This week's midterm elections are likely the most important in recent American history, a referendum on the present and future of the country’s multiracial democracy. On one side there is Donald Trump and a Republican Party which has fully embraced white backlash politics and the lie that white Americans are under siege in “their own country.” Trump and his movement represent an emerging American form of fascism and a full-on assault on democracy. On the other side is the Democratic Party and its multiracial coalition of mostly younger, more educated and cosmopolitan voters who correctly see in Donald Trump and his movement an existential threat to their human rights, safety, dignity and prosperity.
Running through both sides of this fractious political divide – what feels like a domestic cold war about to turn hot — are old and unresolved questions about the relationship between race and class in America.
Donald Trump bellows about the “forgotten” (white) American and taking the “country back” for the (white) “working class.” This is fake populism and classic Herrenvolk right-wing "producerism." Or to put things more simply, white identity politics repackaged as something else.
In response, the Democratic Party have struggled to create a unifying narrative. Too many of its most vocal spokespeople – especially on the left – have suggested that “identity” politics and too much focus on issues of race and gender allowed Donald Trump to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2016.
Ian Haney López has a solution for the Democrats – and the country. He is Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of many articles and several books, including “White by Law” and, most recently, “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.” Lopez is also a senior fellow at Demos and director of the Haas Institute’s racial politics project.
López’s new research project suggests that Democrats need to embrace a more sophisticated way of talking about race, class and human rights as being inseparable from one another. Ultimately, it is plutocrats like Donald Trump, Republican donors and funders, and other members of the 1 percent who are using racism -- as they have done throughout American history -- to divide and conquer, leaving the large majority of people less prosperous, less secure and less free.
How do racial “dog-whistle” politics play into this right-wing strategy? What does white racial identity mean for white Americans at present? In what ways has Trump-style white identity politics actually hurt white people? How can a smarter and more nuanced discussion of race and class unite voters in support of the Democratic Party specifically, and liberal and progressive policies more broadly? How have right-wing libertarians and other conservatives combined racism with a narrative about “big government” to destroy the social safety net, make the rich even richer and more powerful, and hurt the American people as a whole?
My conversation with Ian Haney López has been edited for clarity and length.
How was Donald Trump able to win the White House? What do we know about that now that we didn't know two years ago?
I would say that Trump’s path was eased by a half-century-long process in which the Republican Party purposefully remade itself as the white men’s party. They did this by harnessing racial demagoguery as a weapon. But the fact of the matter is that racial demagoguery is not a weapon which can be controlled. Every Republican politician who gets elected as a racial demagogue is vulnerable to being bested on the right by someone who’s even more extreme in terms of racial demagoguery.
The big advantage Donald Trump had was that he didn’t actually believe he was going to become president. Therefore he didn’t care about the fate of the Republican Party. This meant Trump had few if any constraints – beyond what worked strategically to his advantage – on his use of racial demagoguery. Because Trump was willing to go much further in terms of his racist innuendo, he ran the field on the Republicans. He took them all out.
You look at these folks: Mitt Romney had his own track record with racial demagoguery, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush started talking about deporting people. All of them were racial demagogues themselves, but they were constrained by the sense of what it might take to actually get elected, by the sense that Republicans needed a bigger base and a concern with their own integrity and public reputation. Trump was unburdened by any of that. Essentially what Donald Trump did was walk into a game that the Republicans had set up, one which had a few nominal constraints. He broke the rules and won the game.
There is a more or less straight line from John McCain and Sarah Palin to this moment with Donald Trump.
There is this deeper fear of actually naming what’s been happening in our country over the last 50 years. You have a lot of people who want to treat Trump like an anomaly and say, “Wow! That guy is out of control. If only we could back to 2016.” Here are the facts. In 2016 we were in a deep crisis as a country, a slow-moving crisis which has been on the march since the civil rights movement. Which direction are we going to go as a society? Will we proceed in the direction of multiracial democracy, or will we instead proceed away from democracy and towards rule by the rich? That question has been front and center in this country for the last 50 years. Trump didn’t raise that question. He only drew the dynamics into view.
Similarly, McCain brought Sarah Palin in and also engaged in significant racial demagoguery himself. He understood it was immoral. He understood it was racist. When McCain felt that his own election was jeopardized, he started talking about building a wall on the Mexico-U.S. border. McCain was more than happy to campaign with Donald Trump and with [former Phoenix sheriff] Joe Arpaio, and this is somebody that we know understood that those were racial demagogues. Shame on him! I think it’s a mistake to say, “Well, McCain was this wonderful centrist. If only we had more people like him.” No, McCain was very much a part of the problem.
Frankly, the people who refused to see McCain as part of the problem are part of the problem too, because they’re blinding themselves to the actual challenges we face as a country. Do we move self-confidently and purposefully towards multiracial democracy, or do we follow a set of leaders who are intentionally and strategically dividing us by race, moving us away from democracy and toward rule by the rich?
I have a standard warning I give when writing about Trump and this moment, or giving talks about it. I point out that America’s multiracial democracy is contingent and in many ways an outlier in the country’s history. White backlash under Trump and the Republican Party is a threat to post-civil rights America, a country too many people – especially younger Americans – have taken to be a norm and a given for all time. Are my worries and cautions misplaced?
Not at all. If I were to push back at all, I’d say it’s not clear to me that we have yet achieved a multiracial democracy that we might be in the process of losing. We moved dramatically in that direction in the 1960s, but then, very quickly, progress was cut off. Definitions are important. When I use the term “multiracial democracy,” I mean a democracy in which all people are fully enfranchised and people are not disenfranchised in a way that significantly parallels the country’s racial hierarchy. When have we had that in the United States?
