As the Democrats head into 2022 and 2024, they will need more than just an aggressive ground strategy to succeed; they’ll also need messaging that will resonate deeply with and unite the American people, especially those in marginalized and underserved communities. This week on The Brief, hosts Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld dove into Biden's recent missteps, what kind of messaging they think will truly resonate with the Democratic base, and how the Democrats can course-correct in time for the elections later this year.
This episode’s guest was Ian Haney López. López has worked with the AFL-CIO’s Advisory Council on Racial and Economic Justice and co-founded the Race-Class Narrative Project, exploring how to defeat dog-whistle politics. His argument, which he has written about extensively, centers around a concept called “race-class politics.” Race-class politics can be encapsulated in the following points, which López laid out:
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.
With so many crucial U.S. House and Senate seats up for grabs this year, Eleveld remains optimistic that “Democrats have a better shot than most people [think they do] ... [though they] really need to get on their game.” Ultimately, she said, Biden is capable of better, and needs to lead with empathy:
Joe Biden should lead with his empathy here … this is the top issue for most Americans right now. Almost all of them say jobs and the economy and inflationary prices, the price of household goods, etc. … [I know] there are so many things happening [right now] ... but please sit him down, as all communications people should sit their Democratic candidates, their congressional Democrats down, and say, ‘Look, you’re going to be asked about inflation, and here are the three or four things you need to hit every time you get asked about it. Number one, feel their pain … it’s not that hard. Then, plug Democratic work on the issue.
Democrats … actually passed things to help ease these inflationary pressures, right? … They passed the Child Tax Credit, they put $1,400 checks in peoples’ bank accounts, they passed an infrastructure bill that’s going to create hundreds of thousands of [well] paying jobs. So, you know, they worked on the consumer side of this. But then the other side of the inflation is the corporate side, right? And then they get a chance to stick it to the corporatists, because Navigator Research, which is a consortium of Democratic pollsters, found last month in their survey that somewhere around 73%—nearly three quarters of Americans—agree with the idea that corporate greed is one of the biggest drivers of inflation. So go ahead and talk about this and say, ‘Look, part of what’s happening now is a lesson in corporate greed. So many companies are profiting off of a bad situation’ … and then tell them what you plan to go ahead and do.
“And with record profits,” Moulitsas chimed in. “It’s not inflation—they’re making more money. They’re gouging the American people.”
“So, you know, it’s feeling their pain, it’s plug Democratic work on the issue, it’s stick it to corporatists, and then it’s here’s what else we’re working on. It should be a good Democratic formula, because what Democrats are good at is siding with the little guys, siding with the everyday American and feeling their pain,” Eleveld added. “That’s what all the Democrats, that’s what their policies are about … If you want to reduce this down to two things, it’s ‘feel their pain’ and get voters to believe that for Democrats, they’re going to bed thinking about this and they’re waking up thinking about this in the morning.”
López joined the conversation, and the three opened up a discussion about some of the major roadblocks progressives face talking about race today—especially as Democrats struggle to push back against criticisms of “Critical Race Theory.” In particular, López recalled how decades ago, Republican Richard Nixon deftly turned accusations of racism towards him on their head and instead weaponized them against Democrats who had hoped it would tarnish his image. After Nixon won, Republicans quickly realized this wasn’t just a strategy that worked in the South—the whole nation was racially fearful:
[Democrats said,] ‘We will condemn the coded appeals to white supremacy that Republicans are now using. But … it is in code. And that code is successful. And when we criticize Richard Nixon for appealing to white bigots, Richard Nixon was turning around and saying, ‘Hey, I just said Senate majority. I didn’t say race—but you did. You called me a racist, and by implication, you just called my base racist. So by accusing me of racism, you just proved you’re the real racist.’ And it backfired. Democrats lost white support by challenging Richard Nixon’s racism.
“The accusation of racism is more insulting than the actual racism itself … that’s their outrage. It’s not ‘No, I’m not racist,’” Moulitsas said.
