CHAPTER THREE
Meet the New Populists
Every four years we Americans become spectators in a circus known as the presidential election. For most of us, participating in the process of electing the next president involves watching televised debates, discarding flyers from local and state candidates, and muting the slugfest known as campaign advertising. We’re spectators in the sense that we are watching, listening, and processing the event, but most of us remain far from the table of influence, which is increasingly reserved for a very small, very white, very male, and very rich group of individuals. These individuals—titans of industry, captains of retail, lords of finance—are the pipers calling the tune.
That’s not to say that politics hasn’t always been a game dominated by elites. But generations ago the power elite included the labor movement and the millions of working-class people organized through that now threadbare remnant of economic democracy. Over the past fifty years, as labor’s political influence has waned, the power of the wealthy has mushroomed, aided in great part by several Supreme Court rulings that opened campaign spending floodgates. But perhaps one of the most effective, and cynical, strategies to trample the interests of the working class has been a very strategic and deliberate use of race to undermine class-based solidarity. Finally, there’s the stubborn and historical gap in voting, in which college-educated and more affluent voters almost always show up at the polls while the working class watches from the sidelines.
But speculation about how the working class will vote—especially white working-class men—is a favorite topic of the political pundits. The conventional wisdom is that this group is solidly and impenetrably conservative and a predictable base for Republican candidates. But on some key issues about the role of government and the power of big money in our political system, the white working class is actually much more liberal than its college-educated counterparts, revealing key opportunities for progressive candidates to earn their votes.
Let’s be clear. The Sleeping Giant, with its larger share of women and people of color, is shifting the center of gravity in politics. Thanks to largely working-class movements such as the Fight for $15 and Black Lives Matter, candidates of both political parties have been compelled to address economic and racial inequality in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. There is more working-class solidarity right now in the United States than at any time since the 1970s, and on almost every measure this new working class is much more progressive than its college-educated counterparts. But it would be a mistake to consider the working class a monolith when positions on some key issues still diverge by race and gender.
Who Are the New Populists?
One of the most stubborn pieces of conventional wisdom about the white working class is that they are red-meat conservatives, with a strong knee-jerk reaction against anything that smacks of a government program. But an extensive survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) uncovered a populist streak among the white working class that is way more Elizabeth Warren than Jeb Bush or Rush Limbaugh. Take, for example, the fact that white working-class Americans are more likely than white college-educated Americans to report that a lack of good jobs (67 percent vs. 52 percent) and a lack of opportunities for young people (56 percent vs. 46 percent) are major problems facing their communities.1 Moreover, 70 percent of working-class whites believe that the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy, 53 percent say one of the biggest problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance in life, and 62 percent favor raising the tax rate on Americans with household incomes of over $1 million per year. And finally, nearly eight in ten white working-class Americans say that corporations moving American jobs overseas are somewhat (25 percent) or very (53 percent) responsible for Americans’ current economic distress.
But this populism fractures when it comes to issues of race. Six in ten white working-class Americans (60 percent) believe that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities, compared to only 39 percent of white college-educated Americans. And nearly half (49 percent) of white working-class Americans believe that over the past few decades the government has paid too much attention to the problems of blacks and other minorities, compared to 32 percent of white college-educated Americans. It’s important to note that the belief that too much attention has been paid to blacks and other minorities garners majority agreement only among southern white working-class voters, reflecting a racial anxiety steeped in the region’s brutal history of racial antagonism and terror. Today the racial anxiety expressed by working-class whites also extends to other people of color, namely immigrants. White working-class voters, unlike college-educated whites, blame immigrants for taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to them. Again, the PRRI survey shows a gulf between southern white working-class voters and their counterparts in the rest of the country. In fact, the South has retained its racial animosity to an incredible degree, and there is no dearth of politicians who still tap those reserves to win elections and stoke antigovernment sentiment. As I discuss later in this chapter, the use of race to appeal to white working-class voters has a long and ignoble history.
The Big Class Divide
When we look at how Americans view the role of government in addressing poverty and providing opportunity, it becomes very clear that there are two Americas, one in which the people who live in comfort exhibit little empathy for those in the other America, who struggle. In one of the more illuminating yet depressing examinations of the difference between the fortunate and unfortunate, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press compared the responses of financially secure and financially insecure individuals to one of their major surveys conducted in 2014.2 The groups were created using an index of ten measures of financial security and financial distress, with individuals categorized into five groups, each representing roughly 20 percent of the population. At the ends are the most well-off and the least well-off. A glimpse at the demographics of the two most financially insecure groups reveals a near perfect overlay with the new working class—women, people of color, and people without four-year degrees. In fact, only 7 percent in the least secure group had a college degree.
