselves permanent dominance of American politics by demonizing their opponents and putting them “beyond the pale” of acceptable political discourse) but against Queers as well. In 1953 newly elected Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an executive order banning all “homosexuals” from federal employment — no exceptions, no ifs, ands or buts.

Josh Howard’s narration, delivered by actress Glenn Close, is undecided as to whether President Eisenhower issued this order out of genuine conviction that Queer people constituted a security risk or to provide political cover to the Right of his party. But an earlier PBS documentary mentioned that when Eisenhower was supreme Allied military commander during World War II he had tried to issue a similar order to fire all Gay and Lesbian members of his immediate staff — and, in a rare display of courage, the woman he told to compile the list of Queers on his staff for him to fire said to him, “If you order me to make that list, my name will be the first on it.”

The Cultural Context

In 1953, sex between two partners of the same gender was illegal in every U.S. state. Homosexuality was defined as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the official guide of the psychiatric profession as to what constituted diseases of the mind. The very term “homosexual” had been coined by a Hungarian researcher in 1865 as a definition of a mental illness, and that had been considered a step forward since previously homosexuality had been defined as a sin against God that deserved the death penalty. Anyone caught having Gay sex or declaring him- or herself Gay risked not only imprisonment but social disgrace and unemployability. Anyone growing up and realizing their sexual attractions ran towards people of their own sex would hear nothing but a chorus of condemnation; the church would say they were immoral, science would say they were “sick,” the economy would say they shouldn’t be allowed to work and the law would say they were criminals.

And yet Queer people and their straight allies actually stuck their toes into the pool of activism in ways sometimes subtle and sometimes surprisingly bold. At the end of the 19^th century German physician and sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld organized a group called the Scientific Humanitarian Committee and started a petition calling on the German government to repeal its laws against Gay sex. The first Queer rights group in the U.S., the Society for Human Rights, was founded in Chicago in 1924 by Henry Gerber, a German immigrant inspired by Hirschfeld’s example. “I had always bitterly felt the injustice with which my own American society accused the homosexual of ‘immoral acts,’” Gerber wrote. His organization lasted less than two years.

The continuous history of Queer rights activism in the U.S. began in 1950, when Harry Hay — who, more than any other single person, deserves the title of founder of the movement — and four of his friends held a private meeting in Los Angeles. The group they founded was called the Mattachine Society, after a tribe of traveling jesters in medieval Italy whom Hay had discovered in his researches and believed had been Gay. Hay and some of the other Mattachine founders had been members of the Communist Party and the Progressive Party, which ran former vice-president Henry A. Wallace for president in 1948 under a platform of reconciliation with the Soviet Union and an end to the Cold War. Hay adopted a secretive cell-like structure for Mattachine and scored an early victory when one of its founders, Dale Jennings, was arrested for crusing an undercover police officer in a restroom. Jennings challenged the charges in court and was acquitted.

Like much of the “official” history of America’s Queer rights movement, The Lavender Scare gives short shrift to Mattachine and denounces it as accommodationist and not radical enough. Part of that reputation was earned; in 1953, Hay and the founders were purged in a sort of internalized version of the Cold War, and the people who took over at the time largely adopted the mainstream psychiatric view that homosexuality was a mental illness. They pleaded for legalization and equal rights on the ground that Queer people, like people with physical disabilities, shouldn’t be discriminated against because they were sick. But, as John D’Emilio (who’s briefly interviewed in The Lavender Scare) pointed out in his book Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, his 1983 history of the pre-Stonewall Queer rights movement, visibility was a two-edged sword for the early Queer movement. Queer activists in the 1950’s realized they needed to be visible to overcome the prejudice against them — but that very visibility meant they risked being targeted for being arrested, fired and disgraced.

Kangaroo Courts and Gay Inquisitors

So when Eisenhower declared his intention to fire every last homosexual from the federal government, there was virtually no public opposition. The witch-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) is shown here in film clips joining the public denunciation of “perverts” and calling for their total elimination for federal employment. Eisenhower gave the task of ferreting them out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and people interviewed in The Lavender Scare recalled the kangaroo-court nature of these “investigations.”

