Donald Trump and the Revenge of the Evan Mecham Republicans
If you think Arizona Republicans like Kari Lake are pretty whacky nowadays, just wait till you hear about Evan Mecham
In 1986 Arizona chose as their governor a paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed homophobe and racist (who of course thought of himself as a straight-talking traditional conservative who was not afraid to be politically incorrect) named Evan Mecham. In a three way race with historically low turnout (39%), Mecham won the election by getting 39% of the votes cast. Mecham was the darling of the 15% of Arizona’s electorate that eagerly went to the polls to vote for him. As for the other 85%, well, most were not so enthused by their new governor who soon made news by cancelling MLK, Jr day in Arizona because MLK was, as Mecham and many on the far right “knew,” a Communist. Mecham also made headlines when he informed a gathering of Jews that they lived “in a Christian nation” where “Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Land.” As a reader of Rightlandia, you will undoubtedly be unsurprised to learn that Walter Huss was a big fan of Mecham’s.
Mecham was generally regarded as an embarrassment by most Republicans at the time, especially those in positions of elected authority. John McCain, for example, worried that people would take Mecham to be representative of how many Arizona Republicans thought.
But here’s the thing, Mecham was deeply beloved by the hardcore activists on the right edge of the GOP in the late 80s and early 90s, and such people were bound and determined to rescue their party for the “real conservatives” like themselves who were constantly having to do battle not just with the “Communist Democrats,” but also with their so-called Republican enablers.
When such people talked about “real conservatives,” what exactly did they mean? Well, Walter Huss’s archive can offer us a few clues. In this November 1988 edition of A Monthly Lesson in Criminal Politics, an anti-semitic conspiracy newsletter that Huss subscribed to, we learn that Mecham chose to make his first public appearance after his 1988 impeachment at an event this organization was sponsoring in Naples, Fl. Mecham’s speech was on the subject of the “Globalist combine” that supposedly took him down.
Just in case there’s any doubt about where this publication stood, this is how they signed off.
And this was how they oriented new readers to their basic understanding of the contemporary political landscape.
So yeah, Mecham’s choice to associate with this group suggests that his base was not comprised of folksy traditionalist who were maybe a little out of step with modern mores. This was serious tin-foil territory, and tin foil with a decidedly antisemitic and Christian Nationalist tint.
Mecham also appears as the author of many much-beloved books advertised for sale in this 80-page catalog produced by the Christian Patriot Association, a Posse Comitatus/Sovereign Citizen type of organization in Oregon that Huss had ties to. As you’ll see from their, shall we say idiosyncratic, list of topics, this was a group that had no qualms about directly addressing the “Jewish issue.”
But the most astonishing thing I’ve uncovered in Huss’s archive is a cassette tape of a 25 minute conversation he recorded in 1991 with an anti-tax activist in Arizona named Paul Eller who was also a big Mecham fan. Below is a 5-minute excerpt that takes place about 15 minutes into the call. This is the first time these two had ever spoken, and as you’ll see, it didn’t take long before they went from “taxes are too high, and Evan Mecham was a great governor, and it’s a shame how so many Republicans sold him out” to “it’s high time our side begins to recognize who the enemy is…it’s the Jew.” The first voice you hear is Eller and the second one is Huss.
Several things stand out to me from this conversation. First, Eller and Huss’s sense that the “actual” Republicans were the 16 out of the 90 in Arizona’s legislature with the guts to support Mecham. The rest of those “stinking Republicans” might as well have been Democrats as far as Eller and Huss were concerned. I don’t think the term RINO existed in 1991, but this is basically how Eller and Huss are thinking about the GOP. It’s the logical home for their politics, but for some annoying reason too many Republicans haven’t recognized that yet and are still clinging to outdated ideas about religious pluralism and multi-racial democracy. It’s worth noting that in 1989 and 1990 Huss is avidly reading David Duke’s National Association for the Advancement of White People newsletter and sending him letters of support and monetary contributions. Duke, Mecham, and Buchanan were the sorts of Republicans that Huss supported in the early 1990s. It was their brand of “America First” politics that he hoped the GOP would embrace.
