As it has for decades, “pro-choice” continues to serve as the main term used to express support for abortion. Here’s President Biden after the leak: “it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November. At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice senators and a pro-choice majority in the House.”

Is “choice” the best language? There’s already good evidence that it’s not, including from a group whose own name reflects the long dominance of that frame. NARAL Pro-Choice America, one of the country’s largest groups dedicated to fighting for abortion access, commissioned focus groups and surveys to evaluate how best to communicate with voters. Their 2020 report ranked 18 frames — and “pro-choice” failed to place among the top ten.

In contrast, “freedom to decide” and “power to decide” tied for first, along with “my decision for my life, your decision for yours.” And NARAL’s new tag line? It’s “Freedom is for everybody.”

Why might “choice” not be the best language?

Start by comparing “choice” to the right’s frames: pro-life, pro-family, heart-beat. Simply as a value, “choice” is important, but it also easily comes across as trivial, akin to a consumer preference, or even a whim or caprice. Indeed, already in Roe itself, two justices dissed abortion as a medical procedure too often chosen “for no reason at all.” Certainly, “choice” does not come across as weightier than “life,” “family,” or “heart.”

The central problem is that “choice” does not express the core values animating support for abortion rights.

From a constitutional law perspective, there are two main ways of expressing the values implicated by access to abortion: liberty and equality. These are terms that courts understand, to be sure, but because of the prominent role constitutional law plays in our society, liberty and equality are also powerful cultural terms.

Liberty has two components. The first is indeed “choice,” or the right to make decisions, hence the origins of this frame. But what we really mean is not the power to make random decisions; rather, it’s the right to be free from state coercion when we make decisions central to our sense of self and our inter-personal relationships with partners, family, community, and work world.

This is the core value that underlies freedom of conscience, and of religion. Framed this way, the right seeks to use the power of government to impose its religiously inspired beliefs on the rest of us, while defenders of abortion rights seek to use the Constitution to protect women (and some men, see below) from coercion when making foundational decisions about whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

Liberty also includes the right to control our bodies, including such things as the right not to have our bodies shackled or imprisoned, and the right not to have medical procedures conducted on us against our will. Here, as everywhere, degree matters. The anti-vaccine activists invoke this sense of liberty to oppose injections, as if vaccinations rival or even exceed the physical invasion of one’s body that corresponds to being forced by the government to carry a pregnancy to term against one’s will.

As tag lines, “reproductive freedom” and “freedom is for everyone” do a much better job at communicating these liberty concerns. “Freedom” has more resonance, more cultural power, more emotional heft than “choice.”

But even “freedom” neglects another crucial argument for access to abortion, equality. While choice and freedom point our gaze toward individuals, access to abortion is at least as much about women as a group.

One of the first Supreme Court decisions to uphold discrimination against women in the workplace — ironically, a law banning women from working as lawyers — offered this bon mot: “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things.”

Criminal bans on abortion do more than coerce individuals as individuals — they seek to enforce conformity with 19th century gender roles, pushing women into becoming, if not wife, then at least “mother.” When the National Organization for Women in the summer of 1970 organized a “Women’s Strike for Equality,” it made three core demands: equal opportunity in jobs and education; publicly supported childcare; and meaningful access to abortion.

Conceptualizing abortion in equality terms requires acknowledging that, overwhelmingly, “pregnant people” are “women” in the cisgender sense. Thus it is important to recognize that “equality” is always a tricky tool for emancipation: it fights group oppression by using group identity. But for some, group identity may be precisely the problem. Or, in more pointed terms, conflating abortion with “women’s rights” runs the risk of obscuring the experiences and concerns of transmen, many of whom care very deeply about their ability to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

What term or phrase might communicate a commitment to gender equality in advocating for abortion rights? Perhaps “equality” itself, or “dignity,” a term used by Justice Kennedy in some of his decisions protecting same-sex intimacy and marriage. Or maybe a combination, along the lines of “reproductive freedom and dignity.” After all, liberty and equality are often intertwined — and far more important to each of us than mere choice.

The power of race-class fusion politics is that it’s easy to understand— and the weakness is that it’s hard to internalize.

Race-class at root boils down to this: “they divide to conquer, we unite to build.” Race-class requires BOTH statements. “They divide” by itself strikes many people as divisive, partly because the right constantly projects its sins onto the left, including its strategy of stoking division. “We unite” by itself comes across as an ideal, a worthy aspiration, but naive or too dangerous to chance in the face of the supposed threats that the right constantly warns about. Together, though, these statements (a) explain what’s happening in human, understandable terms and (b) offer a pragmatic way forward. The “ease” with which this frame is grasped explains, I think, why in race-class testing, these messages perform better than all of the other political frames, right and left, even the first time respondents hear them.

The weakness comes because race-class is hard to internalize. This, in turn, is why I’ve taken recently to talking about the need for a paradigm change. My aim in talking about “paradigms” is not to suggest that race-class is new. On the contrary, it’s an older, more radical way of understanding racism. It’s the conception of racism that motivated Bacon’s Rebellion, the Fusion Movement in the South after the Civil War, the analysis of W.E.B. DuBois, the labor organizing of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr., to link and challenge simultaneously racism, capitalism, and militarism. (Shout out to Rev. William Barber, pictured above, for leading one of today’s most vibrant race-class fusion movements.)

Rather, I talk now about paradigm change to highlight how deeply most of us have internalized a perspective on racism that impedes our ability to grasp the full implications of racism as a class weapon. For most racial justice activists, for instance, I imagine that almost all have internalized the notion that racism is at root white-over-nonwhite hierarchy. Certainly, that was my model for years and years, even as a professor who routinely teaches courses on race and American law as well as critical race theory.

If that’s our model, however, then it’s hard to explain why most whites should (let alone will) embrace cross-racial solidarity. The arguments for solidarity become rooted in morality and empathy, but not in pragmatism, since under this model, racism is, frankly, a practical benefit to most whites.

What would it mean, then, for racial justice activists to internalize and truly believe that racism against black and brown people is the most immediate threat not just to communities of color, but to white children, to white neighborhoods, to white jobs and pensions, to American democracy, and indeed to a survivable climate?

For that is the point of race-class fusion: to say to everyone, racism against people of color is the main weapon defeating us in a class war for control over our government, our economy, and our society, and that means racism against people of color is the greatest threat each and every one of our families faces, no matter our race, color, religion, or immigration status.

In other words: race-class fusion rests on a paradigm change regarding racism itself. We must come to see racism as at root class war waged by promoting white-over-nonwhite hierarchy. The white-over-nonwhite hierarchy is there, god knows. But in addition to denouncing its evil and calling for empathy, we also have to look behind racism, to see who promotes and profits from white racism. When the curtain before which white supremacy performs is ripped down, then and only then will we be able to build a multi-racial, progressive supermajority committed to a racially egalitarian, economically just nation.

This essay first appeared as part of the Democracy Endgame series hosted by Protect Democracy.

As a practical matter, at the present moment the survival of democracy in the United States hinges upon the electoral success of the Democratic Party. Given the radicalization of the Republican Party, there is little prospect that democracy endures unless Democrats win enough elections to remain in control of the federal government.

Major hurdles facing the Democratic Party include the disproportionate power of rural states, gerrymandered districts, voter disenfranchisement, the composition and rules of the Senate, and other factors. But chief among these challenges looms identity politics — the success of the right’s identity politics, and the tendency of Democrats to engage in identity wars with each other.

