The “Merge Right” Chapter, or How Trumpism Mines and Fuels Dangerous Trends Among Whites
For the last half century, wealthy elites and the dog whistle politicians they bankroll have been pursuing a “merge right” strategy, seeking to convince as many people as possible to vote their racial fears and in the process to entrust their fates to the plutocrats. Through dog whistling’s exploitation of coded language, this strategy has found traction across racial lines, and in fashioning a response it’s helpful to focus on political views rather than skin hues.
But the main driver behind Donald Trump’s election, as well as the prior fifty years of American politics, is nevertheless color-coded. Van Jones memorably described it as “whitelash”—the political reaction of a majority of whites to a society struggling to transcend white dominance.
It’s time to look directly at troubling new trends among whites. The place to start is with Trump. He personally espouses many of the racist views that the Right seeks to activate and promote, he understands better than perhaps anyone how to exploit racial division for ulterior ends, and his campaign and presidency added propellant to the danger.
Donald Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, was among those arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens, New York, in 1927. “1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all” in the streets, one newspaper reported then. Newspaper articles covering the fracas do not explicitly label Trump’s father a Klan member, leaving open the possibility that he was simply a bystander caught up in what newspapers described as a “near riot.” But the articles do make clear that this was Trump’s father who was arrested for “refusing to disperse,” though the charge was later dismissed. One newspaper also mentioned that all those arrested were “berobed marchers,” suggesting the elder Trump was there in Klan regalia. At the time, Fred Trump would have been twenty-one.1
Donald was born nine years later, and reared as an heir to the real estate empire Fred was building in the boroughs surrounding Manhattan—an empire erected on a bedrock of racial discrimination. In the 1950s, this reflected ambient racism as well as federal housing policy, which encouraged the creation of segregated suburbs.2 It also reflected Fred Trump’s personal antipathies. The legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie lived in Trump’s first housing development, a six-building, 1,800-unit apartment complex called Beach Haven, near Coney Island. Guthrie is most famous for “This Land Is Your Land,” a ballad inspired by the Depression that lifts up the ideal of a country by and for all of us. Beach Haven was far from that. Seeing segregation at work there, Guthrie wrote a song titled “Old Man Trump” that included the lyrics: “Beach Haven ain’t my home! No, I just can’t pay this rent! My money’s down the drain, and my soul is badly bent! Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower where no black folks come to roam. No, no, Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!”3
Did Donald internalize his father’s racism? In a 2016 interview for the PBS documentary series Frontline, Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio identified eugenicist beliefs as “a very deep part of the Trump story.” A racial theory that arose early in the twentieth century, eugenics drew on the then-new study of genes to postulate that biology drives almost every major difference between groups, connecting race to character, culture, religion, and ultimately national destiny. Such beliefs were foundational among white supremacists in the United States at the time Trump’s father was arrested at the Klan rally.4
“The family subscribes to a race horse theory of human development, that they believe that there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get superior offspring,” D’Antonio explained.5 Trump had expressed such views in a 2010 interview with CNN, in which he attributed his business success to his genes. “I’m a gene believer … hey when you connect two race horses you usually end up with a fast horse,” he said, adding, “I had a good gene pool from the standpoint of that.”6 Trump has also been recorded saying, “You know, I’m proud to have that German blood. There’s no question about it. Great stuff.”7
By the 1960s, eugenics as a philosophy had been debunked and racial attitudes among whites had begun to evolve. Many, prodded by civil rights activism, moved toward support for racial equality. Federal and state laws followed and encouraged this shift. In the area of housing, this meant that laws soliciting segregation gave way to laws prohibiting racial discrimination.
The Trumps did not evolve. In fact, so many complaints of discrimination were lodged against Trump Management that in 1973 the federal Department of Justice sued both Trumps—Fred as company chairman and Donald as president—for racial discrimination against African Americans and Puerto Ricans.
In one among many incidents cited by the federal government, a young Black couple, Haywood and Rennell Cash, were told no apartments were available in a Trump housing complex. They knew this was a lie because they were working with a civil rights organization that had arranged for a white “tester” to apply for that same space. While Haywood waited in a car, having just been told there were no apartments available, Maggie Durham, the tester, went in. She was quickly offered a unit. Durham stepped out to get Haywood, then together they returned to the leasing office.
The rental agent exploded, calling Durham a “nigger-lover” and a “traitor to the race,” according to the complaint. This was “one of the first [Trump real estate] projects in which Donald Trump, fresh out of college, played an active role,” according to the New York Times. Trump would later praise that same rental agent as a “fabulous man” and “an amazing manager.”8
The federal allegations, Donald Trump told reporters at the time, were “absolutely ridiculous. We never have discriminated,” he insisted, “and we never would.”9 Then he counterpunched. As summarized by the New York Times, “He turned the lawsuit into a protracted battle, complete with angry denials, character assassination, charges that the government was trying to force him to rent to ‘welfare recipients’ and a $100 million countersuit accusing the Justice Department of defamation.”10 Two years later, in 1975, the Trumps declared they had been vindicated, though in reality they had signed a consent decree promising reforms. In the opinion of the Justice Department, though, they flouted that commitment. “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization,” the Justice Department wrote to Donald Trump’s lawyer in 1978.11 It seems clear that even forty years ago, appearance mattered more than reality to Trump. He’d learned that vigorously denying racism was more important to his public persona than actually ending discriminatory practices.