The findings reveal, unsurprisingly, that when it comes to support for the safety net, views about poverty, and perceptions of business, financially insecure Americans hold much more consistently liberal views than their better-off counterparts. When given a choice between two statements about government’s role in helping the needy, over 60 percent of the most financially secure Americans chose “The government can’t afford to do more to help the needy,” while 60 percent of the least financially secure Americans chose “The government should do more for the needy, even if it means more debt.” One of the likely reasons the well-off don’t support providing more help for the needy is that they think the poor have it easy in this country. Just over half of the most secure Americans agree with the statement “Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return,” while two-thirds of the least secure Americans agree instead that “poor people have hard lives because government benefits don’t go far enough to help them live decently.” Keep in mind that in 2013 just twenty-six out of every one hundred poor families received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, down from sixty-eight families for every one hundred in poverty in 1996, the year that President Bill Clinton “ended welfare as we know it.”3
This polarization by class extends to views about business, with two-thirds of the least secure Americans believing that corporations make too much profit, while less than half of the well-off believe that to be the case.
What the Pew analysis shows is that on pocketbook issues, the new working class desires more action from government to improve their lives while the affluent exhibit very little support for such action. The implications are profound, given what we know about who participates in our political system, who contributes financially to our elections, and whose opinions get preferential treatment once candidates are in office. But the views of the least secure aren’t consistently liberal. In fact, of all the questions Pew asked, there was one economic item on which the least secure held more conservative opinions than the financially secure, and that was on the economic impact of immigrants. Forty-four percent of the least secure, compared to just over a quarter of the most financially secure, say that immigrants are a burden on the United States because “they take our jobs, housing, and health care.”
On other social issues, America’s class divide disappears. The well-off and the working class have similar views on regulation, government’s effectiveness, and national security. And on the question of black progress, the working class and the well-off are nearly identical in their opinions, with close to two-thirds agreeing that “blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition.”
Working-Class Moderates, Privileged Conservatives
The conventional wisdom that white working-class voters are monolithically conservative Republican voters doesn’t conform to the way these voters actually identify themselves. Data from American National Election Studies (ANES), the premier source for public opinion on issues, elections, and political participation, show very little difference between college-educated and working-class individuals in whether they think of themselves as a Democrat, Republican, or independent. In fact, if anything, white working-class voters are slightly less likely than their white college-educated counterparts to identify themselves as Republican and slightly more likely to identify as independent (see Table 3). Both working-class men and women are more likely to be Democrats than their college-educated counterparts. Where conventional wisdom does carry the day is that both blacks and Latinos consider themselves Democrats over Republicans by a very large degree. College-educated and working-class blacks are three times as likely as whites to be Democrats, and Latinos are twice as likely to be Democrats as whites.
Table 3. Political Party Identification of the Working Class: “Generally speaking, do you think of yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, an independent, or what?”
Source: Author’s analysis of American National Election Studies, 2012.
In addition to asking about party identification, the ANES survey asked people to place themselves on an ideological scale. Again the stereotype of a white working-class die-hard conservative isn’t quite justified. While whites self-identified as more conservative than blacks or Latinos (see Table 4), it’s actually college-educated whites who are most likely to identify as conservative, while working-class whites are more likely to identify as moderate. In fact, working-class whites are equally likely to identify as moderate or conservative, belying a well-worn stereotype about their politics.
Table 4. Self-Identified Description of Political Views
Source: Author’s analysis of American National Election Studies, 2012.
What about on more cultural issues? Again, the white working class is less conservative than one might expect, though modestly more conservative than college-educated whites (see Table 5). Overall, the majority of Americans no longer support the man-as-breadwinner/woman-as-homemaker situation as some kind of nostalgic ideal. This idea remains popular among only 21 percent of college-educated individuals and 38 percent of the working class. But working-class people of all races are more likely to agree with the statement that “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” Working-class Latinos were the most likely to agree with the statement, with 44 percent in agreement, compared to 33 percent of working-class blacks and 37 percent of working-class whites. Most Americans have removed their rose-colored glasses about America’s idealized Leave It to Beaver era.