The Democratic Party is famously bad at communicating a unifying story about its vision for society. Indeed, Democrats all too often campaign as if their opponent is another faction of their own party rather than the Republicans. And then, with each new loss (or distressingly narrow victory), Democrats take aim at each other anew, further strengthening the sense that their brand is disarray.

Many factors contribute to conflict among Democrats. But nothing hamstrings the Democratic Party’s power to define itself and its mission as much as the right’s strategic racism. The GOP’s embrace decades ago of racial dog whistle politics has turned Democrats against each other. One Democratic faction believes with every fiber that white racism must be directly confronted, though this alienates white voters and loses elections. The other side insists that the best strategy is to mainly ignore racism — though this leaves unchallenged the Republicans’ main electoral strategy. Democrats are thus two Titanics, steaming in opposite directions. From their respective decks, each can see the iceberg in the other’s path, but not the jagged teeth beneath their own bows. For democracy itself, whatever hope there is depends on both these Titanics turning.

Dog Whistle Politics

In 1961, Barry Goldwater represented an insurgent faction within the Republican Party that opposed the New Deal consensus that government should work for working families, asserting instead that private enterprise and lightly regulated capitalism were the surest engines of national progress. Understanding the widespread popularity of the New Deal, Goldwater’s wing proposed pursuing their class agenda by pandering to white backlash. Using folksy language, the Arizona businessman argued that Republicans “ought to go hunting where the ducks are.” Goldwater meant in the South, where many whites, traditionally allied with the Democratic Party, were increasingly aggrieved by civil rights. But precisely because of the civil rights movement’s success, Goldwater would not speak in the plain language of white supremacy. Instead, he adopted dog whistles, coded terms like “states’ rights” designed to give a neutral veneer to racist sentiment.

For Goldwater himself, the racial strategy failed. His opponent Lyndon Johnson won in a landslide, based on campaign promises for activist government to end poverty. But Johnson, it now turns out, was the last Democratic candidate for president to win a majority of the white vote.

There are two points directly relevant to our current situation. One is that in 1964, white voters by a landslide supported a sweeping progressive agenda they understood as akin to prior New Deal programs — which is to say, government programs designed to help them. Likewise, modern polls show high levels of support for redistributive policies.[1] There’s nothing inherently conservative about American voters, nor even white voters more narrowly, at least in terms of economic issues. The “conservatism” of the voting public, rather, is driven by race. The second point is this: over the last six decades, dog whistle politics has completely remade U.S. electoral politics, bringing us to the cliff’s edge of authoritarianism buttressed by racially-aggrieved populism.

Much has been written about the recent radicalization of the Republican Party. Most of its elected officials now adopt dangerously anti-democratic positions, from the big lie about stolen elections to support for insurrection, from efforts to disenfranchise whole swaths of voters to encouraging vigilante violence against other Americans. Less often emphasized is that racial politics is the prime driver behind this transmogrification.

“It’s a mistake for the party to accept the beliefs of Sen. Barry Goldwater and write off the negro vote.” In 1962, Richard Nixon issued that caution, from his vantage as a moderate Republican and a former vice-president. “If Goldwater wins his fight,” Nixon foretold, “our party would eventually become the first major all-white political party.”[2] But by 1968, Nixon had decided to join the Goldwater’s duck hunt, adopting what was then called the “Southern Strategy.” Nixon understood its ugliness. But he also concluded that he had no choice but to employ coded racism if he was to triumph.

Like Nixon, generations of GOP candidates have made the same Faustian bargain, employing racial demagoguery to win election. Some, likely, have genuinely hated people of color. Most, one suspects, have been more directly motivated dog whistling’s power to win elections. Yet racial demagoguery is not a weapon easily holstered. It remains a loaded gun lying around, easily picked up by someone else willing to go just a bit further — and not just in competition with Democrats, but as a strategy to use against other Republicans. As a result, for six decades the Republicans have been, and remain now, locked into a radicalizing cycle. New cohorts win as firebrands, and then lose as RINOs. Over the decades, we’ve seen the Silent Majority, Reagan Democrats, the Gingrich Revolution, the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus, and then Trumpism. And even Trumpists now find themselves overtaken by the apocalyptic storm of QAnon. More than anything else, it is racial demagoguery and the radicalizing cycle it drives that has brought us to the precipice of democratic collapse.

Identity Politics

Not infrequently, political professionals dismiss “stories” as superficial, even trivial, because they’re seen as cheap words rather than practical policies or concrete outcomes that directly improve people’s lives. “It’s the economy, stupid,” is the classic formulation. But it’s not the economy, or at least, not directly. Axios reported that after the widespread condemnations of the January 6 insurrection, consumer confidence among Democrats rose nearly 4 points while it fell by 5.6 points among Republicans. The trigger? Not any change in the economy, of course, but rather a shift in the evaluation of whether Donald Trump would actually leave the White House. Similarly, many pundits initially attributed Trump’s 2016 victory to economic hardship, only to have more sober analysis demonstrate the power of racial resentment to shape perceptions regarding the state of the country, including the economy.[3] More generally, pollster recognize that with each switch in the party controlling the presidency, big partisan shifts occur in how people regard their economic situation. It’s not that hardship doesn’t matter. Economic distress and anxiety make people more prone to accepting volatile ideas, including the need to dramatically alter course. Still, though, it’s the frame that people use to understand their lives, more directly than the conditions themselves, that drive how they participate in politics.[4]

Look at the GOP’s catastrophic pandemic politics. Republican officials have enacted policies that discourage mask-wearing and vaccination, with predictable outcomes of illness and even death. Even so, their base rewards them. Here’s Republican House member Lauren Boebert at the summer 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference, applause resounding as she strides the stage with fiery rhetoric: “We’re here to tell government, we don’t want your benefits, we don’t want your welfare, don’t come knocking on my door with your Fauci ouchie. You leave us the hell alone.” We can hear Boebert angrily link vaccinations to “government,” “benefits,” “welfare,” and wanting to be left alone. This is not policy talk, it’s identity politics, and racial identity politics in particular (even though the pandemic would seem to have nothing to do with race).

There’s a “Chicago welfare queen” with a “tax-free cash income . . . over $150,000,” Ronald Reagan repeatedly said on the campaign trail in the 1970s and 80s. The welfare queen as a Black woman on a government-subsidized binge is now widely recognized as a racial dog whistle, making the term an effective starting point for understanding the right’s basic story. On the most obvious level, this story centers race, conjuring ugly stereotypes about African Americans. They are supposedly irresponsible and lazy. They could work if they wanted, but they prefer handouts over honest labor. More than shiftless, they’re thieving. They are not just receiving welfare; they’re ripping off the system. In short, African Americans abuse rather than deserve welfare.

To hear this story as only about race, however, misses the most important political work it performs. This story endeavors to give a negative racial cast to liberal government itself. Reagan promoted a zero-sum frame in which government efforts to help Blacks come at the expense of whites. Reagan was communicating to white voters that they were the opposite of Blacks: dutiful not irresponsible; hardworking not lazy; law-abiding not criminal; self-reliant not dependent on handouts. They were, to retrieve other dog whistle terms, the Silent Majority, the real Americans, America’s heartland and its patriots, the makers rather than the takers. Thus, government was not just misguided in its efforts to provide routes of upward mobility. It became a threatening force in the lives of whites. Liberal government, Reagan insinuated, took crucial dollars in the form of unfair taxes from the pockets of hardworking, decent, financially struggling whites, so that welfare queens could tool around in Cadillac splendor.