Another infamous incident from Trump’s past involves the Central Park jogger case. New York City in the 1970s and 1980s was in fiscal crisis, prompting severe cuts to public services and layoffs of public servants, including police. A crime rate that had been climbing through the 1960s continued upward over the next two decades, peaking in 1990. Near the highpoint, in 1989, the police coerced five teenage boys of color into confessing to the brutal rape of a young white woman in Central Park. Though horrific, the Central Park jogger case was one of more than 3,200 rapes that year in New York City. This case, though, particularly seized the city’s fevered imagination because it featured Black and brown teens supposedly running wild and beating and raping an innocent white woman.12
Mayor Ed Koch pled for calm and warned against unfocused hate. Donald Trump instead took out full-page ads in the New York papers, including the Times, extolling hate and calling for executions. “Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” he wrote. “I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”
Trump’s full-page ad followed the dog whistle script the Right had been promoting since Nixon’s 1968 campaign. Trump painted people of color as savage and dangerous: “roving bands of wild criminals [who] roam our neighborhoods,” “crazed misfits” who “terrorize New York.” In contrast, whites were decent people: no longer “safe from those who would prey on innocent lives,” they were vulnerable to “criminals of every age [who] beat and rape a helpless woman.” And government was to blame: it fostered a “reckless and dangerously permissive atmosphere” by its “continuous pandering to the criminal population,” who if they are ever arrested “laugh because they know that soon, very soon, they will be returned to the streets to rape and maim and kill once again.”13
In that atmosphere, the five teenagers were coerced to confess and on that basis were convicted. In 2002, they were exonerated after the actual perpetrator confessed and was tied to the crime by DNA evidence. The teenagers—by then young men—fought for more than a decade to be compensated for their stolen years, and settled their lawsuit against the city in 2014 for $41 million.
That prompted Trump to weigh in again, with an opinion piece in the New York Daily News that trashed the settlement as a “disgrace.” He insisted that “settling doesn’t mean innocence,” even though their innocence had been conclusively established. He warned that “these young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels,” though they were imprisoned as teenagers and so hardly had any pasts at all. He jeered that the men “must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city,” though the city was hardly the victim.14 In sowing racist lies, Trump was unrepentant as well as resistant to facts, traits the country has come to know well.
Trump’s first significant run for office came in 2000. He briefly sought the presidential nomination from the Reform Party. To woo this small progressive party, Trump positioned himself as a liberal supporter of abortion and gay rights. His competition included the hard-right commentator Patrick Buchanan, who hoped to hijack the Reform Party. Trump took aim, claiming the liberal high ground. Speaking to The Advocate, the national LGBTQ magazine, Trump fired at Buchanan: “I read the things he had written about Hitler, Jews, Blacks, gays, and Mexicans. I mean, I think it’s disgusting.… He wants to divide Americans.”15
Trump saw clearly Buchanan’s tactic “to divide Americans,” and positioned himself to campaign against that strategy. The irony of that isn’t lost on Buchanan. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Buchanan returned the favor, saying “Donald Trump stole my playbook.” And what did Buchanan identify as the main play stolen by Trump? The decision to attack non-European immigration to the United States, capitalizing on the realization that “people want to be with their own and want to be separated from others,” Buchanan explained.16
A decade after campaigning to be the Reform Party candidate, Trump was ready to try politics again. This time, he sought the GOP presidential nomination. He began his campaign with a speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2011, testing themes of American economic decline and the incompetence of Washington’s political insiders.17 It fell flat, and his chances of climbing through the presidential primaries seemed nil.
The next month, Trump altered tack. He called Joseph Farah, a conspiracy theorist from the fringe of American politics, whose contentions included, among other things, that soybeans caused homosexuality and that Barack Obama was foreign born. Claims of Obama’s foreign birth had been so thoroughly debunked by then that continued insinuations to that effect seemed as outlandish as the soybean claim.
But Trump made the rounds of news and talk programs, refloating the rumors about Obama’s birth and religion while envisioning TV ratings gold.18 The gambit worked. Quickly Obama’s birth certificate moved to the eye of a media storm that kept offering Trump an ever-expanding platform and rising standing with Republican voters.19 In mid-April 2011, Trump was tied for first place among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, well ahead of the establishment figure and eventual GOP nominee that year, Mitt Romney.20 By mid-May 2011, his publicity stunt having paid out handsomely, Trump announced he was no longer running for president.