Table 5. “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”
Source: Author’s analysis of General Social Survey, 2010. Figures in parentheses represent the percentage who strongly agreed or strongly disagreed.
Missing at the Ballot Box
There is no doubt that the United States has a serious voter turnout problem. Over the past four decades, turnout in presidential elections has hovered around 60 percent. In 2012, 62 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. And among that meager percentage, wealthier and white voters show up in greater numbers than others. In 2012, 26 million eligible voters of color did not vote, and among eligible voters earning less than $50,000, 47 million did not vote.4 The big questions are why this is the case and whether it matters. For decades political scientists concluded that voters and nonvoters essentially held the same views, in essence meaning that low turnout among working-class voters or voters of color was insignificant in terms of representation. But this research examined only candidate choice—whether nonvoters would have voted for the Republican or the Democrat. There are lots of practical reasons that working-class and poor voters may not vote, such as time constraints and registration obstacles. But what if they don’t vote because they sense there isn’t much difference between the two candidates’ positions? It turns out that compared to higher-income voters, low-income voters have a much harder time discerning meaningful differences between the two political parties.
In their book Who Votes Now?, Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler examine differences among lower-income and higher-income voters in rating each of the presidential candidates’ ideology on a liberal-conservative spectrum and on the question of government’s role in guaranteeing a job for everyone who needs one. What they found is that in both the 2004 and 2008 elections, high-income voters perceived a much greater difference in the ideology of the two candidates, while low-income voters saw each candidate as less ideological and had a harder time perceiving his stance on the issue of government guarantee of jobs.5 This matters because the perception of a real difference in the positions of the candidates affects whether someone thinks it matters to vote. The finding that lower-income voters don’t perceive candidates to be either strongly liberal or strongly conservative is telling, and reflects how neither party is directly speaking to the economic concerns of the working class while being quite effective at communicating the party’s positions to people with higher incomes. Without a meaningful perception of a difference between the presidential candidates, many working-class voters make the rational decision not to cast a ballot—and our nation’s policy priorities are skewed as a result.
Since 1972 the difference in the policy preferences of voters and nonvoters about government’s role in our society has widened, with voters much more aligned with conservative preferences and nonvoters more aligned with progressive policy preferences. Missing voters, who are more likely to be low-income, are more liberal on questions of redistribution in particular, specifically on the need for government to provide jobs, services, and health care.6
Politicians focus their campaigns, and all of their polling, on motivating “likely voters” to cast their vote for them. But structural barriers, including burdensome registration procedures, combined with an enthusiasm gap means that the working class is more likely to be missing from the pool of “likely voters.” And so the agenda is set by an electorate that is more white and more affluent than the nation as a whole. This has profound consequences on the types of issues candidates campaign on and what they prioritize once in office. And those decisions have deep implications about the kind of social contract our elected leaders deem appropriate for our country, generation after generation.
Research on turnout and policy outcomes in other countries corroborate the idea that countries with less class bias in voting and higher turnout have more generous social welfare policies. Researchers examining our nation’s depressed levels of voting came to the conclusion that “low turnout offers a potentially compelling explanation why the American welfare state has been so much less responsive to rising market inequality than other welfare states.”7 A study of eighty-five democracies found that higher voter turnout leads to higher total revenues, higher government spending, and more generous welfare state spending.8
One could conclude from this research that the recent conservative attacks on voting rights—from requiring photo identification to shortening early voting opportunities, both of which dampen turnout among younger, lower-income voters, as well as voters of color—are clearly designed to preserve an ideological hegemony that doesn’t reflect the needs of all the people in our democracy. Most recently, in 2013 conservative legislators were given even more leeway to curtail voting rights by the Supreme Court. In Shelby County v. Holder, the justices struck down a provision in the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of voting discrimination (mostly southern states) to get pre-clearance from the Justice Department before making any changes to their voting laws or practices. In the year immediately following the decision, Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, and Mississippi all enacted strict new voter identification laws, which either had been blocked under “pre-clearance” or would likely have been blocked. North Carolina went a step further and repealed a series of laws that increased turnout, including early voting.9
Our democracy is far from inclusive of all the people it purports to represent. And that status quo is highly desirable to, and vigorously defended by, elites of all stripes, using a combination of suppressive voting laws and big-money donations that undermine the Sleeping Giant’s political power.