There are many permutations of the welfare queen story. There’s also an entire genre of dog whistles that focus, not on government programs, but on physical threat, for instance from “criminals,” “illegal aliens,” or “terrorists.” Even in the threat context, however, the racial story is designed to directly impugn government: it’s liberal government, allegedly, that refuses to control these menacing others, for instance by handcuffing the police or by throwing open the border.

What are the basic building blocks of identity politics? At root, these are the most important questions asked and answered by identity politics: who we are, who threatens us, and who will fight for us. Who we are is a question of status. Are we valued, respected, welcome, even superior to others? The right elevates white people as the true heart of the nation, the patriots, job creators, and makers, those who are law-abiding and innocent, deserving and righteous. It does so in code that gains powerful subconscious validation from centuries of white supremacy that finds contemporary expression in much of American culture as well as our nation’s concrete reality — cities and corporate headquarters, rural areas and places of worship, public schools and Ivy League universities.

As to the source of threat in people’s lives, the right warns voters that they’re beset not only by people of color but even more so by liberal government, which betrays white people by siding with minorities. The message is simple and oft-repeated: everyone is on their own, endangered by other Americans and traitorous government, and must largely fend for themselves and their families. On the level of physical safety, this rhetoric encourages buying a gun (gun sales have recently surged, with 2 out of 5 households now owning guns). In terms of the economy, it implies working as hard as you can in the marketplace. When you believe that you’re threatened by people who look different than you rather than by the bosses and the financiers, you shun building power with other workers, whether through unions or politics.

And who will fight alongside you, against the looming dangers? First and foremost, it’s your own narrow community. In demagogic politics, fear of others is used less to foment complete social atomization than a sense of connection with those who might offer mutual defense — the unity that comes from joining forces against the barbarians at the gate. Self-identified white evangelical Christians comprise the demographic cohort most likely to support Republican candidates. Voters in white, rural communities are trending in that direction. The New York Times reported that in 2021 many such communities in Virginia voted for Glenn Youngkin, the victorious Republican candidate for governor, at rates surpassing 70 and 80 percent. The paper also noted that “in interviews with a dozen white, rural voters who backed Mr. Youngkin, policy was less important than grievance and their own identity politics.” Youngkin’s closing argument to voters stressed his opposition to the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. Karen Bass, who voted for him, was persuaded to support Youngkin because, she said, white children “are no longer allowed to be kids, we’re treating them like little monsters.”

As for which politicians will be seen as allies, shared identities matter, for instance along the lines of race and religion. But even more important, voters who accept the right’s narrative support politicians who endorse their worries about dangerous others. Biden’s genuine religiosity and personal integrity mattered less to the vast majority of Republicans than Donald Trump’s supposedly bold truth telling about Black Lives Matter protesters, Latin American immigrants, and Muslims. In Virginia, voters not only elected Youngkin, a white man, but also a Black woman, Winsome Sears, as lieutenant governor. Her being Black was raised as a defense against the charge of GOP racial pandering. But Sears, too, campaigned against the fabricated threat of racial indoctrination in schools, for instance claiming “if Critical Race Theory means that telling a child that once you emerge from the womb you are a racist and a colonizer and whatever else, that’s not going to be good.” Sears had also served as national chair of Black Americans Making America First, a coalition that promotes Donald Trump and defends him after racist comments.

The Race Left

Half-a-century ago, Democrats recognized that the GOP had found a tractor beam to pull working class whites out of the New Deal coalition. But they struggled to find an effective defense. George McGovern, campaigning against Richard Nixon in 1972 in Little Rock, Arkansas, assailed Nixon for “playing to racist emotions.” In San Antonio, Texas, McGovern said there is “no question that [the Nixon] Administration is playing to racist emotions in the country — the President has done that from the very beginning.”[5]

McGovern lost in a landslide that left him with support from less than one in three white voters. Other factors contributing to McGovern’s defeat included early opposition from the Democratic establishment and chaos around his initial vice-presidential pick. But his denunciations of Nixon’s dog whistle politics as “racist” played an important role.

Since the late 1930s, the Democratic Party has relied on African American voters to win elections. By the 1960s, the party’s national leadership was committed to supporting wide-ranging civil rights even in the face of massive resistance and open racism in the South, including in places like Little Rock. But this commitment to frontally opposing white racism did not translate well into a response to dog whistle politics.

“The machinist’s wife in Dayton may decide to leave the Democratic reservation,” the liberal pollsters Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg warned in their 1970 book The Real Majority. “If she thinks the Democrats feel that she isn’t scared of crime but that she’s really a bigot, if she thinks that Democrats feel the police are Fascist pigs and the Black Panthers and the Weathermen are just poor, misunderstood, picked-upon kids, if she thinks that Democrats are for the hip drug culture and that she, the machinist’s wife, is not only a bigot, but a square, then good-bye lady — and good-bye Democrats.”[6] The crux lay in the code used by dog whistling. Those stampeded by talk of thugs, law and order, forced busing, and the silent majority did not understand themselves as racists. Rather, they experienced their reactions as commonsense concerns about crime, their children, and being heard, and they deeply resented the implication that they were prejudiced.

Dog whistle politics is often misunderstood as a secret handshake between a politician and voter when both are closet racists. But in fact, dog whistling is so powerful because it hides the underlying racism even from the voters most agitated by the racist prods.

In the summer of 2020, I ran a project with Way to Win as well as Lake Research to measure the persuasive power of Trumpist dog whistling. We asked almost 2,000 eligible voters to react to a message ripped from Republican rhetoric. It advocated “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws,” and declared that “our leaders must prioritize keeping us safe” and that “taking a second look at China, or illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs, is just common sense.” Since it drew upon GOP language designed to activate white racial anxiety, it’s no surprise that the majority of white respondents found this message convincing. Here’s the shock: at identical levels, so too did the majority of African Americans. And Latino respondents were convinced at rates that were just slightly higher than the white cohort.

African Americans and Latinos are not as likely as white voters to support Republicans; partisan messages never operate uncontested, and Black and brown voters identify with Democratic messages even more highly than with the right’s frame. Rather, the point is that dog whistle politics is still, well, dog whistle politics. It is not, as is now commonplace to announce among liberal political professionals, a blaring sound truck, a shrieking train whistle, or a klaxon of open white supremacy. Rather, the overwhelming majority of voters — including majorities of Latinos and African Americans — interpret racial dog whistles not as bald racism but as common sense.

And yet, like McGovern, one side of the Democratic Party continues to campaign by denouncing white racism. Consider this language, also from our study: “There’s been a horrible explosion of hate in this country. Certain politicians promote xenophobia, racism, and division. And it’s not just their words. It’s their policies, too. We see it in how they rip families apart at the border. And in how the police profile, imprison, and kill Black people, and use excessive force against people marching for justice.”

Akin to how we assembled a dog whistle message to test, we put this language together by drawing from the rhetoric of race-focused Democratic activists and politicians. Call this side the Race Left — those Democrats convinced that the party must directly confront white racism. Compared to the dog whistle message, the Race Left language was far less persuasive to white voters, and also lost, though not quite so badly, among persuadable voters of all racial groups. It was also the least persuasive Democratic message to African American and Latino audiences.

Why does a story stressing white racism perform so poorly? Recall the core questions of identity politics. To the question of who you are in this society, the Race Left’s condemnations of Republican racism effectively say that you’re a bigot — at least, that’s what you are if you’re worried about illegal immigration, drugs and criminal gangs, and supporting the police. Yet that’s the majority of Americans, white, Black, and brown, who feel such fears are reasonable.

