DeSantis and Pence pander to the worst of white Southern Republicans | Opinion

I suspect Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis, two men trying to dethrone Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s standard bearer, don’t want a rerun of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, when a mob of white supremacists violently overthrew a democratically-elected government. But boy are they OK evoking that legacy if it might help them secure the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination.

That mob of white supremacists murdered at least 60 people in that coastal North Carolina city for the sin of having a thriving African-American community, integrated government, and an outspoken black journalist, Alex Manly, who dared write that lynching was wrong. Long before Jan. 6, 2021, when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building trying to overturn the results of an election they didn’t like, Confederacy-longing white supremacists had pulled off the only coup d’état in U.S. history.

Pence and DeSantis didn’t come to North Carolina to celebrate 1898. But in an effort to win votes, they harkened back to one of the country’s darkest eras, when a group of white supremacists took up arms against the U.S. in an effort to establish a new country built on the idea that black people forever be enslaved by white people – the idea that motivated white supremacists in Wilmington in 1898.

Pence and DeSantis each came to North Carolina and said they would re-honor Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, a man who enslaved at least 110 black people. They would turn Fort Liberty back into Fort Bragg, the name one of the most important military installations in the country had since President Woodrow Wilson decided to honor dishonorable men like Bragg.

“We will end the political correctness in the hallways of the Pentagon and North Carolina will once again be home to Fort Bragg,” Pence thundered before a crowd of Republicans.

According to Pence and DeSantis, it was political correctness that convinced American military and political leaders to stop honoring a literal traitor to the U.S. Bragg was a slaveowner who took up arms against the U.S. to ensure black people were forever slaves, and yet two of the top contenders to replace Trump atop the GOP thought the best way to win the white Republican vote in 21st century America was to honor a man like that.

They may as well have argued for the re-flying of the Confederate flag at the South Carolina Statehouse, which was only removed because white supremacist Dylann Roof massacred nine black people in a Charleston church. Heck, they may as well have said there should be one flying in Raleigh and that they’d raise a Confederate flag over the White House if they became president.

When Pence and DeSantis suggested re-honoring Bragg, participants at the North Carolina GOP convention didn’t boo them off stage, didn’t tell them to stick that racist crap where the sun doesn’t shine. Instead, they cheered. And that was the real revelation.

Some are more ethical and principled than others, but politicians of every stripe pander out of necessity. They speak about and make promises on issues they are convinced will increase support for their campaigns and avoid those that won’t. That’s why Republicans are quick to talk up tax cuts and slow to propose major reforms to Medicare and Social Security. And Pence and DeSantis thought their best bet was to weaponize white fear. That says something devastating about them, but even more profoundly about their targeted audience.

Just as Trump accurately predicted he could do anything he liked, including shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, and not lose any support, Pence and DeSantis are counting on white Republicans, especially in states such as the Carolinas, to be just as amoral.

Top GOP candidates have surmised that white Southern Republicans are looking for someone to help them lift up, salute and honor a white supremacist traitor to the U.S. Those white Southern Republicans have yet to show a sign that they are ashamed that their own leaders think so little of them.

Issac Bailey is McClatchy Opinion writer based in Myrtle Beach. He teaches at Davidson College.