Pairs of FBI agents just showed up at their offices and called them in for interrogation on the spot. They were not allowed legal counsel or any sort of due process. They weren’t allowed even to know what information was being used as the basis of firing them, much less the chance to confront their accusers. Also, like witch-hunters everywhere, they hounded the people they targeted to give them more names and keep the witch-hunt going. Navy Captain Joan Cassidy recalled, “They said, ‘We have your friend in the next room, she’s already told us you are Gay. You give us the names of others and we’ll go easier on you.’” 

Ironically — and, oddly, unmentioned in The Lavender Scare — some of the officials carrying out the anti-Gay witchhunt in the federal government were Gay themselves. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his assistant, Clyde Tolson, were a deeply closeted Gay couple who lived together. Joe McCarthy’s chief of staff, Roy Cohn, was also a closeted Gay man who, after McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate in 1954 and died in 1957, became a legendary attorney in private practice in New York City. One of Cohn’s clients was a young real-estate developer named Donald Trump who had inherited a business building and renting properties in the outer boroughs of New York.

Cohn masterminded Trump’s ascension to Manhattan and became so important, powerful and influential that after his death from AIDS complications in 1987 — just months after the New York State Bar had disbarred him for ethics violations — that ever since Trump, frustrated when his later attorneys were either too incompetent or too ethical, has often asked rhetorically, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” So when Trump accuses Robert Mueller, his investigators and the Democrats on the House Judiciary, Intelligence and Oversight Committee of using “McCarthyite tactics” against him, bear in mind that it’s Trump who has the direct one-degree-of-separation connection to McCarthy himself.

Dr. Kameny Fights Back

Most of the government workers who were targeted by the Lavender Scare left government service in shame and tried as best they could to rebuild their lives. Some, including one diplomat profiled in The Lavender Scare, committed suicide. A few managed to keep their jobs. San Francisco postal worker Carl Rizzi, who performed part-time as a drag entertainer in a Gay bar, wasn’t fired because his supervisor stuck his own neck out and told the inquisitors that he knew Rizzi was Gay, but he was doing his job properly, so what was the problem? Captain Cassidy was able to stay in the service but decided to maintain a low profile and not apply for the promotions she probably deserved.

The man who stood out and not only organized a resistance to his own firing but began a movement against the policy was Dr. Franklin Kameny. Born in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants, he decided at an early age to make astronomy his life’s work. After the war, he studied at Harvard University, where he earned a Master’s degree in 1949 and a Ph.D. in 1956. He got a teaching job at Georgetown University for a year and was then hired by the U.S. government. But Kameny’s government job lasted only a few months before he fell victim to the anti-Gay witchhunt; investigators dredged up an old case in San Francisco and used it as the pretext to fire him.

Rather than go gently into the not-good night of depression and disgrace, Kameny fought back. First he sued the government and lost when, after a three-year legal battle, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case. Then he started a Mattachine Society chapter in Washington, D.C. and made the group’s top priority to support other victims of the federal government’s anti-Queer policy. Along with his colleague Jack Nichols, Lesbian activist Barbara Gittings, and a few others, Kameny tried to move Mattachine back to a more confrontational stand. In 1963 the group began a drive to repeal Washington, D.C.’s anti-sodomy law — which finally passed in 1993, 30 years later.

In 1965 Kameny did something even more radical. He decided to mount public protests against the anti-Gay policy, picketing the White House on April 17, 1965. At first he was only able to recruit 12 people for his pickets, but the demonstrations eventually grew to about 100 — remember, at a time when being Gay or Lesbian was itself illegal. Kameny imposed a strict dress code on the protesters; the men on his picket line had to wear suits and ties, and the women had to wear dresses, pump shoes and makeup. Kameny’s logic was that to demand the right to work for the federal government, his activists had to look employable. One Lesbian who marched with him recalled on The Lavender Scare that she’d never before worn pumps in her life.