Trump’s birtherism taught him a critical lesson. In promoting that lie, he lost what little credibility he had with most serious Republican politicians and came across as a pathetic carnival barker to Democrats. But he’d absorbed a fundamental truth about the Republican base. With little more to his campaign than unsubstantiated insinuations about Obama’s foreign birth, Trump had surged among reactionary voters. Trump grasped that he could generate impassioned support from the Republican base through coded racist campaigning. For 2016, he prepared to do just that, updating his arsenal by having aides listen to thousands of hours of Fox and talk radio, mining it for talking points about migrant invasions, Muslim terrorists, and Obamacare.21
During the 2016 campaign, Trump boasted to the New York Times of his ability to read his crowds. “If my speeches ever get a little off,” he said, “I just go: ‘We will build a wall!’ You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of maybe thinking about leaving—I can sort of tell the audience—I just say, ‘We will build the wall,’ and they go nuts.”22 It’s possible this reflects merely Trump’s extraordinary showmanship. Far more likely, this emerges from Trump’s previous experience exploiting racial provocations, along with dog whistle advice from his closest political mentors—among them Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort, who cumulatively had more than a century of experience as practitioners of political race-baiting.23
Even Democrats had to admit that Trump had tapped into a virulent power. “I think Donald J. Trump is plenty bright,” said Paul Begala, a political insider close to both Bill and Hillary Clinton. “He has a cynical, innate intelligence for what his base wants to hear. It’s like a divining rod for division, prejudice, and stereotyping.”
Trump deserves a bit more credit than that. It is not just an “innate” sense of how to divide people. It is one that Trump has studied and perfected. For Trump, racial dog whistling is a practiced strategy. In this sense, Begala’s conclusion from 2018 is sound: “So don’t call him ‘moron’ or ‘idiot’; call him what he is: a conniving, corrupt con man, a dangerous, divisive demagogue—and, most sobering of all, the man who carried 30 states in the last election, and may well do it again.”24
Hating and Helping African Americans
Drawing on lessons learned, in 2016 Trump made some key innovations to dog whistling. We discussed one at the outset of the book: Trump’s strategy of instigating charges of racism from political elites. Trump also altered dog whistling about African Americans.
During campaign rallies, Trump frequently encouraged violence against Black demonstrators. At various times he said, “Knock the crap out of them,” and “I’d like to punch him in the face,” and “Maybe he should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”25 This seemed to function as a new form of dog whistling. Trump’s exhortations to violence could be defended as directed only toward individual protesters, though the larger message seemed to invite violence and anger toward Blacks generally.
This new whistle drew on but also vivified the stock depiction of African Americans as threatening criminals. Trump repeated the usual dog whistles invoking Black criminality. He described himself as the “law and order” candidate, denounced “thugs,” and called for a return to racially discriminatory “stop and frisk” policing. The state violence typically attendant to dog whistle politics would follow during Trump’s administration. For instance, Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, would reboot the war on crime that fuels racialized mass incarceration and rampant police violence in communities of color. But during the campaign, by focusing his crowds’ attention on individual protesters, Trump made his rallies performance pieces in which the rumored Black criminal appeared in the flesh.
The “thug” was no longer an abstraction. Now he was supposedly standing right there, jeering Trump and by extension his fans. When Trump exhorted his crowd to rough up these people, he invited them to participate in dehumanizing violence—the protesters were no longer fellow members of society but objects of scorn who deserved a punch in the face. Trump’s crowds could do much more than vote their racial fear and resentment. They could give it direct voice, through boos and sometimes spit and fists.
Trump didn’t stop with dog whistles that portrayed Blacks as dangerous predators. During his 2016 campaign, Trump frequently regaled crowds with stereotypes about the abysmal conditions of African American neighborhoods. “Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crime at levels that nobody has seen,” Trump bellowed at an Ohio rally. “You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities.”
This language encouraged his base to see African Americans through ugly stereotypes. Yet in a contradictory twist that worked to assuage any concern that this was bigotry, Trump framed his remarks as arising out of concern. Trump instigated hate against African Americans in some of his remarks. And in others, he proclaimed his heartfelt commitment to help the Black community.
To the Ohio crowd he said, “Give me a chance. I’ll straighten it out. I’ll straighten it out. What do you have to lose?” And again, this time in Florida: “Our inner cities are almost at an all-time low, run by the Democrats for sometimes more than a hundred years, chain unbroken. So they have no jobs. They have horrible education. They have no safety or security. And I say to the African American community, what the hell do you have to lose? I will fix it. I will fix it.”
