Iowa congressman Steve King got into some hot water recently, with comments he made to the New York Times. “White Nationalist, White Supremacist, Western Civilization – how did that language become offensive?”
King was finally stripped of his committee assignments by his Republican colleagues, though some are still defending him. The question for me is, what took so long?
Racist remarks are hardly new for King. They’ve been his trademark for his entire career. He is so defined by his racism that it has its own section on his Wikipedia page.
All the way back to 2002, he proposed bills to teach Iowa students a certain kind of nationalism, requiring that schools teach that the US “is the unchallenged greatest nation in the world and that it has derived its strength from…Christianity, free enterprise capitalism and western civilization.”
Whatever you think of the merits of that, the Christianity part would be clearly unconstitutional and in any other country, we’d recognize this for what it is, indoctrination.
King likes to use the phrase “western civilization” as a dog whistle so that he can denigrate other groups by comparison. He claims that nonwhite groups haven’t contributed as much to the world and in one of his most familiar comments, stated that “We can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies.” Who do you think the “we” is in that sentence and who is the someone else?
King has had the endorsement of David Duke and associates with the far-right Austrian Freedom Party and endorsed the French far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. He has engaged in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on multiple continents. His anti-Jewish statements may perhaps only be surpassed by his anti-Islam ones. He even went so far as to criticize President Obama for the offense of using his actual middle name in his inauguration ceremony.
King often uses his Twitter account to promote white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Despite living in Iowa, a Union state, King kept a Confederate flag on his desk for years.
Again, way back in 2002, King pushed for English as the official language of Iowa and later of the country. In 2005, he sued the state of Iowa for distributing ballot pamphlets in other languages, as they are required to do by law.
Many politicians are known for anti-immigrant rhetoric, but the worst of them, like King, just make things up as they go along, inventing fake statistics and code words. These include his ridiculous claim that 25 Americans a day die because of undocumented immigrants and that law enforcement could identify undocumented immigrants by their clothes or accents.
None of these things are new and they were never hidden. They have been in plain view for all of King’s career. And during that time, he has enjoyed the unqualified support of his party, serving as national co-chair of Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2016.
By 2018, there were finally a few who wavered in their support. King won re-election by his slimmest margin ever.
Still, he still seemed to be in almost everyone’s good graces in the party until he got a little too explicit. In the Trump era, he finally felt safe abandoning the code words and openly expressed support for white nationalism and white supremacy.
That’s the political lesson these days. You can say or do just about any racist thing you want, as long as you don’t declare yourself too openly. Just avoid the N-word and specific plans to discriminate and everything else is fair game. And perhaps even that isn’t enough.
It’s a harsh lesson for those of us who thought we’d made more progress. It seemed as early as 2015 that Trump would be unelectable as he openly expressed racist leanings, using his Twitter account to share Mussolini quotes and fake racist statistics generated by neo-Nazis. When David Duke expressed his support and Trump, who is quick with an insult to anyone he doesn’t like, was hesitant to distance himself, it seemed to many of us that this was sufficient evidence of racism that Americans would turn away.
It seems that for many others, this simply isn’t the case.
We worried in 2016 that Trump was normalizing racism and that seems to have been a valid concern. White high school students would taunt Latino students with chants of “build the wall” and other language that would have been easily punishable until recently. But how do you punish language the president uses?
When there was speculation of the existence of a tape with Trump using the N-word to describe African Americans, The Economist conducted a poll. Almost half of white Trump voters said they would support a presidential candidate who used the word and more than three-quarters of them said he could use it and still be a good president.
So the question now is, how much can we narrow the definition of racism before it simply doesn’t exist?
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