Kameny’s powerful story was told in The Lavender Scare mostly in his own words. He was extensively interviewed for various documentaries on the Queer rights movement and was ultimately invited to the White House by President Barack Obama. In 2010, a year before Kameny’s death, a short stretch of street in Washington, D.C. was named for him; The Lavender Scare contains footage of the renaming ceremony.

Josh Howard’s script for The Lavender Scare dates the end of the federal government’s anti-Queer witchhunt as 1995. Though president Jimmy Carter had issued an executive order as early as 1977 ending discrimination in federal hiring on the basis of sexual orientation, there was an important loophole in it. It did not end discrimination in the granting of security clearances.

Part of the justification for Eisenhower’s original order had been the possibility that Queer people in the government would be subject to blackmail by hostile foreign powers if their sexual orientation was revealed. No one in the social climate of 1953 was about to make the obvious (to us today) counter-argument that if you eliminated the legal penalties and social opprobrium attached to being Gay or Lesbian, that would also eliminate the potential for blackmail.

So, though after 1977 Queer people could still work in branches of the federal government that didn’t require clearance, it was not until 1995 that President Bill Clinton signed an executive order banning discrimination against Queer people in granting or maintaining security clearances. And, of course, the ban on Queer people serving in the U.S. military was not finally lifted until 2010, when a Democratic Congress passed, and Democratic President Barack Obama signed, the law repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy Clinton had been forced to settle on in 1993 when he tried to end anti-Queer discrimination in the U.S. military by executive order.

Vote for Democrats!

One important object lesson of The Lavender Scare is that, contrary to the ridiculous and factually unsustainable position of people in what I call the “alt-Left” — the ones who proclaim that “there’s no difference between the Republican and Democratic parties” — there are deep and profound differences between them, especially on Queer rights. It was a Republican President, Eisenhower, who imposed the ban on Queer people in the federal government in the first place, while Democratic Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama took it down step by step.

When the final credits of The Lavender Scare flashed that Dr. Frank Kameny had died on October 11, 2011, my immediate thought was, “At least he has been spared President Trump.” Under Trump and the Republicans in his administration, particularly his evangelical Christian vice-president Mike Pence, Obama’s executive orders protecting the rights of Transgender people have been reversed, as have been Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulations banning anti-Queer discrimination in federal housing projects. Trump has also banned Transgender servicemembers from the U.S. military. One New Yorker report on the Presidential transition said that Mike Pence actually lobbied Trump to repeal the executive orders Carter and Clinton had issued ending discrimination against Queer people in federal employment, though thank goodness for small mercies that Trump hasn’t — not yet, anyway — gone that far.

So one lesson from The Lavender Scare is that it’s crucial that Queer people and their straight allies in the U.S. need to vote for Democrats and not waste their votes on at best powerless and at worst counterproductive alternative parties. The Democrats haven’t always been our friends, but the Republicans — especially today, with their heavy reliance on the votes of Right-wing evangelical Christians and moral reactionaries in general — are our relentless and implacable enemies.

Frontline, June 18, 2019 (originally aired November 20, 2018): “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis” (WGBH/PBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Lavender Scare KPBS ran a Frontine episode called “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis,” a follow-up to a 2018 special produced by Richard Rowley and written and reported by A. C. Thompson on neo-Nazi activists in the U.S. in general and one particularly nasty group in particular: the “Atomwaffen” (German for “nuclear weapons”), a Florida-based group of about 60 “made” members (like the Mafia, the Atomwaffen requires you to commit some sort of crime — the more brutal, the better) and a few hundred “initiates” who claim some sort of affiliation with the group, keep up with it via its Internet presence, and are ready and willing to commit terrorism to promote the group’s goal of an all-white America.