Trump made these remarks before overwhelmingly white audiences who cheered lustily. It didn’t much matter that crime rates were at fifty-year lows and that cities had largely rebounded from Trump’s implicit reference point of the crime-plagued 1970s, or that most African Americans these days reside in suburbs.26 Trump was spinning racist stereotypes, not stating socioeconomic facts. Yet even as he confirmed the worst myths about Black people and cities, he wrapped them in promises to help. In this refresh of dog whistling, Trump encouraged his base’s tendency to believe in Black pathology, but reassured them of his (and their) noble intentions.
Indeed, Trump assured his supporters that Democrats were the real bigots. “We reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, which panders to and talks down to communities of color and sees them only as votes,” Trump told a predominantly white crowd in Wisconsin in August 2016. Voters should “reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, who sees people of color only as votes and not as human beings worthy of a better future,” he said a week later in Ohio. In Mississippi, Trump repeated the claim, stating bluntly, “Hillary Clinton is a bigot.”27 CNN’s Anderson Cooper challenged Trump to explain, and he offered this: “Well, she is a bigot because you look at what’s happening to the inner cities, you look at what’s happening to African Americans and Hispanics in this country … she’s selling them down the tubes.”28
Trump was repeating and amplifying Ronald Reagan’s attacks on welfare families. Reagan had claimed that liberal efforts to help the poor created an entitlement mentality that further trapped them in poverty. Trump expanded the welfare frame into a general description of Black life, and made Democratic betrayal of African Americans a major campaign theme. “Democratic politicians have run nearly every inner city in America for the last 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 years,” said Trump, speaking to a white crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire. “Every policy Hillary Clinton supports is a policy that has failed and betrayed communities of color in this country. But she doesn’t care. She’s too busy raking in cash from people and rigging the system and taking the African American vote.” And the Republican position? “Donald Trump will fix it,” he said. “We’re going to make it better.”29 Because Republicans, Trump boasted, are the ones who genuinely care about Black people.
Creating New Racial Threats
Contrast Trump’s occasional expressions of concern for African Americans with how he presented Latinxs and Muslims. Trump launched his campaign with claims about Mexican rapists, led his crowds in chants of “Build the Wall,” dwelled on gory crimes committed here by Central Americans, and invited the families of people killed by undocumented immigrants to join him on campaign stages. Trump lied about Muslim Americans cheering the 9/11 attacks, called for waterboarding and worse forms of torture for Muslims, speculated that Muslim Americans knew about but refused to alert authorities to dangerous members of their mosques, and demanded “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”30
What explains the venomous tone regarding Latinxs and Muslims? Partly it reflects the increasing social salience of these groups over the last couple of decades. Latinxs recently became the country’s largest minority group, with numbers that will continue to rise. Muslims are newly visible as the country has locked itself into endless wars across the Middle East.
But there’s an additional, important dimension to the vilification of Muslims and Latinxs. Confusion about whether Latinxs and Muslims should be considered races, or instead ethnic or religious groups, provided added leeway for savaging them while pretending not to be intentionally stirring racial hysteria.
Even liberal pundits were befuddled. Witness the summer 2016 exchange between MSNBC political commentators John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, who had cowritten the bestselling book Game Change about the 2008 presidential race and were working on a book about 2016. When Heilemann claimed that Trump’s attacks on Mexicans were “pure racial politics,” Halperin shot back, “No, it’s not racial.” Heilemann insisted,“It’s racial politics. It is.” But Halperin retorted that “Mexico isn’t a race.”31
Halperin’s argument that Mexicans cannot constitute a race is consistent with a continental theory of races—that “whites” hail from Europe, “Blacks” from Africa, “yellows” from Asia, and “reds” from the Americas. Under this thinking, Mexicans can’t be a race because Mexico is a country, not a continent. More generally, this continental theory implies Latinxs can’t be a race because they’re a mixture of peoples from different continents, and Muslims can’t be a race because they’re members of a religion present throughout the world.
Halperin’s mistake lay in crediting as factual the cultural belief in the continental origins of races. This sort of myth is important to how race works. The tale of continental origins seeks to attribute racial groups to nature. This hides from view the more inconvenient fact—inconvenient to those claiming to be naturally superior—that societies create races. Societies create races by how they treat groups and through what the general culture believes. The key to whether a group is a “race,” therefore, has nothing to do directly with continents or nature. No races exist in nature. Rather, what matters are the social practices and beliefs—including about nature and continents, superiority and inferiority—that foster notions of fixed difference and inherent hierarchy.32
Today, the Right broadens the targets of dog whistle politics by making Muslims and undocumented immigrants into races that supposedly threaten whites. Trump, Fox & Friends, Breitbart, talk radio, and the whole right-wing echo chamber are busy promoting a public belief that “Muslims” and “Mexicans” are in their natural essence inferior and threatening groups, and that “whites” must band together to protect themselves.