On a deeper level, condemnations of widespread white racism communicate to white voters you’re part of the problem, part of the group that originated, perpetuated, and still benefits from injustice. Racially progressive white voters are willing to see themselves that way. But the vast majority recoil. They are the contemporary versions of Scammon and Wattenberg’s machinist’s wife from Dayton.

Simultaneously, this story says to people of color, you’re victimized and hated by the dominant group in this society. Activists and those whose educations have stressed the history of racism in America often accept this self-conception. But many voters of color do not, especially professionally accomplished minorities as well as immigrants. In my focus group conversations last summer with Latinos across the country, many were repelled by anti-racist language that, in their minds, positioned them as hated people and predicted that their children would never fully belong in this society. Using the coded rhetoric of dog whistle politics, they preferred to see themselves as among the “patriots” and “hardworking Americans,” even if this meant accepting that the main threat in their lives came from “welfare queens,” “criminals,” and “illegal aliens.”

From 2016 to 2020, Trump improved his performance with every major non-white racial group, especially with Latino voters. In my research, how Latinos saw their group fitting into America’s racial order was the single most important factor driving partisan affiliation, larger than age, gender, region, or whether one’s family hailed from Mexico or Cuba, Puerto Rico or Venezuela.

For the Race Left, there is a hard truth here: condemnations of white supremacy backfire, losing support from voters across racial lines and thereby making justice for communities of color less likely.

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. There are crucial differences: where the right blames racial conflict on thugs, invading aliens, and terrorists, the Race Left faults bigots, white culture, and systemic racism. Where the right says stand with white communities, the Race Left urges solidarity with communities of color. These differences are huge. But they’re overwhelmed by the larger similarity in the story about America the racial right and left share: we’re doomed to racial warfare and everyone must pick their side. Even apart from the electoral implications for the Democrats, this is a democratically unsustainable way to frame our relationship to each other as members of the same society.

It’s all the more important that the Race Left face this truth as the 2022 midterm elections fast approach, because the right will most likely focus its fire on racial justice activists themselves. The Race Left message I tested in July 2020 performed poorly — and yet, this was actually the highpoint of public support for the Black Lives Matter movement and a “racial reckoning” with white supremacy. Very soon thereafter, Trump and the right began a steady bombardment against racial justice activists, framing protesters as thugs and anarchists who preach a religion of racial hatred. In September, this campaign expanded to include “critical race theory,” an academic discipline studying racism that I’ve long been part of, as well as the 1619 Project, an effort to recenter slavery in American history. The narrative throughline from the right boils down to this: calls for “racial justice” are instead demands for “racial revenge.”

In the face of this new dog whistle, public support for Black Lives Matter collapsed. As the political scientists Jennifer Chudy and Hakeem Jefferson report, “white people have actually become less supportive of Black Lives Matter than they were before the death of George Floyd — a trend that seems unlikely to reverse anytime soon.” They also note that the increased support for Black Lives Matter among Latinos essentially evaporated by early 2021.

This past October, Education Week reported that laws to restrict teachers from teaching about white supremacy, systemic racism, and critical race theory had passed in 12 states, with another 26 states actively considering such bans. In November, the Virginia gubernatorial election ended with the Republican candidate closing his winning campaign with an ad tying his opponent to critical race theory. The dog whistles that dominate in 2022 will most likely focus first and foremost on the race left itself — on CRT and 1619, on calls to defund the police and abolish prisons, on “woke” denunciations of white supremacy and white privilege. How the Race Left responds can contribute to losing — or winning — elections.

The Colorblind Left

So Scammon and Wattenberg correctly understood that denouncing widespread racism among white people was likely to cost the Democrats “the machinists wife in Dayton,” their stand-in for white voters. The intervening fifty years have confirmed rather than falsified their warning. In addition, we now know that the Race Left’s rhetoric also repels significant blocs among communities of color.

But if Scammon and Wattenberg were correct in diagnosing the problem, they were wrong in their proposed solution. For them, and for most of the Democratic Party in the ensuing decades, the solution seemed clear: The Democratic Party had to temper its “pro-black stance.” Debate within the white community and in turn among Democrats had always swirled around how much to push for racial equality. But now this took on a new shape. With the GOP using Democratic support for civil rights as an ax handle to club liberals, and given how denouncing dog whistle politics as “racist” backfired, many liberals concluded they had no choice but to retreat from racial justice. This meant, in practice, that Democrats should (1) resist being baited into responding to Republican dog whistling, and (2) should seek to deny Republicans more ammunition by distancing themselves from civil rights and efforts at racial repair.

Today, similar advice again echoes through the halls of power within the Democratic Party. David Shor has gained considerable attention for advising Democrats to say what’s “popular.” This seems innocuous enough, but as Ezra Klein reports, in practice Shor “and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration.” In contrast to the Race Left, we can call this the Colorblind Left — not because they don’t see racism, but because this side urges pretending not to see it. They recognize, correctly, that denouncing white racism backfires; but then, they conclude that the solution is to run silent regarding racial demagoguery while backing away from efforts to foster racial justice.

There’s much one could say about the racial privilege and position of those quick to advocate jettisoning a concern for civil rights and the well-being of communities of color. But set that aside in favor of a cold-eyed appraisal of the Colorblind Left’s proposed electoral strategy. First, it’s never worked. Michael Dukakis tried to ignore the Willie Horton ad depicting, in the words of one gleeful Republican operative, “a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”[7] Over the month when the Horton controversy reached its crescendo with little rebuttal from Dukakis, 12 percent of voters switched their allegiance to the Republican candidate, giving George H.W. Bush the lead and then the presidency.[8] Bill Clinton did not win by ignoring dog whistles, but by imitating them, introducing himself as a new sort of Democrat who would end welfare as “a way of life” and would crack down on “criminals by supporting the death penalty.” Barack Obama and Joe Biden won initial election more in response to chaos and economic calamity under Republican administrations than on the strength of colorblind policy proposals.

However much it is accepted wisdom among Democrats, the run-from-race approach is less an electoral strategy than a last down hail-Mary pass. Viewed through the lens of identity politics, the weakness of the Colorblind Left’s strategy comes clearly into view. To who we are as well who threatens us, speeches on affordable healthcare or tax policy say precious little. Regarding allies, such rhetoric weakly implies that salvation will arrive in the laptops carried by policy wonks. The right is broadcasting Alien v. Predator onto a multi-sensory widescreen. The Colorblind Left urges viewers to tune their radios to PBS NewsHour. In short, the Colorblind Left cedes identity politics to the Right. Identity isn’t everything in elections, of course. But it is the principal rhetorical weapon of the right, and in electoral politics as in sports it’s very difficult to win by leaving the opposing team’s best player unguarded.

Plus, in this era, the colorblind strategy guarantees civil war in the Democratic Party. We are the George Floyd generation. We have stared transfixed and horrified into the business-as-usual eyes of police officer Derek Chauvin as he slowly crushes out a human life. We have celebrated a Black president, and we have seen him replaced by a president cheered on by white supremacists he calls “fine people.” For racial justice activists, Floyd’s murder stands as a bullseye surrounded by thick, concentric bands of racism: the many other police killings of Black and brown people; racialized mass incarceration and racialized mass deportation; spreading Republican attacks on voting rights; the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other armed evangelists of violent white nationalism storming the capitol.

