Demography and the Populists’ Destiny

Before Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) was stripped of his congressional committee assignments, he played a dangerous—some would say duplicitous—game. He would dance right up to the line of espousing racialist politics—retweeting figures linked to white nationalism on social media, asking The New York Times when phrases like “white nationalist” or even “white supremacist” became “offensive.” Then when called on it, he would reaffirm his commitment to colorblindness, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. and saying “that we are all created in God’s image.”

Drawing these moral lines is important and leaders in both parties eventually decided King (the congressman) had irrevocably crossed them. King’s journey from someone on the cutting edge of “Trumpism” over a decade ago, even though he supported Ted Cruz over Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries, to a pariah whose pronouncements and associations troubled even his allies is an interesting case study. It’s also a useful tool for discrediting resurgent nationalism in the West as something that inevitably must descend into the indefensible. Indeed, a Times timeline of King’s “racist remarks and divisive actions” lumps together things that are genuinely troubling with views that are merely conservative.

The King affair did not occur in a vacuum. American politics abounds in language celebrating diversity and the hope it will usher in a new progressive era. Almost all polemics predicting permanent Democratic majorities are rooted in this kind of demographic triumphalism. So to a lesser extent is the observation that the coalition that barely delivered just one state to George McGovern in 1972 was big enough to elect Barack Obama president by 2008. There is no acceptable language for discussing unease with rapid demographic change, even if the source of discomfort among Americans who do not share progressives’ ideological commitments is mainly these political developments. Into this gap step provocateurs flirting with—and in some cases unambiguously trafficking in—racism.