To be sure, Trump and his friends are not inventing new races out of whole cloth, but instead weaving a new tapestry from durable pieces of racist fabric. After the attacks on the World Trade Center, muddy beliefs linking religious, cultural, and racial differences provided fertile ground as right-wing politicians and media organs built the “Muslim terrorist” into a racial beast.33 Soon after 9/11, to say “Muslim terrorist” or “radical Islamic extremist” in the United States was to conjure for many the face of Osama bin Laden. It was to invoke burkas and hijabs; a deep, hostile, and strange foreignness; unfamiliar languages and a singular fanaticism. Most Arabs in the United States are Christian, which itself reflects decades of discrimination in immigration practices, but no matter.34 The majority of Muslims in the United States—and the world—are not Arab, but so what. The particular history of 9/11 and the ensuing politics of endless war warped the American racial imagination.
If criticism of religious differences provides a thin veneer of legitimacy to dog whistle attacks on Muslims, then stories of inherent illegality play that same role with respect to Latinxs. Those stirring dread around Latinxs frequently assail “illegal aliens.” The term offers a ready means to tether Latinxs to myths of criminal depravity. The propaganda deviates from the reality, of course, as a survey of research by the American Immigration Council found: “For more than a century, innumerable studies have confirmed two simple yet powerful truths about the relationship between immigration and crime: immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime.”35
But anecdotes carry more power than statistics, especially among audiences primed to perceive racial threats. The “beautiful Kate” story out of San Francisco and the many other bloody shirts waved by the Right give “illegal” a frightening weight. Indeed, the term is not limited to immigrants at all, but rather expresses an alarm that applies to almost all persons of Latinx descent, most of whom are U.S. citizens.36 Cumulatively, the invective transforms “illegal” into an emotional knife to the throat, implying that the essential identity of Latinxs is criminal, lawless, and bloodthirsty.37
“Mexican” in this discourse is a race that covers almost all Latinxs. As a factual matter, Mexican Americans account for just more than six out of ten in the Latinx population. Among Latinxs, two-thirds are citizens by birth and only a third are foreign born—the majority of whom have naturalized as citizens or are lawfully present in the country.38 But the fearful gaze on the border with Mexico helps transform every group from south of there into a single menacing racial bogeyman. In March 2019, Trump cut aid to El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Frankly, the move seemed designed to deepen the humanitarian crises in those countries in a manner likely to generate more people fleeing north, in time for the 2020 elections and a new wave of anti-migrant fearmongering. More telling here, though, is how a Fox & Friends chyron distilled the news: “TRUMP CUTS AID TO 3 MEXICAN COUNTRIES.”39
The Right actively constructs Muslims and Latinxs as races marked by inferior cultures and threatening agendas. Moreover, though the dog whistles themselves rarely invoke biology, the public is quick to fill in that last detail. Dark skin, black hair, brown eyes—people “know” how to recognize a Muslim Arab (even if some turn out to be Latinx or South Asian, Christian or Sikh). The public also knows an “illegal” when it sees one (but doesn’t look at Europeans or Canadians that way, whatever their immigration status).
There’s no sharp line between racism versus xenophobia against Latinxs. Or between racism, xenophobia, and religious chauvinism against Muslims. They bleed together in a dog whistle technique that conjures these groups as racial threats, but then defends itself by denying that they are races at all. It’s precisely the confusion about whether these groups are races that allows extreme language to be used against them.
White Pride Rising
Trump’s stoking of racial fear toward brown and Black contributed to a rising sense among many whites that being white forms a key part of their identity. This played into a larger shift already under way among whites about how to understand who they are and how they relate to others in society. Even before Trump’s campaign, many whites were already moving toward a conscious embrace of their white identity.
This racial backsliding must be viewed against decades of progress. In the 1950s, large numbers of whites saw being white as important to their identity. Back then, being white was an obvious source of pride as well as a get-in-free pass to jobs, neighborhoods, social and civic clubs, churches, retail establishments, and so on. Knowing yourself to be white was like knowing the sky is blue on a sunny day, the sort of self-evident fact that allows you to breathe a sigh of relief: no matter what else might be happening, at least you weren’t Black.
But the civil rights movement convinced most Americans that beliefs in white superiority were morally repugnant. In the years that followed, many whites adopted the “colorblind” norm of trying not to see others or themselves in racial terms. Colorblindness has admirable liberal roots, resting on the ideal of not seeing others through racial stereotypes. That said, racial reactionaries quickly hijacked the ideal, turning it into something very different.40 Colorblindness became less an injunction to avoid stereotypes, and more a command to never directly mention race or racism. This enforced silence about race and racism has greatly impeded efforts to foster racial integration, in much the way that refusing to acknowledge a problem ensures it won’t be solved. On the Left, this version of colorblindness still limits progress.
In contrast, for the middle and on the Right, colorblindness is fading, and society may rue its demise. Whatever its perversities, even the reactionary version of colorblindness condemned consciously foregrounding racial identity as a source of pride. During the Obama years, however, many whites started shifting back toward taking pride in being white.