Even for racial moderates like Joe Biden, it’s a new day. As president, he has denounced the “ugly poison” of “white supremacy,” and ordered his administration to repair “the unbearable human costs of systemic racism.” Democrats as a whole, and white Democrats especially, have become much more racially liberal over the last decade. The Democratic Party cannot avoid internecine mutual destruction if the Colorblind Left continues to insist that the way forward is for Democratic politicians to mainly ignore racism.

Race-Class Fusion Politics

In 2020, Joe Biden won with 43% of his total vote coming from Black, Latino and Asian American voters, combined with 53% of his support coming from white voters. In practice, Democrats are already a multi-racial coalition. But this has been more an accident, the product of pursuing votes in various racial communities, than of a purposeful strategy to build cross-racial solidarity. To lean into its de facto identity as the party of multi-racial democracy, the Democratic Party must address racism. And it must bring along as many voters as possible, including white voters as well as voters of color resistant to seeing white people as the problem. Shifting how they talk about racism gives Democrats a way craft a unified — and unifying — story.

Race-class fusion politics frames racial conflict as a divide-and-conquer strategy that threatens us all, people of every race and across the broad economic spectrum. The real enemy we all face, fusion politics says, is those who profit by intentionally stoking racial division. The Trumpist politicians fueling group hatred; the media personalities like Tucker Carlson harping on the “great replacement theory” lie that Democrats seek to displace white voters with ever more people of color; the dark money think tanks that promote attacks on affirmative action, welfare, and more recently critical race theory. These are the real enemies we face. And by naming them as such, Democrats can shift the basic us-them conflict in American politics. The core opposition in American life is not between white people and people of color, fusion politics says. It’s us all, against those who profit by promoting social strife.

(And in electoral politics we do need an enemy. At the most generic level, it’s a basic requirement of effective storytelling. In addition, any narrative without a villain will lose to the right’s constant depiction of people of color and liberal government as predators at the door. But perhaps most importantly of all, things are so desperate right now, people need to know why and whom to blame. True, there’s a danger of sliding into Democratic versions of demagoguery, or even of anti-Semitism with frames that blame “the powerful few.” Democrats have to be specific in the enemies they name. What Democrats cannot do is offer a convincing identity story in which no one threatens us. It’s not narratively compelling, and it’s not accurate, either.)

This is “race-class” fusion politics, race-hyphen-class. It is not “do both.” Almost everyone on the race left also talks about kitchen table issues. And those on the colorblind left episodically challenge racism, especially in response to shock-the-mind displays of white supremacy like the torch-carrying marches in Charlottesville or the hate-motivated murders in El Paso. The point of distinguishing the Race and Colorblind Left is not to suggest that Democrats are neatly split into groups that exclusively talk about racism, or instead completely ignore it. The point, rather, is to highlight how Democrats are at war with each other over how much to emphasize white racism — even as both sides talk about racism and class issues as basically distinct.

On the contrary. Rather than arising separately, the surging economic hardship in the United States is directly tied to worsening racism. This is the connection that race-class fusion politics explains to the country: our fates are linked, no matter our color, because racism is the main weapon in the class war the wealthiest Americans have been winning for the last 50 years. This is class war in the way that the Occupy movement framed it: the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. But where Occupy gave little weight to race, fusion politics centers racism as the immediate threat that keeps working families from effectively fighting rule by the rich. Race-class fusion politics is not do-both. It is not additive. It is a very specific story about race inseparably fused to class.

There’s good evidence the race-class fusion story works. In focus groups and poll testing I and others have done over the last three years, we’ve probed the power of race-class narratives like this one: “we need to pull together no matter our race or ethnicity. We have done this before and can do it again. But instead of uniting us, certain politicians make divisions worse, insulting and blaming different groups. When they divide us, they can more easily rig our government and the economy for their wealthy campaign donors. When we come together by rejecting racism against anyone, we can elect new leaders who support proven solutions that help all working families.”

This message from July 2020 was more convincing to all respondents — white eligible voters included — than the right’s dog whistle fear message. It also performed better than the Race Left and Colorblind Left messages, including among voters of color. In other words, research suggests that a fusion race-class message is the most persuasive political message available today, right or left.

Yet the real strength of fusion politics rests not on how well it polls, but in what it represents to Democrats: a single story that can be genuinely owned by the contending Race and Colorblind sides. Fusion politics addresses the core concerns of the Race Left, directly confronting racism and also speaking in the most convincing frame to communities of color. In addition, fusion politics also satisfies the demands of the Colorblind Left: far from alienating white voters, it’s the most politically persuasive message among white voters (as well as for those voters of color disinclined to see themselves as racial victims).

To be sure, there remains plenty Democrats can debate about how best to bring government back onto the side of working families. Genuine differences in policy preferences will remain, for instance between economic populists like Senator Bernie Sanders and friends of Wall Street like Senator Chuck Schumer. Democrats representing multi-racial, working class cities like the progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will continue to have different priorities compared to centrists like Abigail Spanberger who represent well-off suburbs.

But what Democrats should no longer divide over is the basic identity story they offer voters. Who are we? We’re people doing our best to take care of our families, communities, and country, no matter what we look like or how long we’ve been here. Who threatens us? Those who intentionally push racial conflict so they can rig the rules for themselves while we’re divided. Who stands with us? Everyone willing to reach across racial lines to forge a common purpose, and especially those leaders who will bring us together to ensure that the American Dream is a realistic possibility for all communities.

Beyond elected officials, it’s also an important advantage that fusion politics resonates with activists as a compelling analysis of what’s happened to the country. Political messages can be based on intentional falsehoods, as dog whistle racism demonstrates. But Democrats lack propaganda outlets akin to those used by the right to normalize lies through repetition and saturation. There’s no dominant ideological machine to impose message discipline on fractious Democrats; nor close coordination between the Democratic Party and the news media, unlike the synergy between Fox and the GOP. As a result, groups that actively organize people — unions and grassroots-oriented activist organizations in particular — play an outsize role in Democratic politics. These organizers provide a key resource for spreading liberal ideas (in addition to the work they do helping to overcome the right’s disenfranchisement strategies).

But before activists will carry a message, they have to believe in it. For racial justice activists, fusion politics provides a powerful lens for understanding government violence against communities of color. When Nixon won his landslide reelection, for instance, the nation imprisoned roughly 200,000 people. Today, that number stands above 1.6 million. We now know that mass incarceration did not follow trends in crime. But to explain this violence mainly in terms of white rage or the continued shadow of systemic racism is partial at best. The rage is there, and so is the cumulative inertia of past racism. For sixty years and counting, however, the most destructive racial force in our society has been active, strategic racism — the racism that flows from cold political calculation rather than heated emotions. When politicians campaign on themes of law and order, gangs, and super-predators, they govern by building prisons and funding the police to fill them. In other words, mass incarceration reflects first and foremost racial demonization as a political strategy.

Nor is fusion politics new for racial justice activists. On the contrary, it’s the roadmap sketched for us by earlier generations, from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fred Hampton, to César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, and even earlier, back to W.E.B. DuBois and before him the Fusion Movement that brought together newly emancipated African Americans and poor whites in the post-Civil War South. Some of these freedom fighters were more radical than others, but they all understood that racism is a class weapon and must be fought that way.

