The grim lesson Sen. Tommy Tuberville learned after his white nationalism comment

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama would like you to know that he is “totally against racism.” For good measure, he told reporters on Capitol Hill on Monday, “there’s nobody less racist in this building than me.” Even Tuberville — who thinks the three branches of government are “the House, the Senate and the executive” — knows these aren’t the kind of statements a senator makes when he’s having a good week. But in real time he is learning something key to being a GOP politician: how to race-bait without being too obvious about it.

This all began in May, when Tuberville criticized the Pentagon for its efforts to root out white nationalism in the military. When asked in a radio interview whether he thought white nationalists should be allowed in the military, he responded, “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”

Those comments have stayed in the spotlight because Tuberville has placed a monthslong hold on dozens of military promotions to protest the Pentagon’s policy of paying travel expenses for active-duty personnel seeking abortion care. As a result, the Marine Corps is now without a Senate-confirmed commandant for the first time in 150 years.

Though even some Republicans are exasperated with Tuberville’s blockade, he’s maintained his hold, and thus he — and that radio interview — have been resurfacing in the news. In a CNN interview this week, Tuberville defended himself, saying, “My opinion of a white nationalist, if someone wants to call them white nationalist, to me is an American.” But after a torrent of criticism — again, including from some Republicans — Tuberville backtracked to say he opposed racism itself, as though someone finally explained to him that “white nationalism” doesn’t just refer to patriotic folks who happen to be Caucasian, but is a racist ideology asserting that the country should be run by and for white people.

The problem Republicans may have with Tuberville is that he doesn’t understand a fundamental principle of contemporary conservative rhetoric on race: Though Donald Trump may have shown Republicans they don’t have to be particularly subtle, they still don’t want to be too explicitly racist. 

So for instance, when Tuberville said in 2022 that Democrats are “pro-crime” and “want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that,” it was a little too unambiguous. But GOP politicians know that Republican voters are more likely to believe that whites face racial discrimination rather than blacks. So their trick instead is to stir up outrage at any effort to acknowledge, explore or address racism against nonwhite people, while saying that you’re only doing it because of your passionate opposition to racism itself. And while Tuberville may be moderately chagrined, neither he nor his party is any less committed, as both a substantive and political matter, to what we might call its anti-anti-racism project. 

That’s why nearly every contemporary conservative initiative to undermine anti-racist efforts that originate with liberals is presented as the truest opposition to racism. Why must affirmative action be dismantled? So no one will be discriminated against because of their race. Why must we restrict what teachers are allowed to say about racism? So no one is made to feel bad because of their race. 

And then there’s the the most horrifying brand of racism for Republicans: white people being unfairly accused of racism. Vicious liberals wielding false racism accusations is a constant topic on conservative talk radio. It feeds conservative victimhood narratives, and it’s why Republicans have passionately fought against efforts to eradicate extremism from the ranks of the military, the issue that led Tommy Tuberville to start riffing on “white nationalism” in the first place. 

Preventing more versions of Timothy McVeigh — the white nationalist Army veteran who used his training in explosives to murder 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995 — seems a self-evidently worthy goal for the military to pursue. But Republicans don’t think so. 

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning that military personnel and veterans were prime recruiting targets for extremist groups, including white supremacists; the performative outrage from Republicans was so intense that then-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano withdrew the report and went on Fox News to apologize. And amidst this current controversy, Tuberville’s office issued a statement saying Tuberville “was being skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military.” 

Even if that statement bore any relationship to what Tuberville actually said, which it doesn’t, it’s an equally problematic assertion. One study from the University of Maryland showed that among the hundreds of active-duty and ex-military personnel arrested for criminal offenses motivated by political extremism from 1990 to 2021, over 80 percent were identifiably right wing, either anti-government/militia or white supremacist. A 2020 Pentagon report warned about white supremacists in the military, stating “individuals with extremist affiliations and military experience are a concern to U.S. national security.”

But Tuberville and other Republicans are more interested in condemning the Pentagon for being too “woke” for seeking diversity. At least two GOP candidates for president, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence, have proclaimed their intention to again rename Fort Liberty in North Carolina after its former namesake, Confederate general and slave owner Braxton Bragg. (And before the base was renamed Liberty last month, Donald Trump repeatedly defended honoring Bragg.) DeSantis and Pence claimed to be defending tradition against “political correctness,” but we know what it really is: an attempt to convince white voters that they should feel threatened and angry, then turn those feelings into voter turnout. 

But even Republicans know race-baiting can’t be so blatant that it sounds to everyone like simple racism. That’s the lesson Tommy Tuberville will no doubt take from this episode. He won’t change what he believes, but he may be a little more careful about what he says.