In three studies in 2012 and 2013, political scientist Ashley Jardina asked nationally representative samples of whites this question: “How important is being white to your identity?” Respondents could answer on a spectrum from “not at all” to “extremely.” Across all three studies, she found a consistent pattern. About a fifth said being white was not important. In contrast, three times as many, about 60 percent, said being white was at least moderately important to them, with about one-third saying being white was very or extremely important.41 She asked this question again three years later, in October and November 2016, in the heat of the election. The numbers saying being white was “very” or “extremely” important had crossed above 40 percent. More than half, 54 percent, said that “whites have a lot or a great deal to be proud of.”42
People taking polls often give different answers on socially controversial matters depending on how exposed they feel to judgment. Few people want to risk a reproving stare. Jardina had been asking her questions in face-to-face interviews. Was it possible that Jardina’s respondents were actually underreporting their commitment to white identity, worried about violating the colorblind social norm against expressing racial pride? In addition to the in-person interviews, Jardina also surveyed respondents over the internet. The results came back the same.
On one hand, the redundancy in her methods generates greater confidence in the results. On the other, the similar results are themselves an important finding: Respondents did not seem embarrassed about saying being white was very or extremely important to them. “It seems quite unlikely,” Jardina concluded, “that reporting a strong white identification feels widely inappropriate or in violation of a norm in recent years.”43 If that’s true, then what happened to colorblindness? Under the old norm, whites should have hesitated to claim that being white was important to them.
Jardina’s work has since been replicated and other social scientists are noticing significant changes in how whites think about themselves. “Trump’s success reflects the rise of ‘white identity politics,’” the social psychologists Eric Knowles and Linda Tropp report. “Our research shows that the era of ‘white invisibility’ is coming to a close.”44 Another group of social psychologists studying white identity added this prediction: “As White Americans’ numerical majority shrinks and they increasingly feel that their group’s status is threatened, White identity will become increasingly salient and central to White Americans.”45
Jardina cautions against interpreting this development as an increase in white bigotry. She explains that even though most whites say that “whites have a lot or a great deal to be proud of,” they are not expressing “a marginalized, extremist identity that is often associated with white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, and militia movements.”46 Certainly, compared to the number of whites that Jardina finds now embrace white identity, far fewer whites endorse white supremacy. “White identity politics,” Jardina concluded in 2017, is “clearly part of mainstream opinion.”47
But there remains cause for concern. Derek Black is a former white nationalist whose father founded Stormfront, one of the most popular white supremacist websites. In a conversation with NPR’s Terry Gross in 2018, he offered an insider’s view on how white supremacists see Trump. Black said they think of him as akin to George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor from the 1960s. When Wallace ran for governor the first time, he did so as a racial moderate, and lost. Then he publicly postured as a racial firebrand and won. White supremacists at the time, Black observed, viewed Wallace “as an opportunist who was using white grievance and who was speaking things that the media didn’t want him to speak.” Today, Black explained, they view “Donald Trump as a very similar person who was tapping into latent social racial opinion and using it to win campaigns”—in other words, not a true believer so much as an opportunist seizing rhetoric that works.
But, Black hastened to add, even if they see Trump as a carpetbagger, white supremacists nevertheless celebrate the mainstreaming of their ideas from the pinnacle of American power. Whatever Trump’s motive, they believe his adopting white nationalist language “could only help” their cause.48 White supremacists seek “to recruit normal people,” said Black. “The people who start a sentence by saying, ‘I’m not racist, but …’ And if they’ve said that, they’re almost there. All we have to do is get them to come a little bit further.”
They seem already on their way. Several polls asked about white supremacy in the wake of the Charlottesville white-power marches. In one poll, just 1 percent of whites said that they mostly agreed with Klan beliefs.49 That number jumped to 4 percent among those who approved of Trump. In another survey, 4 percent of whites said they held a favorable opinion of neo-Nazis. Among people who voted for Trump, the number was 7 percent. Yet another poll asked again about neo-Nazis, and found that 6 percent of Republicans viewed them favorably. Among those who strongly approved of Trump, that number doubled to 12 percent. After the Charlottesville white riot, Trump said some of the marchers were “very fine people.” His comment inspired this poll question: “Do you think it is possible for white supremacists and neo-Nazis to be ‘very fine people,’ or not?” Among whites in general, 13 percent answered yes. Among Trump voters, the number rose to 22 percent, more than one in five.50
Trump’s Connection to White Supremacy
Trump’s campaign was in free fall in August 2016. He had done little to build a campaign machine, relying instead on the Republican National Committee. “The Trump campaign,” the reporter Bob Woodward wrote, was at the time “a few people in a room—a speechwriter, and an advance team of about six people that scheduled rallies in the cheapest venues, often old, washed-out sports or hockey arenas around the country.”51 This was classic Trump, running for president on the cheap as a publicity stunt. But he had clinched the GOP nomination, and the party’s leaders and their dark money backers were in despair.
