Sometimes relatively ancient political history remains relevant today. Such is the case with a masterful six-part podcast from Slow Burn, a project of Slate Plus, about the three-year peak of neo-Nazi David Duke’s political career. The series aired its final episode Wednesday.
Duke’s rise in Louisiana began with a successful special-election race for the state House of Representatives in 1989. It ended with a landslide loss in an infamous runoff election for governor of Louisiana, but only after he had pulled within the polling margin of error less than three weeks before election day. Slow Burn, hosted by Josh Levin, captures tremendously well, sometimes breathtakingly, a dizzying array of elements that contributed both to Duke’s rise and his ultimate defeat.
I appear in four of the six episodes describing events from the perspective of a then-young, conservative, New Orleans-based, anti-Duke organizer and then journalist. I was interested to see what they came up with, and I am impressed. My own involvement is immaterial to my assessment of the podcast’s quality.
The reason those 30-year-old events are relevant now is that the redemptive portions of them are ones we desperately need to re-learn and apply anew. In today’s frightening atmosphere of divisiveness and racial tension, the example provided by the broad coalition that defeated Duke is more important than ever.
There was a profound sense of how people of different races, faiths, and political persuasions could come together for cooperative purpose at the second meeting, on a cold November evening in 1989, of what soon became the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, internationally credited for its leadership in the anti-Duke fight. With whites, blacks, Jewish leaders, Christian pastors, liberal Democrats, and conservative Republicans, LCARN showed that commonality could be discovered, developed, and powerfully used.
Slow Burn amply captures the contributions of a wide swath of people, from Republican State Central Committee members Beth Rickey and Neil Curran to black TV journalist Norman Robinson to LCARN executive director Lance Hill (a liberal academician), Holocaust survivor Anne Skorecki Levy, New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Tyler Bridges, business leader Pres Kabacoff, and Southern University (a historically black college) student leader Ken Smith. The honor roll goes on, from the Lafayette dentist who sent a letter to all his patients urging a vote for scofflaw former governor Edwin Edwards over Duke, to young investment advisor Kirby Newburger, who devised the famous bumper sticker saying “Vote for the Crook. It’s important.”
The nation needs the same sort of unifying spirit today. We need to do it not just because we agree on a common adversary, as against Duke, but because we rediscover beliefs in common values and purposes. We also need people with moral authority to set an example, to remind us of those purposes, the way widely respected journalist Robinson and Republican former governor Dave Treen did against Duke.
Yet it can be done. The leaders in Charleston, South Carolina showed us how to unify rather than divide after the horrific shooting at the African-American church there in 2015. The so-called “Cajun Navy” from Louisiana did likewise by coming to the rescue of Texas residents after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. At the local level, in places across the country, organizations such as the Welcome Table from Mississippi and Shrink the Divide in Alabama work for racial reconciliation and understanding.
Somehow, some way, we must recover that spirit nationally, too. This is what Americans, both native and naturalized, have always done before. Can all of us give a little, find some moderation, learn again to listen, and join again as one people?
Today’s unrest is more than just a slow burn. It threatens to become an inferno. Let’s douse it, now.