López pointed out the frequent use of the scarcity script, which is often used to encourage conflict among people for resources they are consistently told are scarce—specifically because those who haven’t “earned” those resources are accused of cutting in line and stealing from or taking advantage of the system:
The scarcity script is a script that says, ‘Public goods, like good jobs, or healthcare, or good schools, they’re really scarce.’ And, frankly, they are scarce because the rich are [hoarding them.] But they don’t say that. They say, ‘They’re really scare, and the reason they’re scarce is because undeserving people are grabbing more than their fair share. The welfare queens, the “illegals” flooding into the hospitals, the people cutting in line when you’ve been waiting your turn.’ So these are these two big scripts.
Now, when it comes to Critical Race Theory, CRT is not a physical threat, it’s not scarcity, he noted:
[Fear of CRT comes from] is this much older idea that people who are asking for racial justice aren’t actually motivated by racial justice—they’re, rather, motivated by racial revenge. That when somebody says ‘I want justice for Black people,’ what they mean is, ‘I want to put Black people above White people.’ That Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean ‘Black lives matter.’ It means ‘white lives don’t matter, shouldn’t matter. Black lives should matter more.’ That’s the attack on Critical Race Theory, that those of us who talk about race, who talk about a racially egalitarian society, that we don’t actually want that. That instead, we preach hate.
Moulitsas asked how much of this is projection. As López elaborated,
It’s the deepest sort of projection. It’s projection that is rooted in a self-justifying claim ... [that] racial groups are by nature locked into mortal combat. One racial group is going to come out on top, other racial groups will be on the bottom, by nature. And you see, actually, this is a very important part of the Old Right, the way the white nationalists are talking today. They say, ‘We’re not racist—we’re realistic. Racial groups inevitably come into conflict, and now the choice we all have to make is, do we want our racial group to be on the bottom, or on the top?’ And what they do is, they apply that logic to communities of color. They say, ‘See, when communities of color ask to be treated fairly, what they really want is to be treated better than the rest of us. They want to become … the special favorites of the law.’
Moulitsas added, “If you teach that, white people might get uncomfortable. We can’t let them deal with [even] a twinge of guilt.”
López believes that we are in the midst of a class war, one that the rich have been winning for fifty years, with their main strategy being “to wage war with racism as their proxy, to wage war by dividing the rest of us and by promoting the idea that we’re mortal threats to each other.”
He also noted that denouncing racism will always come with risks and create backlash, though that doesn’t at all mean we should shy away from naming it. In fact, framing this as a battle between whites and nonwhites misses the point, he said, reflecting on how he used to think:
For 20 years … I was part of the camp that said, ‘we have to denounce white racism, we have to do so.’ And people would say back, whites hold the great bulk of power in this country. If you denounce racism, you’re going to alienate most white people. And I’d say, ‘Then so be it.’ Because racism is a problem people have to be forced to confront. And then people would say, ‘Do you really think anything is going to change?’ And I, as a critical race theorist, and here, I’m channeling Derrick Bell, who’s one of the founders of Critical Race Theory, would say, ‘No, I don’t think things are going to change.’ Racism is in the interest of white folks. They’re never going to fully reform and give up the higher status, the greater access to material goods, jobs, neighborhoods, connections, boardrooms, that they have through white privilege. Racism is a feature of American society—all we can do is speak truth to power.
Expanding on race-class politics and addressing those who might be doubtful of its utility, López had this to say:
To the folks who want to [draw that whites vs. nonwhites distinction to] denounce white supremacy: A, this used to be me. B, I get why you’re skeptical of anyone who come and says, ‘there’s a better way to talk about race.’ Because we’re being told that all the time. And usually, what people mean is, ‘Talk about it amongst yourselves, but you’re scaring white folks, stop doing that. We want to do these other things. Let’s talk about healthcare, let’s talk about Fight for $15, but for the love of God, stop talking about racial justice. It essentially says to communities of color, ‘We’ll solve your problems some distant day when progressives have won power on economic issues. Don’t hold your breath.’ And it’s like, no, we’re not going to wait!
Especially with the alarming results of the 2020 election, which showed how Donald Trump made inroads among all communities of color, it has become more important to talk about racial justice, and the conversation can’t wait, López argued.
“It’s always, ‘Wait for racial justice … we’re moving too fast’ … But if I’m sitting here listening to this as a listener, I want to know what the solution is, and I think you have some prescriptions here, so I’d love to hear them,” Eleveld said.