Rebekah Mercer saw a possible solution. Mercer’s father had amassed billions as the head of a hedge fund, and she and her father were major funders of the far right.52 Among their projects was Breitbart and its director, Steve Bannon. Mercer demanded a meeting with Trump. “Your campaign is in chaos,” she told him. “What do you recommend?” Trump asked. “Steve Bannon will come in,” she responded.53 This may mark the moment Trump went from encouraging white supremacists through his rhetoric to bringing them into his inner campaign and administration.
What were Bannon’s racial views? Bannon saw immigration as a major threat to the continued dominance of whites. “It’s not a migration,” Bannon said in January 2015. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.” This obscure reference is telling. Camp of the Saints is an apocalyptic novel from 1975 that describes the onslaught in Europe of sexually perverted brown and Black hordes, and that vigorously denounces white Europeans for their refusal to wage a race war for survival.54
After his conversation with Mercer, Trump welcomed Bannon on board to run his campaign.55 Bannon didn’t shrink from taking charge. “I realized,” he would say later about helming the Trump campaign, “I’m the director, he’s the actor.”56 On the day he came aboard, Bannon told Trump, “Number one, we’re going to stop mass illegal immigration and start to limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back.”57
At Breitbart, Bannon had used his position to promote the ideas of the self-styled “alt-right.” “We’re the platform for the altright,” he boasted at the 2016 Republican National Convention.58 Understanding that term clarifies the connection between white supremacy and dog whistle politics. As a term and a movement, “alt-right” seeks to exploit code to build mainstream support for racial hatred. The use of code makes it a ready companion to dog whistling.
Richard Spencer coined the “alt-right” term the summer before Obama’s 2008 election in order to sanitize hard-core white supremacy.59 Outlining the phrase’s etymology, Southern Poverty Law Center researcher Heidi Beirich reported that among those attempting to mainstream racial hatred, “it went from white supremacy to white nationalism and now from white nationalism to the alt-right or the alternative right.” By ditching “white” for “right,” Beirich explained, the term effectively wrapped white nationalism in the mantle of the larger conservative coalition.60
In his public appearances, Spencer favored clothes that were the sartorial equivalent of the alt-right’s linguistic camouflage. He often donned khakis and button-down oxford shirts, exploiting a clean-cut image to smile into the camera as the bright face of reasonable-sounding white pride.61 In reality, Spencer’s convictions were supremely racist.
Graeme Wood, a correspondent for The Atlantic, grew up with Spencer in Dallas and knew him distantly. In 2017, Wood traced Spencer’s racial thinking to time spent in Germany early in the new millennium, where Spencer encountered the notion of Volksgeist. Roughly meaning “spirit of the people,” this nineteenth-century term contends that races are marked by physical variations and, much more important, that race determines group destiny. Facial features and skin colors carry little independent importance. Rather, Volksgeist argues, visage and hue only matter because they provide a surface marker of fundamental differences in character, temperament, intellectual ability, the capacity to reason and to produce high culture—in short, all of the traits that racists believe separate civilized from savage races.
Spencer stuffed these ideas into his luggage when he returned from Germany to Texas. Back in Dallas, he was distraught by what he perceived as whites squandering their greatness. Dallas, Spencer thought, was “a class- and money-conscious place—whoever has the biggest car or the biggest house or the biggest fake boobs.… There’s no actual community or high culture or sense of greatness, outside of having a McMansion.”62
Frustrated, Spencer found a personal mission in rekindling the flame of racial glory among whites. His core proposal became what he termed “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”63 That is, Spencer advocated making the United States or major portions of it for whites only. Left unexplained was how the roughly four in ten Americans who are not white might be convinced to “peacefully” decamp.
Immediately after Trump launched his campaign in June 2015, Spencer stood up as a fan. “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” he told The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos. But he did believe that Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have—that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there,” he said. “I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon. I think he is the one person who can tap into it.”64
This was the coded white supremacy of Spencer’s alt-right that Breitbart propagated. In spreading these views, the key piece was an article from spring 2016, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” by Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos.65 Leaked emails subsequently showed that Yiannopoulos solicited early advice on arguments and sources from writers at the white supremacist sites Daily Stormer and American Renaissance; circulated drafts to them and other avowed white nationalists; and received back detailed comments and line-by-line annotations.66 Nevertheless, the guide sought to present the alt-right as disconnected from white supremacy. The guide strongly contrasted the alt-right with “old-school racist skinheads,” dissing them as “lowinformation, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred.”67 The alt-right was something different, the guide insisted.
Breitbart’s guide located the main impetus for the alt-right in people it termed “natural conservatives.” Their conservatism was “natural” insofar as it supposedly reflected instinct: “They instinctively prefer familiar societies, familiar norms, and familiar institutions,” it said. “For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe.”
