What you don’t get about Strategic Racism may kill your democracy
Anyone who won't recognize the power of the GOP's best con is a threat to democracy.
You’ve probably heard a lot less about Critical Race Theory since Virginia’s elections ended — even if you watch Fox News.
That doesn’t mean the GOP’s use of this dog whistle is gone after helping Republican Glenn Youngkin score a 60,000-vote win over Democrat Terry McAuliffe to become the commonwealth’s next governor. It means the GOP is just warming up and doesn’t want to blow out its fastball before the playoffs.
Trumpism without Trump
The big lessons the right has learned in their first gubernatorial win in Virginia since 2009 are a) to engage Trump voters, Republicans need to elevate racial grudges and b) to keep non-Trump independents from turning on GOP candidates while also dulling Democratic turnout, Republicans in tight races have to keep Trump away and use coded racial appeals.
Ian Haney López calls this use of coded language to benefit greedy elites “Strategic Racism.”
Youngkin doesn’t bleat about Muslims and immigrants the way Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene do, but he’s activating the same racial animus — just in a way that can win in swing areas where pouring base GOP voters to the polls isn’t enough for the W.
Youngkin is playing the same role Paul Ryan played to the Tea Party: a Men’s Wearhouse face on the same policies of exclusion and exploitation. This well-coiffed version of the politics of division lacks the glaring fake tans or growls of Trump or Steve Bannon. Thus it generates plenty of mainstream coverage that assume that there are actual good faith concerns about “education” at the heart the GOP’s efforts to, say, ban Toni Morrison’s books and bring out the bright side of slavery.
This sort of con will be much tougher to pull off 2022, when Trump is likely to resurrect his superspreader rallies and dominate the news, at least wherever he shows up. For many voters, about 81 million in 2020, Trump sprays a stink on everything the GOP does, revealing the party’s more nefarious and cowardly intentions.
But one of the GOP’s many advantages is they can keep Trump very entertained in safely gerrymandered districts and rolling rural outskirts. They may well be able to make sure he doesn’t make headlines in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, for instance, as he hammers the hundreds of miles of Mississippi in between the Keystone State’s metropolises. And Trump’s lack of presence on social media killing the cable news fixation on his every utterance is probably to the GOP’s advantage, since that gives Fox the power to package just the most useful of Trump’s email blasts.
The thing to remember is that will do exactly what they did in Virginia. They will activate the fears of parents on imaginary threats of fantastical academic theories — in order to distract from their party’s active support of Covid-19 and fiscal policies that poll even worse than spitting in a fight attendant's face.
Why? Because it works.
Think of it as a partisan gerrymandering of the American mind, because it’s an equally insidious and effective strategy for one-party GOP rule.
Stop reading this if you haven’t read Ian Haney López’s latest
In an essential new essay, “Can Democracy (and the Democratic Party) Survive Racism as a Strategy?”, Haney López lays out the history of the right’s embrace of racial dog whistles since the Civil Rights Era, Democratic failures combatting it, and a proven strategy to take it on directly.
You need to read it and any attempt I make to sum up his irreplaceable analysis (including in the paragraph above) might embarrass me and, even worse, him.
What you don’t get about Strategic Racism may kill your democracy
But let me dwell on two points that nearly everyone misses that allows many in politics to believe that we don’t need an approach that inextricably combines race and class to combat the GOP’s Strategic Racism.
The magic con of plausible deniability.
Because of the work of Haney López, his sometimes collaborator and host of the Words to Win By podcast Anat Shenker-Osioro and so many others (including Lee Atwater himself), Strategic Racism has become much more obvious to you and most of us on the left. That doesn’t mean it’s obvious to everyone or all of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump.
”Dog whistle politics is often misunderstood as a secret handshake between a politician and voter when both are closet racists,” Haney López writes. “But in fact, dog whistling is so powerful because it hides the underlying racism even from the voters most agitated by the racist prods.”
And just calling Republicans racists or white supremacists doesn’t undermine their effort, it helps it.
”Condemnations of white supremacy backfire because, perversely, the Race Left’s story strongly echoes the right’s racial narrative. Boiled down to its essence, the right says to the American public: our nation is locked into racial conflict, and everyone must choose a side. But that’s what the Race Left is saying, too.”
It may sound like a foghorn to you, but when Trump talks about immigrants threatening your way of life, it doesn’t feel like racism to much of America, even the Americans who look like the people he’s scapegoating. That’s because…Strategic Racism doesn’t just work on white racists, which is why it works.
Many if not all dog whistles are artisanal wonders, crafted to appeal to the innately conservative mindsets of many Americans. Tropes about bootstraps, strong families and bootstrapping your strong family play well with almost everyone who grew up on our founding myths. Haney López’s fantastic book MERGE LEFT opens with him trying to talk race-class with left-leaning union members who keep wandering into many of Fox’s favorite talking points.
Black and Latino voters are in no way immune to these coded appeals, which are designed to hide the damage they do their communities. In fact, Haney López found that “the overwhelming majority of voters — including majorities of Latinos and African Americans — interpret racial dog whistles not as bald racism but as common sense.”
The stakes of the 2022 election are unlike any midterm, and I’ll lay them out explicitly in a post soon in case there’s any doubt. But the strategy the GOP is using is just an 21st-century version of what they’ve been doing since 1968.
They do it because it works, especially when they’re out of power and don’t have their inevitable failures and atrocities to defend. And they do it because Democrats generally haven’t figured out that it must be countered directly, likely because it requires recognizing, as Haney López says, that race is “inseparably fused to class.”
A bulletpointed list of six popular policies or even an honest accounting of the ways Joe Biden, and every Democratic president since Clinton, soars over his GOP counterparts when it comes to every economic indicator won’t do it. Nope. Especially because we have two Senators who’d rather see permanent GOP rule than anything that threatens the filibuster thus their power and their careers.
Pretending the GOP isn’t good at what it does (and that what Trump did and does is fundamentally different than what, say, Paul Ryan did) will guarantee a disaster in 2022.
Adopting the strategies that Haney López teaches in his Race-Class Academy and Shenker-Osorio spreads through We Make the Future isn’t our best hope. It’s our only hope.
Image by Anthony Crider, CC