López drew on messaging research he has done over the past few years, challenging the audience to consider how they define racism to begin with:
I really want to start, as a critical race theorist, with a challenge to your audience. What do you think racism is, fundamentally? Because I know that I for years thought that racism was a white-over-people-of-color hierarchy. A single axis. White over people of color. Now, we connected these things with gender and class, but more than everything else, I thought of racism as whites over people of color. And if that’s how you’re thinking of racism, then I get it. When you think to yourself, ‘I’ve got to fight for communities of color, you think to yourself, ‘I’ve got to fight white people. They’re the bulk of the problem.’ … Here’s what I want to challenge you. Ask yourself this: Could it be that racism fundamentally is fundamentally a weapon of class war that succeeds by promoting white over nonwhite hierarchy?
With Republican Party having invested heavily in campaigning through racial scare stories, backed by billionaire donors and their well-funded think tanks, and Fox News promoting racial resentment, it becomes easy to see how they turned this conversation about race on its head, López said.
A historical context for the origins of racism, exposing its origin and symbiotic ties to economic exploitation, is also necessary here, according to López:
Racism [was] invented in the 1600s, why? To justify slavery. What is slavery first foremost? Race hatred? No. It’s a plantation economic system that is one of the most extreme form of labor exploitation the world has devised, which needed some justification, so racism was the gloss. Same with the taking of land from Native Americans … the notion that Native Americans were a ‘red and inferior people’ who could just be exterminated and their land taken. That took 200 years to arise, to develop, to justify colonialism from its inception right up until today. Racism reflects the efforts of very powerful people to gather more power, to hoard power for themselves, by promoting racism and racial conflict among the rest of us. And I don’t mean to minimize white racism. It’s there, it’s active, it’s spreading—it’s getting way worse. But who’s funding it, who’s encouraging it, who’s stoking it, who’s laughing all the way to the bank?
And once we think about that and notice that this is a paradigm [shift], racism is fundamentally a strategy of the plantation class to get us to fight each other … but we’re still fighting each other while they run the economy and they rig the government for themselves. It changes our mental model for what a movement for social change looks like. Now, that looks not like people of color denouncing white people; [rather], it looks like white people and people of color are joining together and having to build genuine solidarity with each other in order to save their own families, in order to build their communities. Whether they’re people of color or white, the only route forward for any of us is to build power precisely across the differences that the rich tell us threaten us, because that’s the only way we’re going to stand up to this class war.
Calling out those on the left who would shy away from addressing race, whom he termed the ‘colorblind left,’ López argued that talking about race and advancing Democratic policies and ideas do not have to be mutually exclusive: “Two things about America: the system is rigged for the rich, and racial conflict is worse than it’s ever been. Put those two together; it isn’t an accident. Those two happened as a consequence of each other. And once you say that, people are like, ‘Now I have a frame for understanding [things like the rise of] Donald Trump.’ But you need the frame ... and once you have it, you can see it.”
López highlighted Stacey Abrams’ recent announcement for her 2022 gubernatorial run as an amazing example of race-class fusion politics, where she says very clearly, ‘”We have to come together against those trying to divide us.”
“Voters get it—they’re not the problem. What’s happening is, there is a sort of political professional class that’s deeply connected to the approach they’ve been taking for years … we’ve got to convince the professional political class to say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to get out of our rut here and take a risk,’” López insisted.
Eleveld added, “Can I just say, that’s a political power structure in and of itself. They’ve made a lot of money from it, and they don’t want to stray from it.”
López called out the political class among the left that is invested in preserving the political status quo and urged Democrats to understand what is at stake if they don’t shift their messaging.
“We have a political class that is very … political status quo, that is insulated from violence affecting communities of color. So we have to create, from the ground up, a multiracial coalition that is committed to the radical proposition that we should all have a decent chance … that we are all equal and deserve equal dignity,” he explained. “Now, the good news is, Democrats, to win elections, almost have no choice but to go in this direction … Without this, they’re going to lose in 2022, and then they’re going to lose in 2024.”
Moulitsas feels hopeful and believes that “Stacey Abrams’ campaign is going to be a sort of bellwether” for whether or not Democrats can harness this sort of messaging effectively to have big wins in 2022 and 2024.
Daily Kos’ own community member and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at Empire State College of the State University of New York, Ian Reifowitz, also took a deep dive into the findings from research on race-class politics, which you can read here.
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