“New American Nazis” was made by Rowley and Thompson as a follow-up to their earlier Frontline show about the 2017 confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia between white supremacist demonstrators and anti-racist counter-protesters, one of whom was killed when a driver from the white supremacist camp deliberately ran her down with his car. This was the incident of which President Trump famously said “there were good people on both sides — on both sides,” and this, along with his opposition to immigrants and proclamation of a “new American nationalism,” has made Trump an unlikely hero to America’s white supremacists despite his Jewish son-in-law and friendship with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The organizers of Atomwaffen had a very different idea of how to run a white supremacist movement from the people who staged the protests at Charlottesville. According to “John,” a former affiliate of Atomwaffen Thompson interviewed, the Charlottesville actions led to a rise in the number of people expressing interest in joining Atomwaffen. “C-ville had a huge part in that, of the influx, applying in, asking in because they're like, ‘Oh, C-ville, wow, this didn’t work. Huge rallies don't work.’ All that happens is people get arrested, people lose jobs, and you get put on some FBI watch list.” According to “John,” Atomwaffen’s alternative strategy was to “go underground” and organize individuals to commit acts of terrorism.

Atomwaffen’s inspiration came from a white supremacist author and editor named James Mason — not to be confused with the late British actor whose closest connection with Nazism was playing Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in a 1952 biopic, The Desert Fox. The American James Mason edited a neo-Nazi newsletter called Siege in the 1980’s and the members of Atomwaffen followed his strategic guidelines. “There's a huge passage in Siege about terrorism — dropping out of the system so that you can conduct lone-wolf activity,” the pseudonymous “John” explained. “The group followed James Mason’s Siege like a Bible. It was like a Bible to them. It’s the handbook on how to operate.”

What Mason came up with for a strategic and tactical guideline is the so-called “leaderless cell” model of organization. It’s a system that has been used by other groups, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Al-Qaeda adopted it after the U.S. toppled their allies, the Taliban, from power in Afghanistan. ISIS used it from the start, though it also relied on a more conventional guerrilla-war strategy. It’s also been used by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in the U.S. to advance environmentalism and animal rights, though strictly speaking those groups are saboteurs rather than terrorists. They destroy property but, unlike white supremacists or Muslim radicals, carefully plan their actions to avoid taking human or animal life.

Though the leaderless-cell model of organization predates the Internet, the Internet’s existence has facilitated it. Many of the actions attributed to ISIS have been carried out by people totally unknown to the group’s leaders in Iraq and Syria. They simply post onto the group’s Web site, proclaim their allegiance to it, and announce what they’re going to do and how it fits into ISIS’s ideology. Likewise, ELF and ALF function as Web sites to which people can post, attribute their actions, and explain how they advance the causes of environmentalism or animal rights. Atomwaffen appears to be a bit more centralized than that, but it still draws the distinction between “members” who take orders from a central authority and “initiates” who mount free-lance actions on behalf of the group and its white supremacist ideology.

Atomwaffen first registered on law enforcement’s radar in 2015 when police in Tampa, Florida arrested 18-year-old Devon Arthurs for killing two of his three roommates, 22-year-old Jeremy Himmelman and 18-year-old Andrew Oneschuck. Arthurs told police that he and his victims had been part of a new neo-Nazi terror group organized by their fourth roommate, Brandon Russell. Arthurs demanded to talk to an FBI agent and explain what Russell was up to. The four met as teenagers in Junior ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) classes in school — establishing a running theme through the show: how neo-Nazis and other white supremacists are infiltrating the U.S. armed forces and essentially letting the federal government train them in how to fight the U.S. government.

Devon Arthurs told police he had killed Himmelman and Oneschuck because, though he shared their white supremacist beliefs, what they and Russell were planning was too much for him. “Atomwaffen Division is a, is a terrorist organization,” Arthurs explained to the Tampa police who’d arrested him. “It's a neo-Nazi organization that I was a part of. But the things that they were planning were horrible. They were planning bombings and stuff like that on, on countless people. They were planning to kill civilian life.” Arthurs said the specific targets the Atomwaffen members discussed were “power lines, nuclear reactors [and] synagogues.”

Indeed, Thompson began and ended his program with coverage of the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018. Though there’s no evidence that the alleged shooter in Pittsburgh, Robert Bowers, was a member or affiliate of Atomwaffen, he left behind a manifesto explaining his actions in similar white-supremacist terms. Among Atomwaffen’s other heroes are Charles Manson (the show describes the group making a sort of pilgrimage to the cave in Death Valley where Manson told his followers they would wait out the apocalyptic race war he allegedly committed his murders to spark), Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black parishioners at an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015. “There could be another Dylann Roof in Atomwaffen,” defector “John” warned Thompson.