Focusing on the class side, fusion politics helps explain the economic calamity engulfing the majority of Americans. My race-class messaging research partner Heather McGhee uses the metaphor of the public swimming pool in her recent best-seller, The Sum of Us. When white voters believe that integration threatens them, they support politicians who drain away government for everyone, themselves included — in the areas of public amenities, but also extending to schools, jobs, the marketplace, healthcare, and the environment. Since the Nixon administration, the top 1 percent of Americans have captured an estimated $50 trillion dollars that would have gone to the bottom 90 percent, had the nation maintained the income distribution created by the New Deal. Instead, after 1974 the very wealthiest prospered, but the broad middle class stagnated, with households holding their position only because women flooded into the workplace. The nation is now marred by levels of wealth inequality not seen since the Gilded Era. Changes in trade patterns and technology contributed, as did other factors. But dog whistle politics was also key. It was the party of big business, after all, that rose to power on the back of coded racism.

SEIU and AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor groups, endorse a fusion of racial and economic justice. People’s Action, a national group working with grass-roots activists to organize rural America, carefully tested this approach in 2020 with strong results and now employs fusion politics. Likewise, Rev. William Barber’s new Poor People’s Campaign embodies fusion politics. The Sunrise Movement, activists fighting climate change, also adopt a fusion politics approach, as do Justice Democrats. These groups are to the left of most elected Democrats. No matter. The point is not that the broad left has to come to a single consensus on policy. Rather, the broad left has to tell a single, galvanizing story that brings together as many Americans as possible. The activist groups are indispensable to seeding the fusion story with voters, though ultimately it will be up to elected officials to give fusion politics legislative content.

Can the two Titanics of the Race and Colorblind lefts turn to steer a parallel course? To ask the question this way is to call to mind all of the forces that typically prevent big changes. But even so, their identity is something that Democrats can unilaterally control. Unlike so many of the proposed structural changes to protect democracy that cannot be enacted without either significant cooperation from Republicans or landslide Democratic victories, Democrats right now can begin to tell their own story about who we are to each other, who threatens us, and why we must fight for each other. Democracy, and not just the fortunes of the Democratic Party, hangs in the balance.

Ian Haney López is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley, and the author of Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America, as well as Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.

For a free, self-paced video seminar on race-class fusion politics, check out Race-Class-Academy.com

[1] Benjamin I. Page and Lawrence R. Jacobs, Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality (2009).

[2] Simeon Booker, “What Republicans Must Do to Regain the Negro Vote,” Ebony, April 1962, at 47, 48.

[3] John Sides, Michael Tesler, & Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America Hardcover (2018).

[4] Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (2017).

[5] James M. Naughton, “McGovern, in the South, Lays ‘Racist’ Tactics to Nixon,” New York Times, June 28, 1972.

[6] Richard M. Scammon & Ben J. Wattenberg, The Real Majority: How the Silent Center of the American Electorate Chooses its President 184, 180, 285 (1970).

[7] Quoted in Sidney Blumenthal, Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War 264–265 (1990).

[8] Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994 , at 79 (1996).

“If racism is a class weapon, then ending racism is in the self-interest of nearly every American.”

Could you unpack the term identity politics for us? Where does it come from? Why is it used?

Identity politics can be a substantive term, expressing the idea that people engage with each other partly informed by who they are. But in practice, the term is usually used as a dog whistle. It suggests that some people are elevating their identity above other priorities and that when they do that, they create division in our society.

For this to make sense as a criticism, you have to believe that most people don’t have identity concerns and that when we suppress attention to identity, we are brought together. This idea starts to unravel — and you can see the damage it does — when you recognize that the conversation is taking place within a system of unjust social hierarchies. It implies that people who raise issues of social justice divide us, while those who refuse to talk about existing hierarchies are actually bringing us together. Often when people denounce identity politics as a problem, they are obscuring and thus protecting unjust social arrangements.

But let’s take the claim seriously for a moment. Do people engage in identity politics? Yes. But it isn’t just some people. Almost all of us, irrespective of our educational level or sense of political sophistication, are reacting to the world around us through unconscious reasoning about who is like us, who threatens us, and who will help us. These are the main political questions people ask, and they are identity questions. Politicians who promote demagoguery in our society understand that they are providing a particular set of responses to these questions, responses that tend to make people fear their neighbors.

One of the challenges for large, complex societies is that people are always asking, Who’s with me, and who’s against me? People seeking power often purposefully answer these questions by stoking social divisions and antagonisms. This leaves those of us trying to create a society rooted in an ethic of care with a lot of work to do. We have to answer the same identity questions, but in a way that builds social solidarity, a sense of linked fate, a sense of empathy and connection with others.

But a lot of progressives are not answering these questions at all. They are answering a different question, one most people are not asking: How might policy A or policy Z be helpful to me?

What is the role of what you call “strategic racism” in this dynamic?

We are used to thinking about racism in interpersonal terms. More recently we’ve added the notion of institutional racism. Both are important, but both also imply a racism that has few individual actors. We talk about bigots hurling spittle-laced invective on the one hand and diffuse, even abstract practices on the other. Both are operating, to be sure, but we’re missing something important.

We live in a society in which some of the most powerful actors are today, right now, purposefully stoking racial conflict. Who? One of our two main political parties; an entire right-wing propaganda system; and some of the wealthiest, most powerful corporations and family dynasties in the country.

Here’s where strategic racism comes in. Why are these powerful forces actively promoting racial conflict? It’s not primarily because the people involved are poisoned by racist antipathies. Rather it is because they understand that if the vast majority of Americans fear and fight each other, they then turn their backs on the idea of government as working for us all. Once that happens, powerful elites can more easily rig the economy and hijack government for the sake of concentrated wealth.

Racial dog whistling specifically as a class strategy goes back to 1964, when Barry Goldwater started campaigning against the New Deal by appealing to White southern sensibili­ties in opposing integration. He opposed the New Deal vision of government working for working families, but he also knew this vision was powerful — so he campaigned instead on racial themes. And that’s what the party of big business has done ever since.

The racial demagoguery Goldwater pioneered has slowly but surely consumed the Republican Party itself. Generations of Republican elected officials have found themselves confronted by candidates more demagogic, more extreme, more racist, more hostile to democracy than themselves. Each generation has seen itself replaced by ever more reactionary forces — until we get to Donald Trump in 2015, who essentially annihilated the establishment Republican field because he was so extreme.

Who are the current actors in this arena?

The Kochs and Americans for Prosperity, funded by about 400 wealthy families. The Mercers, who funded Steve Bannon and Breitbart. Richard Mellon Scaife’s family foundation. I recently read about a Mellon heir who’s the largest new donor to the Republican Party: here’s an heir to a Gilded Era fortune who is now spending millions to support a political party that strategically promotes racial conflict and division and fear.

I like Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase: “malefactors of great wealth.” It’s not great wealth itself that threatens us — the Roosevelts themselves were a family of dynastic wealth. Rather, it’s malefactors of great wealth, and we have plenty of them.

Along with this movement of strategic racism, has racism also become more prevalent among Americans generally?

That’s trickier to answer. Here’s the most important thing about public opinion and racism. This is not a country of bigots. The vast majority of people who vote Republican are not self-consciously racist or committed to the idea of White supremacy.

The reality is more disturbing and also more hopeful. It is more disturbing because almost all of us harbor deeply internalized racist stereotypes that demean Black and Brown people and unconsciously elevate White people.

What’s more hopeful is that we also have split minds on race. We consciously embrace egalitarian norms that say we should not judge others by the color of their skin, that race hatred is wrong and immoral. Thus politicians strategically use language to push people to react to their unconscious racial fears while assuring them that they are acting in concordance with their conscious commitments to rejecting racism. That is what dog whistle politics does: it pushes people to react in racist ways while telling them they are not racist.

What is an effective response to this kind of political messaging?