Since the mid-1970s, we’ve been moving back quite aggressively from that ideal. If you look at what’s been happening with the Republican Party, essentially from 1980 onward, they came to understand that their election depended upon disenfranchising people of color. They have been aggressively pursuing the disenfranchisement of people of color through such policies as felony disenfranchisement laws, gerrymandering and now this whole narrative about almost nonexistent “voter fraud.”
Meanwhile, of course, these are the same Republicans who will not lift a finger to ensure that our voting systems are protected against hacking by Russia. There is a profoundly antidemocratic impulse at work on the American right wing, and it’s embodied institutionally in the Republican Party. It has forestalled any actual move towards multiracial democracy.
This hostility towards multiracial democracy is part of a hostility by Republicans and conservatives to democracy more generally. For example, the rule of law, freedom of the press and what is happening with America’s courts from the appellate to the federal system also show how the conservative movement is hostile to democracy. Trump is just more obvious about it.
The right-wing assault on the judicial branch is also a clear example of how conservatism and racism are one and the same thing in America at present.
Yes, although I would not go that far. I would say that the Federalist Society for example takes a view of race relations which they claim is “anti-racist.” Yet it’s a view that tends to ensure the continuation of white dominance. But this is not just Trump. Conservatives have been engaged in a purposeful remaking of the courts that has two complementary parts. This is pure “dog-whistle” politics.
One part is to attack the courts for their recent role in promoting racial integration and gender equality and to say, “Well, the courts are full of activist judges.” In this logic, the courts do not deserve legitimacy because they are promoting this illegitimate liberal agenda of integration and gender equality: “We have to get rid of activist judges.” What that means in practice is that we have to install court justices who are hostile to the basic idea that human rights should exist for everybody in society.
The other half of this logic and strategy is that conservatives are going to take the opportunity to put on the court justices and judges who are friendly to the business community. This is part of one big strategy.
The more we shut down human rights as a society, the more we create space to open up for a pro-business orientation. What we have in the Supreme Court as it exists now – and where Brett Kavanaugh will only make this worse – is an institution that is historically one of the most hostile to civil rights and one of the friendliest to big business. That is a product of dog-whistle politics.
How does this work? Right-wing politicians say to voters, “Hey! People of color are a threat. You know who else is a threat? Government and in particular, the courts, because the courts keep forcing you to have to deal with these people. Let’s remake the courts so that you’re protected from these activist judges.”
In the process of remaking the courts, they install business-friendly judges who are busy making life difficult for unions, making life difficult for people who want to sue corporations, making life wonderful for big money in politics, making life wonderful for polluters.
These are the wages of dog-whistle politics: The promise that you’re going to be protected from people of color and activist judges and government that protects them, when in reality what you’re really going to get is a judicial system and a government that helps rig the rules for the new plutocrats.
Here is an obvious and common objection by conservatives – especially College Republican types who still have Ayn Rand in their back pocket – to your observation. “We have to free business and get rid of regulations because capitalism and the market are antithetical to racism. Those are market inefficiencies. If we just free business, then racism will go away.”
Anybody who says that is not paying attention to what’s actually happening in the economy. The whole idea of unfettered competition, that’s just theoretical libertarian nonsense. One would have to be crazy to believe that stuff.
What you really have is not deregulation, but re-regulation on the part of the corporations and the family dynasties and the lobbyists themselves. This is the rich writing the rules for themselves, and they write the rules in ways that protect them from market competition and liability when in the course of making billions they do damage to regular people.
The whole sort of college libertarian thinking is so much self-induced blindness about what’s lurking behind these arguments. It wouldn’t take but 15 or 20 minutes of serious reading to discover that very few people are actually serious about a deregulated marketplace. It wouldn’t take that much more to discover that many of the big libertarians, including Rand Paul and his father, are people who came to libertarianism as a way of opposing civil rights.
It doesn’t take that much reflection to recognize that libertarianism as a political ideology is most attractive to young (white) men of great means who can, because of their age and gender, imagine themselves as dominant and heroic and self-sufficient. And also because of their privilege and means, these same libertarians don’t worry about how they are going to pay for education, how they are going to pay for health care, how they are going to pay for shelter, how they are going to pay for food. They have not experienced the hardships of life or its sudden reversals.
Ultimately, there is a type of political and psychological immaturity to libertarianism. There is also a disregard for human rights, through libertarianism, for many different people in our society.
What are some examples of how racism actually hurts white people? Of course, there is what the historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois famously described as the “psychological wages of whiteness.” But there is a huge material component to whiteness as well.
I think you’ve hit on a really critical point. What is the relationship between most white people today, in 2018, and whiteness as an identity? Being considered “white” is a type of social identity. But in this moment with Trump we have an opportunity to show white folks that seeking meaning in being white is actually very dangerous to their welfare and the welfare of their children. In a remarkable way, given the politics of this crisis, we’re in a different position in 2018 than we were in 1968 -- let alone than we were in the 1600s -- to make this point.
For centuries the radical idea has been cross-racial solidarity between working people. But the reality has also been that the psychological and material benefits of whiteness have been enormous and thus sufficient to win over the loyalty of many whites. Whiteness has granted certainty about one’s place in society, one’s own inherent goodness, one’s own rationality, one’s human capacity, one’s ability to engage in self-governance.
Whiteness also provided jobs, neighborhoods, houses, the clubs, the churches, etc. These are tremendous benefits. How do they compare to the one percent, or the one-tenth of one percent, in terms of class and money? Relatively speaking, they're crumbs. But these wages of whiteness are still significant.
What has happened in 2018, by comparison? Two different things. On the one hand, if we think about the psychological wages of whiteness, for many whites those wages have been going down because of the civil rights movement, and going down in a way that I think many whites would actually describe as positive. That is, many whites have internalized the idea that foregrounding your sense of self in race pride is racist, immoral and ugly.
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