Madison Square Garden, 1939. "The Christian Front" joins the German-American Bund in a pro-Hitler rally combining Nazi & American symbols. The Rick Perlstein story in today's New York Times explains why this picture is still relevant.

When I was a young boy I picked up some special insights about Donald Trump’s America; the result of growing up in a strange time and place for being an American. While the rest of the country enjoyed a post-war economic boom along with the optimistic liberal politics that came with it, I was trapped in a war-zone governed by a racist police state.

My home town of Oxford, Mississippi in 1962. Those are the black and white soldiers of the 1st Division, the army’s Big Red One, standing guard on the town square. All hell had broken loose the night before after Federal Courts ordered the University of Mississippi to accept its first black student, James Meredith. Kennedy sent 30,000 soldiers and national guardsmen to restore order in North Mississippi.

Mississippi was not just a place, it was also a state of mind and the enablers of our dysfunction included folks across the United States, from Texas billionaires to John Birchers as far away as Anaheim, California. For the most part they were Republican to the bone, the sort of people who laid the foundation stones of Donald Trump’s Presidency. The Koch Bros dad, Fred was among them. He was a Founder of the John Birch Society while brother Charles was an early and enthusiastic Bircher.

Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party didn’t surprise me at all, I just didn’t see him winning the Electoral College. (He did lose the popular vote by 2%, never forget that — in any other democracy on the face of the earth we would now be arguing about President Hillary Clinton’s most recent political tactic).

So I was overjoyed to read Rick Perlstein’s story in today’s New York Times. It’s a badly overdue assessment of how we ended up with President Donald Trump:

I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong: A historian of conservatism looks back at how he and his peers failed to anticipate the rise of the president.

He explains how historians normalized the Republican Party after Reagan’s 1980 victory, while ignoring the ugly parts of the story.

Until Nov. 8, 2016, historians of American politics shared a rough consensus about the rise of modern American conservatism. It told a respectable tale . . .

Perlstein recaps how historians went wrong by putting their whole focus on William F. Buckley and the National ‘Review, as the starting point of their stories about modern conservativism.

Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society, anti-Semites and supporters of the hyperindividualist Ayn Rand, and his cohort fused the diverse schools of conservative thinking — traditionalist philosophers, militant anti-Communists, libertarian economists — into a coherent ideology, one that eventually came to dominate American politics. I was one of the historians who helped forge this narrative. . . . Then the nation’s pre-eminent birther ran for president. Trump’s campaign was surreal and an intellectual embarrassment, and political experts of all stripes told us he could never become president. That wasn’t how the story was supposed to end.

The “intellectual embarrassment” of Trump’s campaign is best described by this instagram posting by his son, Donald Jr., who saw these people as the key players. That’s Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart and Alex Jones of Infowars on the far right, with Ben Carson and Roger Stone on the far left. I’ll let the reader figure out the rest of the crew, but note that Pepe the Frog is front and center behind Donald Trump’s left shoulder. Pepe was a cartoon internet meme pushed by Trump’s alt-right (neo-Nazi) supporters.

Donald Trump, Jr. put out this instagram making fun of Hillary’s attack on the alt-right (neo-Nazis) who supported Donald Trump. Note Pepe the Frog — a neo-Nazi meme — peering over Trump’s shoulder.

So how was it that Trump could openly welcome neo-Nazis into his ranks without losing rank and file Republicans? Perlstein admits that historians made a mistake in their conservative storyline.

The professional guardians of America’s past, in short, had made a mistake. We advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump . . . Which poses a question: If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?

Pepe the Frog in all his Nazi/Klan glory. This was one of the top trending Pepe Memes during the election. I’m not claiming this particular Nazi-Pepe was supporting Trump, but how can you separate him from the Trump-Pepe that Donald Jr. promoted in social media?

According to Perlstein, another key figure ignored in the now-traditional conservative story was Joseph McCarthy and the role McCarthyism played in shaping America.

Senator Joseph McCarthy with aide Roy Cohn during their anti-communist witch-hunts.

This is especially significant when it comes to Trump, because Roy Cohn was one of his most important mentors.

Roy Cohn together with Donald Trump. Democracy Now! image.

Perlstein also talks about Leo Ribuffo, a professor at George Washington University who made his reputation with an award-winning 1983 study, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right From the Great Depression to the Cold War.

Ribuffo argued that America’s anti-liberal traditions were far more deeply rooted in the past, and far angrier, than most historians would acknowledge, citing a long list of examples from “regional suspicions of various metropolitan centers and the snobs who lived there” to “white racism institutionalized in slavery and segregation.”