One thing that is not effective is condemning White racism. When voters nod in agreement with dog whistles, for the most part they believe that what they are hearing is common sense, not bigotry. So it backfires to say, “Actually, no, that’s racist, and so is anyone who supports this nonsense.” They believe themselves not to be racist and greatly resent being labeled racist. Perversely, the very effort to condemn dog whistle politics often makes it more effective.

To see why, look at how both sides — those who promote dog whistling and those who condemn it — frame racial conflict. Both say that racism pits White people against people of color and that everyone has to choose a side. The dog whistlers are saying: You had better stand with White people, or you are going to lose your country. But progressives often structure their response in the same form: Yes, we’re locked into racial conflict, and you had better stand with communities of color, or else you are unjust and immoral. Everybody is constantly reinforcing the same story.

We’ve got to break out of that story. We need to recognize that we are not locked into racial conflict but that instead our fates are linked. This is not merely a narrative strategy or a rhetorical shift. We need a new understanding of racism. At root, racism is a strategy of division wielded by the powerful few. It succeeds by promoting conflict. Powerful interests are, right now, promoting this conflict because it profits them. That’s why racial conflict is so bad today, 60 years after the civil rights movement made it clear to all that racism against Black people was a gross immorality.

How do you tell the story of the harm racism does to White people?

This story is very easy to tell. It deeply resonates with things that people already know but haven’t previously connected. Almost all Americans know two things about our society: that the economy is rigged for the rich and that we are racially divided.

These two things are inseparably linked because for the last 60 years, economic elites have been pushing us to fight each other while they laugh all the way to the bank. This class war strategy amounts to divide and conquer: turn people against each other so they won’t notice the real threat in their lives. Get them arguing about the crumbs while someone else eats all of the cookies. The more we’ve concentrated on walling out certain people or building prisons or disinvesting from government programs that might help supposedly undeserving minorities, the more we’ve handed the government and the economy to the very rich — and the worse things have gotten.

The most convincing political story available right now is that the very wealthy and politically powerful are profiting by pushing the rest of us into interracial conflict. Simply saying that to people resonates; they get it. That story is capable of building a supermajority of Americans who are committed to genuine cross-racial solidarity while also being committed to a New Deal–style politics that believes that the government should appropriately tax the very wealthy and regulate the marketplace to create routes of upward mobility for all of us.

It’s more convincing than a progressive story that emphasizes racial justice for communities of color but implicitly blames White communities. It’s more convincing than a different progressive story that insists on a colorblind universalism, one that says let’s focus on economic issues or health care or education, but let’s not talk about race because that divides us. And, most importantly, it is more convincing than a story of racial fear.

How does the American narrative of upward mobility and the American dream play into this? Do you find that it gets in the way of people being willing to blame the rich?

It can, but this story is actually a story about mobility, possibility, and hard work — and it’s a story that says none of us succeeds on our own. Yes, we succeed through hard work. Yes, we work hard because we want to create opportunity and a better life for ourselves and our children. But the ability to strive and to thrive depends upon a government that regulates the marketplace, prevents fraud, and prevents monopolies. It ensures safe workplaces and basic infrastructure; it ensures access to clean water, affordable energy, and shelter.

This story says that upward mobility requires the government to work for all of us. My Berkeley colleague Emmanuel Saez and others have shown that upward mobility has largely evaporated in the United States. There’s greater economic mobility in most other industrialized democracies. Today in the United States, the surest route to upward economic mobility is to marry into a family of great wealth. That betrays the American dream.

The recovery of the American dream requires that we recognize that our fates are linked — and that when we provide the conditions in which others can thrive, then and only then can our own families thrive.

Do you find that higher-income White people are unsure where they belong in the narrative? Can they stand in solidari­ty against the elites? Are they themselves the elites?

This is a story in which almost all people can see themselves, if not in terms of racial injustice or economic stress, then certainly in terms of a commitment to living in a democratic society that protects people’s rights and protects the environment.

Since the January 6 Capitol insurrection, I’ve been getting phone calls from people who are part of the one percent or even the 1/10th of one percent. They are saying to me: we’ve got to protect democracy, and we’ve got to avert climate collapse. Both of these things require social solidarity. Both require standing up to a political party that now promotes racial demagoguery and systematic assaults on democracy.

How did you get interested in the question of political messaging?

I’d been focused on race and racism since I was in graduate school. For the first couple of decades, I took for granted that racism was a conflict between White people and people of color. From within that mindset, I came to the conclusion that racism is thus a permanent feature of our society.

I saw, in my own life, how this story about racism generated a politics of despair, frustration, and even rage — because it was a politics that did not believe change was possible. That was fine within academia but not in the real world. In academia I could document the perniciousness of racism and issue denunciations, but in my heart I didn’t think they would make a difference.

More than a decade ago, I came to see I was wrong. As I studied mass incarceration and systematic state violence, as I probed the question of what produced it and why it was so difficult to end, I realized that racism had become normal American politics. But behind that politics there was a class war that the rich were winning. This was not only an intellectual epiphany for me, it was also a sharp jolt to my sense of the possible. If racism is a class weapon, then ending racism is in the self-interest of nearly every American.

That’s when I began to search for language that could translate these insights to regular folks, who could use them to help free themselves, to help create the sort of society that they deserve. It’s the only way we’re going to build enough political support to stop government violence against communities of color, to engage instead in repair, and to create a government that provides the health care and affordable housing, the education and environmental protection, and all the other policies we need to create a society and planet that thrive.

In preparing to write his latest New York Times opinion piece, Thomas Edsall queried several political writers about how a hypothetical Democratic candidate might respond to four of most challenging topics for liberals. Here’s how I responded (Edsall’s questions are in bold).

1. What does your approach suggest about gender and race-based affirmative action policies, should Democrats retain them and defend them?

The shortest answer is that Democrats (and Americans more generally) should fully embrace gender- and race-based affirmative action as fundamental to saving our democracy.

Affirmative action is a key to saving democracy because it responds to the GOP’s practice of intentionally stoking social strife. Since 1970, the Republican Party has successfully shifted attention from class issues to status conflicts. The party of big business has done so by stoking social hatreds on the basis of race, gender, immigration, sexual orientation, and religion, to name some of the key hierarchies promoted by the right. Pursued for 50 years, that strategy has now pushed the country to the precipice of authoritarianism. To the extent our society remains segregated, especially along racial lines, we remain that much more vulnerable to the politics of division and hate.

Building on this analysis, race-class fusion politics shifts the primary rationale for affirmative action. The typical defense leans foremost on helping marginalized groups. While this is morally important, it also implies a basic conflict between whites and people of color, or between men and women. Instead, fusion politics primarily emphasizes the importance of building common cause across lines of division so that the majority can reclaim government from the rich and powerful. If the strategy of the powerful few is to shatter social solidarity, our response must be to foster social connection — and that requires a robust commitment to integrating our society.

2. How should Democrats deal with the issue of border security?

As a policy matter, Democrats should shift the immigration system away from a punitive crime-control model toward a social services model. This would reflect the importance of immigration to American families and the economy, and it would honor deeply American values welcoming immigrants, including refugees. In other words, the United States should return to the immigration system put in place for European immigrants more than a hundred years ago.

In talking about immigration with the public, Democrats should directly confront Republican fear-mongering by labeling it as such. Immigrant-bashing is a principal GOP strategy. Democrats cannot win by shifting the topic; the fear generated by the right about immigrants is too intense. Nor can they win by denouncing anti-immigrant sentiment as racist. That offends many people, not only white voters, but also many Latinos and African Americans concerned about immigration. Instead, Democrats should shift the threat, from immigrants to the politicians backed by dark money who promote fear and division. This makes immigration reform a benefit to all of us, citizens and non-citizens alike and no matter our race.