“It’s unclear what the authorities did in response to Arthurs’ plea to investigate Atomwaffen,” Thompson said — though the FBI did arrest Russell and he’s currently in prison. “The FBI won’t talk to me about its handling of the case. But here’s what I do know: Atomwaffen continued to operate and its violence didn’t end. Seven months later in Virginia, Atomwaffen follower Nick Giampa allegedly killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents. They had objected to his Nazi views. Giampa has yet to stand trial. But the 17-year-old appeared to be fascinated with Atomwaffen. His social media accounts were full of its propaganda.

“Weeks later, in California, Sam Woodward was arrested for allegedly killing Blaze Bernstein, a Gay Jewish college student. Shortly after the arrest, I published a story identifying Woodward as a member of Atomwaffen. Woodward has pleaded not guilty. But in a cache of confidential chat logs I obtained, Atomwaffen celebrated the slaying. They referred to Woodward as a ‘one-man Gay Jew wrecking crew.’”

Arthurs also told authorities that Atomwaffen and similar white supremacist groups have infiltrated the U.S. military and enlisted more than once in order to learn military strategies and tactics. They’ve also helped themselves to weapons, explosives and other service materials in order to wage their own private war. And, in a frightening possibility even Thompson and Rowley didn’t explore, the ability of Atomwaffen and other white supremacists to infiltrate the U.S. military — and what the reporters describe as the military’s slipshot and desultory policy towards getting rid of them — raises the possibility that they could stage a military coup, especially if a U.S. President who’s either a white supremacist himself or a sympathizer wants to set aside the Constitution and make himself a fascist dictator.

What’s more, many white supremacists believe that in Donald Trump they have exactly that sort of President. After 15 years of public silence, James Mason, Atomwaffen’s guru, agreed to give an interview to Thompson in which he said, “With Trump winning that election by surprise, and it was a surprise, I now believe anything could be possible.” After decades of attacking the U.S. as run by what they called a “Zionist-Occupied Government,” America’s white-supremacist whites see Trump as a new hope. Mason cited Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and added, “In order to make America great again, you’d have to make America white again.” (Ironically, that echoed the criticism by Trump’s Democratic opponent in 2016, Hillary Clinton, who said “Make America Great Again” was code for “Make America White Again.”)

The result of white supremacist violence, as well as mass shootings committed by others, is that America is slowly turning into an armed camp. The Frontline episode ends with Brad Orsini, an ex-FBI agent hired by the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh as their security director in the wake of the Tree of Life massacre, describing preparations for their weekly services similar to those a military unit undertakes before a battle: “We have put casualty bags in each one of our synagogues and schools. There's tourniquets. There are compression pads. There's wound-packing material.”

It’s somewhat ironic that San Diego’s PBS affiliate, KPBS, ran the Frontline episode “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis” right after the film The Lavender Scare. Both are, in a sense, about small, tight-knit groups of people who came together to fight what they consider evil and injustice. The difference is that the people who stuck their necks out for the rights of Queer people to work in the federal government were seeking to expand the rights of Americans as citizens and human beings, while the white supremacists profiled in “New American Nazis” are seeking to contract rights and remake the U.S. as either an all-white country or one in which Jews, people of color, Queers and others on their hate list are treated as what Adolf Hitler called Untermenschen — literally “below human.”

Organization and commitment are value-neutral: the same tactics people like Frank Kameny used to break the power of homophobia over American society in general and the federal government in particular can be used by people like Brandon Russell to carry out a hate-filled agenda in which only people like him are regarded as “real Americans.” With the U.S. military now a volunteer service that directly involves only about 1 percent of the American population, the real danger of people like Russell and Atomwaffen is the possibility that they might build a secret center of power within the U.S. military and ultimately turn it from an institution protecting the U.S. Constitution to one really out to destroy it and install a white-supremacist dictatorship in its place.