The Big Influence of Big Money
There’s an old adage that if you ask a simple question, you’ll get a simple answer. So here’s the question I posed to the individuals I interviewed: “Who has power in this country?”
“People with money.” “Rich people.” “The politicians and all big companies.” “Anybody who has money.” “Once upon a time, I would have said the people. Now I say it’s the ruling class.” “Rich people do.” “The companies have the power.” “Whoever has the money has the power.” “The rich.” “Big business.”
Simple, yes. But pithiness often comes from great clarity. And today it is abundantly clear that instead of our democracy writing the rules for capitalism, capitalism is writing the rules for our democracy. The decline in working-class economic and political power mirrors the rise of power among corporate and wealthy elites. And this shift was anything but accidental—a political thriller of a story that we’ll visit in the next chapter. For now, let’s stick to how the views of the rich and the working class diverge significantly on fundamental economic issues, and how the affluent almost always win in this tug-of-war.
There’s a saying in Washington, D.C., that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. And America’s big business lobbies and high-powered donors have gotten fat off a menu of free trade, financial deregulation, weak labor protections, and tax cuts. The power to set the agenda in Washington and in state capitals across the nation—the menu, if you will—rests almost entirely on having the money of a big corporation or trade association behind you, or a very fat bank account that can easily support checks containing six or seven zeros in the amount box. This cozy connection between big money and government has prompted many respected journalists and academics to declare that the United States is no longer a democracy but a plutocracy or oligarchy.10
Money has always played a role in our nation’s elections, but there used to be commonsense rules about where that money could come from, how it could be spent, and how much any individual or corporation could contribute. The principle of political equality—that the size of a person’s wallet shouldn’t determine the strength of his or her voice in our democracy—was at the heart of these rules. In addition, laws protected our democracy from corruption—the kind of pay-to-play, “I rub your back, you rub mine” relationships that the Watergate scandal exposed. But in 1978, in Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court struck down many features of our campaign finance laws and dealt a fatal blow to the ability to promote political equality by limiting the amount of money that can be spent to win elections, either directly by a candidate or by outside groups.
Since that watershed decision, the Supreme Court has ruled on several additional campaign financing cases, all of which resulted in the loosening of restrictions and the weakening of the average citizen’s voice. The fatal blow to our democracy’s bedrock principle of all citizens having an equal say in the decisions that shape their lives came in 2010 with the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Court struck down previous restrictions prohibiting corporations from spending money to influence elections through what are known as “independent political expenditures,” which essentially means any spending that is not directly coordinated with a political party or candidate. Corporations are still prohibited from giving money directly to candidates. Unfortunately, there are countless indirect and influential ways for corporations and wealthy individuals to stack the political deck in their favor. While some donations to certain kinds of groups must be disclosed (such as those to PACs and Super PACs), money given to tax-exempt “social welfare organizations” or trade associations does not have to be disclosed. In the 2012 presidential election, the first after the Citizens United ruling, this secretive spending or so-called dark money accounted for 31 percent of all outside spending.11 Whether the money does or doesn’t have to be disclosed, the amount these organizations can spend to influence federal elections is completely unlimited.
Demos, the organization where I oversee research and policy, analyzed the amount of money spent in the 2012 elections and detailed the findings in a report called “Billion-Dollar Democracy: The Unprecedented Role of Money in the 2012 Elections.” In the 2012 presidential election, just over $1 billion was spent during the national elections to influence House and Senate races and the big kahuna, the race for president of the United States.12 That amount was more than was spent by the Republican and Democratic parties combined—a first in American elections (see Chart 1).13
American elections have become dominated by slush funds in which major individual donors can place their bets, doubling down to advance their interests and protect their privilege in a game we used to call democracy. In the 2012 presidential race, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama raised a combined $313 million from over 3 million individuals giving less than $200. But that’s nothing compared to the largesse of America’s superdonors, who with an average contribution of $9.9 million to Super PACs were able to match the combined giving of over 3 million citizens with just thirty-two people.14 These über-donors reflect a small sliver of an already nefariously narrow group of big political donors. Consider that nearly 60 percent of Super PAC funding came from just 159 donors who contributed at least $1 million. And nearly all the money (93 percent) raised by Super PACs came in the form of $10,000 contributions, from just 3,318 donors.15 Think about that. Through the ability to write very large checks to political organizations whose sole purpose is to sway the outcome of an election, just 0.0011 percent of the U.S. population is controlling the messages and the agenda of our federal elections through television spots, radio commercials, and public events that now form the backbone of election season. The 2016 election cycle is already breaking records for outside money from a small cadre of donors. As of August 2015, more than $303 million had been raised by Super PACs, a much higher amount than was raised at the same point in the 2012 presidential election.16
Chart 1. Total Federal Spending by Type, 2012 Election Cycle
Source: Demos and U.S. FIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data.
