The first night of the Democratic National Convention often felt like a direct response to the GOP’s competing event in Cleveland the week before. Where the RNC often seemed designed to show off Donald Trump’s kids, for example, many of the DNC speeches instead focused on the dangers Trump presents to your children. The most striking divergence, however, arose almost in passing, when Elizabeth Warren spoke briefly of Martin Luther King Jr., a man whose legacy was also repeatedly invoked in Cleveland.
Where Warren drills down into the specifics of King’s thought, Republicans turned him into a defender of their own thinking. The contrast reveals a great deal about the ways the two parties have laid out their respective positions: The RNC’s version of Martin Luther King Jr. is little more than a convenient, vacuous myth, an empty caricature with which speakers papered over and justified the racist, fearmongering ideologies they espoused on stage.
As Slate’s Isaac Chotiner writes, Warren spent most of her speech launching a series of excoriating—but specific—attacks on Trump, both the man and the brand. Though she drew on the familiar and frighteningly massive catalog of offensives, her most perspicuous broadsides may have been against Trump’s lack of substance. “Did you hear any actual ideas?” she asked at one point, smirking professorially.
Warren, for her own part, laid out few plans or proposals of her own, opting instead for a pugnacious elaboration of the differences between the two parties. Nevertheless, even when she was dismissing Trump’s proposed border wall as “stupid,” her speech was still a smart one, focusing on both intellectual and ideological particulars. Nowhere was that more apparent than in her account of King, a moment that deserves to be quoted in full:
Divide and conquer is an old story in America. Dr. Martin Luther King knew it. After his march from Selma to Montgomery, he spoke of how segregation was created to keep people divided. Instead of higher wages for workers, he spoke of how poor whites in the South were fed Jim Crow, which told a poor white worker that, “No matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.” Racial hatred was part of keeping the powerful on top.
Warren’s King is not a passive dreamer; he is a practical thinker, attentive to the realities of sociopolitical conditions. This is a King who recognized that racism and economic inequality are interwoven, a King who spoke to the dignity of work and who argued in the speech Warren cites, “Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races” but in order to ensure “Southern labor the cheapest in the land.”
In referencing these lines, Warren is, of course, still attacking Trump, but she’s doing so by way of a sophisticated intellectual pivot. She implicitly proposes that Trump’s well-established, wholly indefensible racism stands in precise contradistinction to his promise to bring jobs back to America, as well as his claim—one he made in Cleveland last week—that he will be the voice of the silenced. When the Republican nominee fans the flames of racial hatred, Warren suggests, he deploys a centuries-old tactic used to disempower white and nonwhite workers alike.
It’s a subtle avenue of attack, certainly too subtle for the TV Muppets who wondered afterward where on Day 1 the Democrats had tried to reach out to the disaffected voters flocking to Trump. In its very complexity, however, Warren’s citation of King struck a useful contrast between Democrats and their Republican opponents. RNC speakers repeatedly trotted King out over the course of the convention’s four nights, but they did so in a way that betrayed little knowledge of the man or his thought. The GOP’s King was not a politically minded activist but a calming prophet of essential unity and human goodness, a defender of the very status quo he sought to change.
David A. Clarke Jr., the Milwaukee sheriff who came to Cleveland to speak on behalf of the Blue Lives Matter cause, came closest to offering a King with real heft. Observing that King “wrote passionately about the interrelatedness of all communities,” he described a thinker committed to “the basic morality of the rule of law, provided that it is applied equally to both the wealthy and the impoverished.” Though his observations about “interrelatedness” offer a wan, anticipatory echo of Warren’s remarks, Clarke fails to acknowledge King’s deeper point—that those communities are bound together in a pernicious mesh of mutual oppression. He instead portrays King as a man who would have thought that present conditions were good enough.
Other speakers who referenced MLK in Cleveland did so in ways that were still more perfunctory. For Eric Trump, King provided little more than quotable inspiration for his own philanthropy:
As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” When I was 22 years old, I founded the Eric Trump Foundation to benefit St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, an incredible, incredible organization. I run my foundation based on the principles my father taught me, honesty, integrity, and values.
Here, Eric Trump sets himself up as a man who has already answered the challenges King posed, having done so—puzzlingly—not by bringing about social change, but by raising funds to support sick children. But King also plays another rhetorical role in the speech: In bookending his own efforts with King’s words and the “principles” his father supposedly conveyed, Eric Trump sets up a noxious equivalence between the two. Significantly, he does so without going into detail about the actual “values” that either man espoused, allowing him to sidestep the question of just how far they are from one another.
Mike Pence, Trump’s VP nominee, went wider still in his allusion to King, invoking him in an attempt to reveal his ecumenism and broadmindedness. “Although we weren’t really a political family, the heroes of my youth were President John F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” Pence claimed. Once again, the rhetorical point is simple enough: Pence, an evangelical Republican who was born to a family of Irish Catholic Democrats, admired JFK—therefore he must be capable of working across the aisle. Pence, a white man, looked up to MLK—therefore he must not be a racist. If you like them, he suggests with a shrug, maybe you’ll like Mike Pence, too.
This is the RNC’s version of Martin Luther King Jr. in a nutshell, little more than a prop to hold up the speakers’ own ideologies and cults of personality. He is their useful black friend, a reference point who—like Trump’s many anonymous acquaintances—shows that they’re not bigoted, and that they have the American people’s best interests at heart. By contrast, brief as it was, Warren’s reference to the civil rights leader was no mere ornament. Hers was a more complicated King—and he was all the more meaningful for it.