Here’s the immigration message I tested in July 2020, in a national poll run by Celinda Lake with 400 African American voters, 400 white voters, and an oversample of 1100 Latino voters.

Whether it’s from another town or another country, most of us move for the same reason — to build a better life for our families. But especially during COVID-19, certain politicians are insulting immigrants while billions are going to a handful of corporations. The richest 1 percent benefit when politicians blame immigrants for the hard times regular people face. We need to recognize the contributions of immigrants in our communities and states, and embrace people with the courage to move. When we come together, we can elect new leaders who will put fairness back into our immigration laws and make this a country that provides a better life for everyone, whether we’re Brown, Black, or White.

Compared to the GOP racial fear message also tested, this race-class immigration message was more compelling to 1. persuadable voters of all races as well as to 2. Latinos and 3. African Americans (indeed, it was the single most powerful message we tested with Black voters). Among white voters overall, it tied the racial fear message. (I know of no other pro-immigration message that did not lose badly among white voters overall when up against a message promoting racial fear of immigrants.)

3. If asked in a debate, what should a Democrat say about the claims of Ibram X. Kendi that all tests showing a racial disparity are racist, about intersectionality, about identity politics generally?

The power of the race-class fusion approach is that it offers a single powerful story that can be told across many issues. This includes in response to questions about racial justice activists, Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter, and so on. These broadsides are likely to overshadow even immigrant-bashing as GOP attack lines in 2022.

Here’s the basic structure to a race-class fusion message:

• An explicit statement of shared concerns and aspirations across racial groups
• Redirection of the perceived threat, toward elites stoking division as a class strategy
• A call for cross-racial solidarity in order to elect leaders committed to helping all working families, white, Black, and brown.

Thus, regarding GOP attacks on identity politics and so on, Democrats should respond by affirming our shared aspirations; by hammering the GOP for constantly stoking fear and hatred while they rig the system for their donors; and by resoundingly calling for coming together across racial lines so we can get our government back from dark money special interests.

Here’s a fuller version, albeit not one I have yet tested:

No matter our race or background, most of us seek the best possible education for our children. But some politicians mainly work for special interests that do not want to pay their fair share in taxes. So they say that grade school teachers teach kids racial hatred, and warn that our kids are not safe in public schools that provide an honest education about race in America. Let’s reject these efforts to promote division and resentment. We know that almost all of us — no matter our race, income, or origin — seek the freedom to prosper from hard work and study. That’s why by supporting our teachers, schools, and colleges, we can help all of our families climb together, whether we’re white, Black, or brown.

4. Democrats have been wary of approaches to poverty that are seen by some as “blaming the victim.” Is this wariness appropriate or should it be abandoned?

The GOP has successfully shifted the main divide between conservatives and liberals into a supposed conflict between individual responsibility versus social structures. On this terrain, Democrats should reject the opposition between these elements, and instead constantly explain that individual responsibility can only result in a prosperous life if the necessary rules and opportunities are in place. The freedom to prosper does not come from anarchy, but from an organized society structured to promote broad upward mobility.

At the same time, Democrats must seek to shift the supposed divide between conservatives and liberals to other oppositions. The most important of these are:
1. conflict and social strife versus a sense of linked fate and curiosity about differences
2. the corruption of the powerful versus shared efforts to rebuild the American Dream for us all

A race-informed response to Ezra Klein’s engagement with David Shor

What Shor gets right
Shor is correct that most Democratic messaging makes it harder to win elections because it either fails to persuade or perversely actually alienates many conflicted (rather than “moderate”) voters. The former is true for messages that primarily stress policy issues; the latter comes into play with messages like “defund the police.” Shor is also correct that, to win, Democrats must do far more polling, and must make their case in plain terms easily grasped by people outside the beltway and without a college education (an obvious point, but one often not put into practice).

What Shor gets wrong
1. The conflicted voters in the middle who toggle between the two parties — and thus the voters who determine elections — are not “moderate.” They are low-information voters who are not paying attention (something Shor sometimes concedes). More than that, they often quickly bounce between progressive and reactionary views of the world (but certainly do NOT hold nuanced, considered, centrist views). They are “conflicted,” in the sense that they can be pulled in very different and possibly extreme directions. It makes no sense to advise Democrats to adopt ideologically moderate policies to appeal to people who are not, in fact, ideologically moderate.

The core for the conflicted middle is not ideology, but who they see as like them and on their side, versus hostile to them and a threat. If there’s stability in their voting patterns, it’s the stability of identity rather than ideology.

2. Democratic messages fail to persuade conflicted voters when they center on policy issues. These voters are not able to make heads or tails of policy debates, especially because the opposition Republican messaging consistently claims to be seeking the same end goals. Both parties, for instance, insist they’re fighting for working families. Conflicted voters will not decide whether to support one or the other party by evaluating the relative efficacy of, say, high taxes on corporations to fund government programs, or instead the plausibility of the Laffer curve, low taxes, and trickle-down economics. They will instead use identity issues as a proxy for whom to trust.

3. Democratic messages alienate voters when they are predicated on a sense of identity that voters do not share. For instance, “defund the police” and “abolish ICE” are deeply connected to a story of the police and ICE as white supremacist institutions that oppress communities of color. In turn, this story depicts the country as locked into a historic conflict between white people and people of color. It thus asks white voters to see themselves as members of an oppressive group they must help to disempower; and it asks voters of color to see themselves as members of widely hated groups they must rally to defend. This framing is acceptable to many who are college educated, white and of color alike, but not to majorities of voters.

4. The core problem for the Democratic Party is not too many young, liberal activists, per the Politico piece the followed up the Ezra Klein review. The fundamental challenge for Democrats is to develop a unified, effective response to the intense polarization around race intentionally driven by Trump and boosted by the interlocking elements of the rightwing propaganda machine.

Shor’s blindspot
For Shor, racial justice activists are out of control and leading the Democratic Party over a cliff. He’s correct, to a point (see Para. 3). But Shor then weds himself to the wrong conclusion. As the Ezra Klein piece reports, Shor “and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration.” This is Shor’s most dangerous piece of advice to Democrats (and gets surprisingly little attention from Klein). For Shor, this has become an article of faith — faith, rather than reason, in the sense that Shor does not substantially engage contrary evidence.

I along with others have been testing the efficacy of talking about racism as a divide-and-conquer strategy. The idea is to shift the basic political conflict in the United States from one between racial groups (the right’s preferred frame) to one between the .1% and the rest of us, with racism as their principal weapon. In our research, which I discuss at length in my book Merge Left, this race-class fusion politics is the most promising route forward for Democrats. This potential has also been heralded by other researchers, including in a careful study done by People’s Action. Despite this, Shor has not deeply engaged with the evidence showing the power of the race-class approach.

In other words, Shor is making the same mistake leaders of the Democratic Party have made for decades: to jump from the insight that attacking racism as a white problem backfires with most voters (true) to the unsupported/seemingly unshakeable article of faith that Democrats should largely stop talking about racism (false).

The GOP has made racial identity the main driver of political polarization since 1970. Democrats have tried to side-step this by emphasizing policy rather than identity (Para. 2); or to confront it by denouncing white racism (Para. 3). Neither approach will win in 2022. The best evidence calls for a new approach that reframes racism as a tool of division that threatens all racial groups.

Shor is mainly wrong about racism (which is to say, about electoral politics) was originally published in GEN on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.