Now, it’s important to say explicitly that the amount of money spent in our elections isn’t inherently bad. What makes it so toxic and dangerous to our democracy is that the money is overwhelmingly from a very small number of wealthy individuals and special interests who use their generosity to promote their messages and their agendas and to elect candidates who share their priorities and positions on issues. Today in America, economic clout is easily translated into political clout, ultimately driving the very governance of our country.
Thanks to a body of new research from political scientists, we now have empirical evidence that confirms our gut instinct that the wealthiest among us dominate our democracy.17 In his seminal book Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, Martin Gilens looked at several decades of public opinion on economic, social, and foreign-policy issues. He compared the policy preferences of different income groups to the actual policies that were passed by Congress to identify which, if any, income groups had more or less influence over policy. It turns out that the American government does respond to the public’s preferences, but that responsiveness is strongly tilted toward the most affluent citizens. Indeed, under most circumstances, “the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt,” Gilens writes of his findings.18
Of course, average Americans don’t always disagree with the opinions of the affluent. In many areas there is consensus among Americans of all income levels. But, importantly, Gilens found that “the starkest difference in responsiveness to the affluent and the middle class occurs on economic policy, a consequence of high-income Americans’ stronger opposition to taxes and corporate regulation.”19 In fact, if policy outcomes more generally reflected the preferences of the poor and the middle class, it’s probable that we’d have a higher minimum wage, more generous unemployment benefits, stricter regulation of big business, and a more progressive tax code.20 Given what we know about the causes of the Great Recession and its devastating and disproportional impact on the working class, the outsized role of the affluent on economic policy is particularly concerning. The deregulation of the financial industry—a long-pursued goal of Wall Street titans and the investor class—played a key role in the financial collapse and allowed millions of working-class homeowners to be preyed upon by mortgage brokers whose compensation depended on duping homeowners into refinancing their safe loans with ones with exploding interest rates. These subprime loans were aggressively marketed in working-class communities, particularly black and Latino neighborhoods. When the dust settled and the investigations ended, it was clear that the big banks had exploited America’s strapped working class for their own profit, and in the process vacuumed up what little wealth so many homeowners had scraped and sacrificed to accumulate. All told, this unregulated morass of mortgage brokers and lending companies (often financed by America’s top banks) created widespread suffering, causing over 4 million foreclosures21 and 8 million lost jobs.22 While America’s economic elite eventually recovered from the financial collapse, the working class is still reeling even several years after the official end of the Great Recession. And while President Obama and the then Democratic-controlled Congress were able to pass some economic regulations and stimulus spending during the darkest days of the collapse, they were considered by most economists to be far too weak to offer broad relief to people battered by the crisis.23
America’s economic elites, including big business, had a different agenda. While the overwhelming majority of Americans agreed that the government should be doing more to create jobs, the top 1 percent were more concerned about deficit reduction and reducing the nation’s long-term debt.24 This finding was part of a larger, groundbreaking survey conducted by Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright examining the policy preferences of the affluent, defined as individuals with annual incomes greater than $1 million, compared to those of the general public. The survey found that 87 percent of affluent households believed that budget deficits were a “very important” problem—the highest percentage of all listed perceived problems.
But it’s not just in choosing fiscal austerity over job creation that there are distinct differences in policy preferences between the general public (which includes the sizable working class) and the richest among us. As you can see in Table 6, the donor class isn’t very supportive of a robust minimum wage, affordable college tuition, public schools, or ensuring that people can meet the most basic of needs. Differences of opinion about public policy are part of democracy; the problem isn’t disagreement. The problem is that the donor class wins almost every time. In fact, America’s elites are very effective at translating their wishes into legislation while the preferences of the working class are by and large ignored.