I grew up with white racism institutionalized in slavery and segregation. I find it amazing that so few Americans saw this coming? Haley Barbour, elected Governor of Mississippi in 2003, said some nice things about the White Citizens’ Councils only to discover that it doomed his 2008 Presidential bid (not that he had a chance anyway). Barbour is considered a “moderate”, but he emerged as a big Trump backer during the election. (In fairness to Barbour he seems to be expressing some buyer’s remorse in his op-ed in today’s Washington Post. But that remorse has nothing to do with Trump’s attacks on Muslims and Mexicans).

The White Citizen’s Council was founded in Mississippi and by the 1960s had turned it into a defacto One-Party state where the Citizens’ Council leadership dictated the politics of everything.

Perlstein brings the Klan into the story as well, pointing out it was once a mainstream organization:

Consider, for example, an essay published in 1926 by Hiram Evans, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in the exceedingly mainstream North American Review. His subject was the decline of “Americanism.” Evans claimed to speak for an abused white majority, “the so-called Nordic race,” which, “with all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization.”

I’m from the South — I knew back in the 80s that the Klan was a big thing. It was David Duke that began the long journey to bring Klan hate back into the political mainstream.

David Duke signaled a change in Republican politics when he ran for Governor of Louisiana as a Republican. Despite losing the support of the national party, he almost won.

David Duke was the first to make the Klan respectable to Republicans when he shed his robes, donned a suit and ran for Governor of Louisiana as a Republican. I remember the campaign vividly since it has us spooked over in Mississippi as well. The national party refused to back Duke, but he nearly won — gathering the votes of the majority of Republicans in the State. Steve Scalise, the House Republican Whip (number 3 position), is said to have bragged in later years that he was like “David Duke without the baggage”. Perlstein admits that all this history is lying in the open for anyone who wants to see it. But the historians have cherry-picked it away. Perlstein again:

None of this history is hidden. Indeed, in the 1990s, a rich scholarly literature emerged on the 1920s Klan and its extraordinary, and decidedly national, influence. (One hotbed of Klan activity, for example, was Anaheim, Calif. McGirr’s “Suburban Warriors” mentions this but doesn’t discuss it; neither did I in my own account of Orange County conservatism in “Before the Storm.” Again, it just didn’t seem relevant to the subject of the modern conservative movement.)

But there’s more. Even this one surprised me, a secretive 1930s extremist-right group called the Black Legion that was said to have assassinated 50 people.

1937 Bogart movie about the Black Legion, a violent Klan northern off-shoot.

Perlstein:

. . . the Klan remained relevant far beyond the South. In 1936 a group called the Black Legion, active in the industrial Midwest, burst into public consciousness after members assassinated a Works Progress Administration official in Detroit. The group, which considered itself a Klan enforcement arm, dominated the news that year. The F.B.I. estimated its membership at 135,000, including a large number of public officials, possibly including Detroit’s police chief. The Associated Press reported in 1936 that the group was suspected of assassinating as many as 50 people. In 1937, Humphrey Bogart starred in a film about it.

Then there was another extremist from the 30s I had learned about, from my Father. He was Father Charles Coughlin and he had a radio show listened by as many as 30 million at his peak. Apparently one of his Uncles liked to listen to Coughlin and Dad remembered hate-filled diatribes aimed at FDR and the New Deal.

Father Charles Coughlin in a story about the Christian Front in Look Magazine.

Perlstein:

In 1938, Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, began reprinting “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a forged tract about a global Jewish conspiracy first popularized in the United States by Henry Ford. After presenting this fictitious threat, Coughlin’s paper called for action, in the form of a “crusade against the anti-Christian forces of the red revolution” — a call that was answered, in New York and Boston, by a new organization, the Christian Front. Its members were among the most enthusiastic participants in a 1939 pro-Hitler rally that packed Madison SquareGarden, where the leader of the German-American Bund spoke in front of an enormous portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas.

That would be this event in 1939 at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Christian Front and German-American Bund gather to promote George Washington and Adolf Hitler.

According to Perlstein, the Christian Front continued to attack Jews throughout WWII.

Victims who complained to authorities, according to news reports, were “insulted and beaten again.” Young Irish-Catholic men inspired by the Christian Front desecrated nearly every synagogue in Washington Heights. The New York Catholic hierarchy, the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts largely looked the other way.

