Ben Gray/AP Photo
Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) addresses the crowd during a rally with fellow Republican Sen. David Perdue, December 5, 2020, in Valdosta, Georgia.
Sen. Kelly Loeffler has, by now, poured several million dollars into attack ads, as she attempts to save her job in the Georgia runoff election. The most memorable and cartoonish of them paint the Rev. Raphael Warnock, her Democratic opponent, as a shadowy “agent of change” who must be stopped in order to “save America.” This is, of course, a badly concealed effort to keep the flames of white paranoia lit. Like most dog whistles, it echoes attacks made by the country’s chest-beating segregationists of the past.
But it also has a second aim, one that W.E.B. Du Bois shined a spotlight on 75 years ago. By destroying Black political participation, and pitting poor communities against one another, “the working people of the South, white and black” will never realize “that their emancipation depends upon their mutual cooperation.” In other words, the only way to improve working people’s lives is for them to link arms and demand it.
That poses a real threat, and one that must be defeated. You start by portraying anyone who sympathizes with that worldview as dangerously foolish. In their debate last weekend, Loeffler repeatedly referred to Warnock as a “radical liberal” who is “out of step with Georgia values” and “won’t keep our communities safe.” And in an infamous attack ad, a classroom of mostly white children is followed by grainy footage from what appears to be one of the summer’s many protests against police violence, with Warnock’s image laid on top. The loudly whispered—shouted—idea here is that the first group will somehow be menaced by the second, and that the United States will be turned into the shadowlands if Warnock wins, and uses the powers of a Senate that Republicans themselves have called “weak” and “impotent.”
Loeffler’s attack ads are a badly concealed effort to keep the flames of white paranoia lit.
Next, you have to insist that the target of your attack isn’t just misguided, but is motivated by a sinister worldview that wants to sledgehammer everything you hold sacred. Warnock, we’re told, has “praised Marxism and the redistribution of income” and wants to send the country “down the road of socialism.” This person does not share your values, and the values they do have are hell-bent on your destruction.
Leave aside the fact that Loeffler offers no explanation for why this would not make the country a better and cooler and fairer place. She is also reading, almost word for word, from an old script.
The pages in that script are at least 150 years old. In his classic Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois spends an entire chapter combing through the “cheap and false myth” that “Reconstruction was a disgraceful attempt to subject white people to ignorant Negro rule.” That myth justified the destruction of the small window newly emancipated Black people had to participate in the country’s political life. One hundred years of terror-driven feudalism followed. Du Bois called it “an exploitation of labor unparalleled in modern times.”
When the next window was pried open in the 1960s, and a popular movement threatened to overthrow the Southern system of economic apartheid, the script was pulled off the shelf like a family heirloom. Examples fill entire books.
Take one relevant example from Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. In 1966, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Lester Maddox, a segregationist Democrat, spent the campaign ripping into pending civil rights legislation as a “Communist inspired” plot “that will enslave all Americans.” He would go on to win the election. By 1978, Perlstein writes in Reaganland, his fourth and final book on modern American conservatism, another Georgia fanatic named Newt Gingrich was coaching young Republicans “to be nasty” brawlers “in a slug-fest” for power. At the time, Gingrich was blanketing his Georgia district with flyers that pictured his Democratic opponent, state Sen. Virginia Shapard, with Julian Bond, a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and then state representative. Bond was Black, and a well-known leader in the civil rights movement. The flyer read, “If you like welfare cheaters, you’ll love Virginia Shapard.” Gingrich, after two previous losses in congressional races, would beat Shapard and serve in the House for the next 20 years.
And who could forget 1990s classics like North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms’s “Hands” ad against his Black opponent Harvey Gantt, in which a pair of white hands ball up a rejection letter as the narrator reads, “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota.”
Decades later, Loeffler is just playing the hits. She doesn’t have to be a fire-breathing segregationist to tag in the ghost of Lester Maddox, or to hit the same notes about undeserving minorities that Gingrich and Helms once did. She only needs to be enormously invested in maintaining the status quo.
Loeffler hits the same notes about undeserving minorities that Gingrich and Helms once did.
From that perch, Warnock’s very modest points that “the system works against those without power and money,” and that “health care is a human right” that the world’s most fabulously wealthy nation should “provide for its citizens,” sound like calls to flip the world over with a spatula. In the debate, Warnock hinted that the path to that world runs through popular movements like the “multiracial coalition of conscience [that poured] out into American streets” this year. And just like every major movement for progress, this one has been awash with ambitious demands for countering capitalism with more egalitarian, social democratic institutions.
The civil rights movement was, after all, led by committed socialists like A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bayard Rustin. And as historian Robin D.G. Kelley has shown, the American Communist Party was indeed engaged in some of the most serious work “to secure racial, economic and political justice.” Du Bois, then, would likely not be surprised that Warnock has been cast as a “radical” Marxist ushering the United States down “the road to socialism.” As he wrote in 1935, the chief reason that “ridicule and scorn and crazy anger were poured upon” Reconstruction-era governments was simple: “poor men were ruling and taxing rich men.” Warnock, in his more courageous sermons and public statements, has suggested that maybe taking modest steps in this direction wouldn’t be such a bad idea.