Second, the moment around the 2:50 mark when Eller asks “you know who controls the media don’t you” and Huss playfully says “Irishmen.” My read on this is that by this point in the conversation, even though “the Jewish conspiracy” has not been explicitly named, Huss is pretty confident that he’s talking to a likeminded antisemite. “Irishmen” is both a playful joke that the two can share, but also holds out a bit of plausible deniability for Huss. Remember, he’s recording this call because he’s a deeply paranoid person who thinks he’s being spied on by “the Jewish mafia” who he believes controls Oregon and the country. You never know who might be a spy.
Third, when Eller complains around the 4:00 mark about how he’d given up on the churches because the people in them are like sheep, note how Huss (an ordained Foursquare minister) takes a slightly different approach to the issue. Yes, he agrees, many Christians have been led astray, but Huss has devised a “course of study” for Christian people to help them “get their eyes open.” [Stay tuned for a future edition of Rightlandia where I’ll share that “course of study” with you.] Eller is frustrated that too many Christian churches teach parishioners to be respectful of other faiths, when what they should be teaching is that Jews/Communists are their enemy who will destroy America if “patriots” like Mecham, Eller, and Huss don’t stop them. To these men, “true” Christianity is a Christianity that teaches that Jews/Communists are the enemy.
Finally, at the very end when Huss says he’s been in this fight for 35 years, the moment he’s identifying as the beginning of his “fight” was 1955 when he attended a Christian Anti-Communist Crusade led by Fred Schwarz. For Huss, the battle against Communism (remember, this call takes place AFTER the Berlin Wall has fallen) and the battle against “the Jewish conspiracy” were one and the same. It’s worth noting that Schwarz, a more “mainstream” figure than Huss ever was, frequently made it a point to say that he was not an antisemite and that he did not knowingly associate with such people. That said, he and Huss carried on a very friendly correspondence from 1960, when Schwarz was the honored guest at the opening of Huss’s Freedom Center in Portland, into the 1990s. Perhaps Huss knew better than to share his real thoughts about the nature of “the Communist conspiracy” with Schwarz. Or, more likely, he did share them and Schwarz either agreed or chose not to be overly concerned about a seemingly small point on which he and his friend (and contributor) Walter disagreed.
To return to Mecham, it’s the menacing, apocalyptic illiberalism of his supporters like Huss and Eller that I want to emphasize here as the bridge to Trumpism. The ~15% of the Arizona electorate who comprised this “Mecham constituency” in the late 1980s was no where near a majority, but it was a very organized minority who were dead set on transforming the Republican Party into a vehicle for their far right politics. It is this “Mecham constituency” that most establishment Republicans like John McCain regarded as a sort of embarrassing leftover from another time who would soon enough fade away. Little did he know that when he chose someone from that Mecham constituency to be his running mate in 2008 he was breathing new life into this strain of Republicanism that would eventually swallow the party whole.
One last point, and this is about the mainstream media’s role in all of this. While Mecham was often a figure of ridicule in the press, rarely was the dark underbelly of this far right insurgency frankly discussed. Here’s how the Arizona Republic (11 December 1991) reported on the tax reform project advocated by Walter Huss and the Arizonan who he recorded his phone conversation with. Note the gap between how Huss and Eller talk about their "enemy" privately, and the fairly pablum description here that makes them sound like just regular old concerned citizens with some “conservative” ideas about taxes.
I don’t fault the Arizona Republic for not knowing in 1991 who Eller and Huss were in all of their fullness. Such insight would have been very hard for a regular old reporter to acquire from these cagey old coots who knew better than to talk honestly with someone from “the controlled press.” But maybe we today can learn a few lessons from this episode and take a bit more time before we grant such seemingly “normie” conservatives the benefit of the doubt.