Christian Front and German-American Bund Madison Square Garden Rally, 1939.

Perlstein continues:

“Why hasn’t the presence of organized mobs with backing in powerful places disturbed historians’ conclusion that the American right was dormant during this period? In fact, the “far right” was never that far from the American mainstream. The historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, writing in the journal Social History, points out that “scholars of American history are by and large in agreement that, in spite of a welter of fringe radical groups on the right in the United States between the wars, fascism never ‘took’ here.”And, unlike in Europe, fascists did not achieve governmental power. Nevertheless, Steigmann-Gall continues, ‘fascism had a very real presence in the U.S.A., comparable to that on continental Europe.’”

Growing up in Mississippi taught me that the crazy thinking never went away, it just went underground, into many places, embedded in local churches, emerging in the John Birch society. I remember hitting one weird version of it during a Baptist church retreat in the 1960s when Hank, our Youth Leader, breathlessly told us about what he had just heard; that the Beast foretold by Revelation (last book of the Bible) was actually John Kennedy. Now this was especially amazing since Kennedy was long dead. But Hank explained what had happened — his brain had been kept (true actually) and would be grafted into a replacement head, to be planted on another man’s body. The miracle of modern science and the devil combined. Hence the Beast with Two Heads. I promise I’m not making this up, it really was told to me as a true thing.

As I remember Hank’s telling it had already happened and we were just waiting for the news to be sprung on the world — but I was among the lucky ones to first get the news. Strangely enough my Youth Leader seemed terribly excited about it and not at all scared. I didn’t know what to think and decided to try and forget I’d heard it. Trump’s run for President has brought back a lot of memories I wish had stayed buried. American extremists have been preparing the way for Trump for a long time. This image used to support Mitt Romney in 2012, didn’t come out of nowhere.

This anti-Obama poster was put on Facebook by one of my high school classmates.

During the 2012 Election I saw a lot of this kind of weirdness on my Facebook feed, put there by high school classmates (since de-friended). Perlstein helps explain why that was:

Anti-Semitismin America declined after World War II. But as Leo Ribuffo points out, the underlying narrative — of a diabolical transnational cabal of aliens plotting to undermine the very foundations of Christian civilization — survived in the anti-Communist diatribes of Joseph McCarthy. The alien narrative continues today in the work of National Review writers like Andrew McCarthy (“How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda”) and Lisa Schiffren (who argued that Obama’s parents could be secret Communists because “for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or ’60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics”). And it found its most potent expression in Donald Trump’s stubborn insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Attacks on the Southern Poverty Law Center and its Klanwatch project often take an anti-semitic spin one of the founders was Jewish and the other, Morris Dees was named after a Jewish friend of the family. This image comes from a Klan rally attacking Morris Dees an an “Enemy of the People”. Does that have a familiar ring to it?

I took this photo at a KKK rally in Montgomery, Alabama in 1986. They were protesting Morris Dees as “Enemy of the People”. Note the language similiarity to Trump’s attack on the Press.

Perlstein makes a direct connection between Donald Trump and the Klan through Trump’s father, which makes Trump’s initial refusal to denounce David Duke all the more telling:

Trump’s connection to this alternate right-wing genealogy is not just rhetorical. In 1927, 1,000 hooded Klansmen fought police in Queens in what The Times reported as a “free for all.” One of those arrested at the scene was the president’s father, Fred Trump. (Trump’s role in the melee is unclear; the charge — “refusing to disperse” — was later dropped.) In the 1950s, Woody Guthrie, at the time a resident of the Beach Haven housing complex the elder Trump built near Coney Island, wrote a song about “Old Man Trump” and the “Racial hate/He stirred up/In the bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed/That color line” in one of his housing developments.

Pearlstein points out the similarity of Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade to extremists of the past. Then ends by summing up the media manipulation it takes to fit Trump’s extremist populism together with the billionaire agenda of his business and Wall Street backers:

Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage. It will not be a pleasant story. But if those historians are to construct new arguments to make sense of Trump, the first step may be to risk being impolite.

As much as I love what Perlstein has written, this conclusion is too timid by half. Risking impoliteness is just the first baby step. A fight with racist bullies is its own special thing and it requires one main ingredient above all else: the truth.

But even the truth is just a start. We have to continue to organize and build this movement against Trump and Republican fascism. It took a Movement to free Mississippi in the 60s. We have the same kind of job ahead of us now. Go ahead, find your own place in the movement that’s already emerging, and pitch in.