Table 6. Policy Preferences of the Affluent Versus Those of the General Public
| WEALTHY IN FAVOR | GENERAL PUBLIC IN FAVOR | |
| Government must see that no one is without food, clothing, or shelter. | 43% | 68% |
| The minimum wage is high enough that no family with a full-time worker falls below the official poverty line. | 40% | 78% |
| The government in Washington ought to see to it that everyone who wants to work can find a job. | 19% | 68% |
| The federal government should provide jobs for everyone able and willing to work who cannot find a job in private employment. | 8% | 53% |
| The federal government should spend whatever is necessary to ensure that all children have really good public schools they can go to. | 35% | 87% |
| The federal government should make sure that everyone who wants to go to college can do so. | 28% | 78% |
| The government has an essential role to play in regulating the market. | 55% | 71% |
| Spending on domestic programs like Medicare, education, and highways should be cut in order to cut federal budget deficits. | 58% | 27% |
Source: Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 1 (March 2013): 51–73.
Research by the political scientist Larry Bartels finds that in contrast to the affluent, working-class Americans have little or no influence over policy outcomes. As he writes in his 2008 book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, “The preferences of people in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent impact on the behavior of their elected officials.”25
Although the working class is more liberal than the affluent or the middle class on questions of economic policy, that doesn’t necessarily translate into the political will for change. What opinion surveys measure is the starting point for any kind of policy preference or ideological belief. But once active debate happens, underlying support can easily be made to erode. And politicians of both parties have found a very effective way to turn support for activist government into downright vehement opposition by using a weapon as old as our nation’s history: race.
The Dog Whistle Still Blows
In this chapter we’ve shown that the majority of working-class voters believe the government does too little to help the needy, and are sympathetic toward those who are in need. Yet an examination of how these issues were portrayed during the elections following the Great Recession, when a great many Americans were reeling from the financial collapse, reveals the toxicity of using racial anxiety to diminish support (and sympathy) for struggling Americans.
In his illuminating book Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, Ian Haney López details the long history of politicians triggering racial anxiety to stymie the expansion of government. It’s a strategy with roots in the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon, now widely known as the “southern strategy”—the Republican Party’s infamous and calculated winning of votes in the South by appealing to racism against black Americans. When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he fretted that he had just signed away the South for the Democrats for a generation. The Republicans largely made that fear a reality.
In the decades that followed, starting with President Nixon and his championing of “states’ rights” and moving on to President Reagan’s “welfare queens,” the first President Bush’s demonizing of Willie Horton, and President Clinton’s calculated “Sister Souljah moment” and pledge to “end welfare as we know it,” white political candidates have effectively used coded racial language to court the white vote and provoke antigovernment sentiment.26
In a shockingly honest admission, Lee Atwater, a leading political strategist and adviser to the Republican party, explained the southern strategy during an anonymous interview with political scientist Alexander P. Lamis, which appeared in his book The Two-Party South and was subsequently reprinted in Southern Politics magazine in the 1990s, this time with Atwater’s name revealed. He described both the strategy and President Reagan’s use of it:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” So any way you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.27
Our nation’s inability to confront its history of racial oppression and the continued racial anxiety and bias that exert a powerful influence in our society are among the reasons that we can’t have nice things like affordable college tuition and child care, pensions, world-class infrastructure, and the higher taxes to pay for all these things, which countries without our destructive racial history simply consider the requisites of an advanced society.
Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, through their use of racially coded language—up to Newt Gingrich’s characterization of President Obama as “the food stamp president” and our racially fraught present moment—Republicans have deliberately used race to pursue their broader objectives of shrinking government and deregulating the economy. And it has worked. As Haney López explains, in 1964 almost two out of three whites voted for Lyndon Johnson, who embodied the support of activist government, but in 2012 nearly the same proportion of whites voted for Mitt Romney, a candidate clearly hostile to activist government. Additionally, in every presidential election since 1964, a majority of whites have voted for the GOP candidate, while rarely have more than one in ten blacks done so.28 Something is clearly up. That something is race. But not racism in the vein of vitriolic name-calling and beating with clubs; it’s something much more subtle but just as powerful. And as we’ll see in the next chapter, for the black and Latino working class, the experience of racial exclusion and exploitation in the labor market and its associated institutions that began centuries ago still echoes today.