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Based on Chapters 5-9 of Ian Haney López's Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class:...

Race and race baiting are used to win the votes of the white working class. The author cites the work of Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels, who has shown that working-class incomes have grown six times as quickly under Democratic administrations than they have during Republican administrations (page 8). Therefore, as the author writes, "dog whistle politics is critical to the GOP's success" (page 8). The Republicans do not generally offer political and economic policies that benefit the working class, so they must sway them with coded racial appeals in the form of what the author calls "dog whistle politics."


The author traces this development back to the 1960s and 1970s, when Richard Nixon first broke apart the New Deal coalition of white northern liberals, Northern working-class people, Southern African-Americans, and Southern Democrats. The Republicans broke apart this coalition, which had held from the 1930s through 1960s, by sewing the seeds of racial division. As the author writes, "it was almost inevitable that most whites would abandon the Democratic Party once it became identified with blacks" (page 26). Nixon used appeals to the white working class such as his opposition to busing that won them over to the Republican Party, and this appeal to the working class through coded racist appeals has continued in the years since. The Republicans and Democrats such as Bill Clinton have appealed to the white working class by disassociating themselves with the concerns of African-Americans and suggesting through coded racist language that African-Americans (and later Arab Americans and Latinos) are the source of crime and national security concerns. 

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