The guide particularly stressed the alt-right’s opposition to nonwhite immigration. “While eschewing bigotry on a personal level,” the guide insisted, “the movement is frightened by the prospect of demographic displacement represented by immigration.” Every group, the guide claimed, rightfully seeks to promote its culture. The inevitable result, the guide warned, was conflict. “You’ll often encounter doomsday rhetoric in alt-right online communities: that’s because many of them instinctively feel that once large enough and ethnically distinct enough groups are brought together, they will inevitably come to blows.”
The alt-right, according to Breitbart, is not racist. Instead, it merely recognizes that all groups are marked by inherent cultures and destinies, that groups inevitably cross swords, and that each group must defend itself. The talk of “tribes” does much of the work here.
♦ “Tribe” shifts attention from social practices and instead invokes nature. It repositions racism as basic instinct. Every person belongs to a tribe, tribal members instinctively prefer their own, and tribes inherently war against each other.
♦ “Tribe” also flattens racial hierarchy. It erases centuries of white-over-nonwhite domination. Now whites are just one more racial-cultural group in a melee of many.
♦ “Tribe” also excuses white supremacist violence as self-defense. Because the term is associated with Native Americans and because “tribes” are responsible for inevitable conflict, the term subtly implies that racist violence begins with nonwhites and that whites merely defend themselves.
Breitbart’s guide to the alt-right said “tribe.” But “tribe” functioned as a disinfected version of Volksgeist.68
Breitbart broadcast these refurbished racist beliefs, greasing Trump’s path to the White House and marching with him into those halls. Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Harvard, studies the spread of ideas on the internet, tracing the links, Facebook posts, and retweets that push some ideas viral. Parsing the 2016 campaign, Benkler found that on the liberal side, the two primary sources for news stories were CNN and the New York Times. On the Right, it was Breitbart. Benkler’s data showed that Breitbart had three times the reach of the right-wing behemoth Fox News. Citing Benkler’s data, the investigative journalist Wil S. Hylton wrote in the New York Times, “If you wanted to know who was driving the Republican agenda in 2016, you didn’t need to look much farther” than Breitbart.69
A few weeks after the 2016 election, the National Policy Institute hosted its annual gathering. Its plain name was another cloak. In fact, Richard Spencer led the outfit. At the convention, Spencer took to the podium in a gray three-piece suit, sporting a haircut called the “fashy,” as in “fascist”—with buzzed sides, long on top and gelled back, it’s often a coiffured homage to Nazi style. The veils were dropping.70
“Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” yelled Spencer, leading the crowd in a rousing cheer. Some in the audience responded with stiff-armed Nazi salutes. “For us, it is conquer or die. This is a unique burden for the white man,” Spencer inveighed. “We were not meant to beg for moral validation from some of the most despicable creatures to ever populate the planet. We were meant to overcome—overcome all of it. Because that is natural and normal for us. Because for us, as Europeans, it is only normal again when we are great again.”71
Spencer was welding Volksgeist to Trump’s campaign slogan. His listeners cheered and saluted. And Trump embraced that philosophy in notable ways, from bringing Bannon into the White House to giving over much of his immigration policy to people with white nationalist views, like Stephen Miller.72
Indeed, riling his base in the final days leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, Trump adopted the “nationalist” label. “Really, we’re not supposed to use that word,” he told a crowd in Houston, but then proceeded to do it anyway. “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, okay? I’m a nationalist,” he crowed. “Nationalist!” As the crowd roared its approval, Trump chanted back to them, “Use that word! Use that word!” The next day in the Oval Office, reporters challenged Trump over its racist connotations. He professed ignorance. “No, I never heard that theory about being a nationalist,” he said. Then he reiterated his stance. “I am a nationalist. It’s a word that hasn’t been used too much. Some people use it, but I’m very proud. I think it should be brought back.”73
Here is one of the most important questions for the future of American democracy: What does it mean to be white in the United States today? The majority of whites already believe that being white is important. They want to know what it means for them and their children in a society that’s increasingly nonwhite. This question matters greatly to people of color as well. It helps answer which way whites are moving and how communities of color should respond.
This is the question dog whistle politics constantly puts into the minds of the majority of whites, and then answers with tales of peril and instigations of resentment.
How can the Left answer this critical question? The next chapter turns to the race-class approach toward building political power. In the context of responding to dog whistling, it offers a potential answer rooted in racial equality and cross-racial solidarity. Thus the race-class approach intentionally speaks to people of all hues, not alone nor especially to whites. Nevertheless, the race-class response does offer an answer to what it means to be white in the United States today:
To be white means to be an equal member of this society, like people of every other color, and therefore to be better off practically and morally by coming together across racial lines to demand that government and the marketplace truly work for all working families.
Let’s turn to more fully explore the race-class approach.