Early in his career, law professor Ian Haney López was caught up in the heady debates about the intricacies of identity, power and the law. Put another way, he was the type of academic whose out-of-context quotes could easily appear in Fox News rants about critical race theory and campus PC culture.
Over time, Haney López, now at the University of California, Berkeley, has shifted his focus further and further out of theory and into practice. In 2014, he authored the book “Dog Whistle Politics,” on the coded messages used by politicians to trigger racial division without explicit racism. It was a nasty but winning strategy, Haney López concluded, and the left needed a way to respond.
So the esteemed professor got his hands dirty, surveying voters and using his findings to advocate for what he says is a desperately needed change to progressive messaging.
“The basic strategy [from the 2008 and 2020 campaigns] is, at the point where Republican administrations have damn near destroyed the country, turn around and say ‘we represent a steady hand,’” Haney López told Blue Tent. “That is enough to win national elections. It is not enough to actually change this country’s direction.”
What Haney López sees as the chief failure in Democratic messaging is the clumsy handling of those dog-whistle messages he previously studied. His most recent research suggests that the most common responses to racial attacks in politics—which, he says, are calling them out directly or ignoring them to focus on other (usually economic) issues—are both losers among voters. Ignoring the dog whistle predictability alienates those groups being targeted. But making a big show of yelling “racism,” which pushes away whites, also demeans many voters of color, who resent that they are seen inherently in conflict with white society.
Calling a wedge a wedge
Haney López’s solution is simple: Describe the dog whistles exactly as they are. They’re a cynical tool of elites, which they use to divide the working class on race and expand their own wealth and power.
“That’s the most successful, well-received political message available right now, and it’s a progressive message,” said Haney López.
Haney López’s research on effective counter-messaging came about after writing “Dog Whistle Politics,” and was done with Demos, a progressive think tank [Blue Tent founder and editor David Callahan was also one of the founders of Demos]. The think tank’s then-president, Heather McGhee, agreed that right-wing corporate power had “weaponized” racist messaging, and was likewise devoted to threading the needle on universal economic issues and anti-racism.
“Ian’s decades of scholarship on how racial conservatives had reshaped jurisprudence, combined with his deep insights into racial narratives in America, gave his perspective on racial politics a unique depth,” McGhee told Blue Tent.
In the last few years, Haney López and his team conducted wide-ranging studies presenting campaign messages on race and class to voters, testing their reactions to dog whistles and rebuttals. Haney López’s work, which tested several counter-messages, convinced him of the need to fuse the race and class narratives into an anti-elite ethos, one that could potentially neutralize divisive rhetoric while building solidarity across racial lines.
As Blue Tent’s Eoin Higgins previously reported, canvassers across the Midwest put these ideas to work in 2020 and found stunning success, helping re-establish Democrats’ “Blue Wall” in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Pragmatism with a progressive ethos
One thing Haney López wishes to make clear is that his resistance to other strategies, such as aggressive anti-racist posturing or class-first populism, is purely pragmatic. In order to make the major political changes progressives want, they have to win, and win big. In Haney López’s estimation, due to structural impediments in elections, progressives need a “durable coalition” of at least 56% to 58% of voters to get anything serious done.
“The way to win power is by organizing a multiracial coalition that leans into being multiracial, recognizing the biggest threat we face is intentional division, and the pragmatic way forward is building social solidarity,” Haney López said. “This is a winning strategy whether you’re focusing on communities of color or on white voters, whether you’re focused on working-class voters or middle- or upper-class voters.”
Haney López isn’t afraid to criticize even progressive and far-left voices he otherwise agrees with, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom he saw as first ignoring racism in 2016, then struggling to juggle race and class as separate issues in 2020.
“Talking about them separately doesn’t work, and two arguments that don’t work don’t get better when you combine them. This is a different sort of argument. This is an argument that says ‘racism hurts all of us, and the main culprit behind racism are powerful elites who encourage division, so that we’ll fight our neighbors rather than realize that these elites are laughing all the way to the bank,’” said Haney López.
He also emphasized that his pragmatic approach is not a cover for some deeper policy disagreement with the left.
“Too often, people are pretending that they’re pragmatists who are simply having a conversation about what you need to do to win, when in fact, they’re taking a substantive position saying ‘I,’ comfortable with the status quo,’” said Haney López.
Who are the fake pragmatists? Haney López named the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, along with the Democratic members of Congress who blamed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the party’s down-ballot losses in 2020.
A different vision for anti-racism
Having put in the work, Haney López now wants to spread the word and get others in the progressive world to adopt his tactics. That’s why he launched Race-Class Academy, a resource for unions, campaigns and others to learn the ropes of his strategy, with YouTube videos and discussion guides detailing the history of dog-whistle politics, how those messages work, and his solutions for countering them.
Haney López offers a refreshing throwback to the golden era of civil rights, a sharp diversion from the intellectualized, corporate-friendly anti-racism that blanketed social media and bestseller lists this summer. Race-Class Academy eschews the granularity of individual guilt and privilege to advocate for something bigger: namely, building solidarity across racial lines. In further contrast to his contemporaries, Haney López’s lectures and guides are all mercifully concise and free to read or watch.
Finding space in a divided Democratic Party
Though Haney López’s research points to a potentially better path, it may run up against serious challenges in the Biden years. Biden, after all, embraced dog-whistle politics and policy at times, from his virulent anti-busing rhetoric early in his career, to his stewardship of punitive crime legislation that exacerbated policies that harm minorities in the 1990s. Now rebranding as a civil rights defender who defeated America’s most prominent racist, Biden is hardly following Haney López’s advice. Likewise, Haney López’s dream of a multi-racial working class coalition must contend with a Democratic Party that still cashes massive checks from Wall Street and Silicon Valley while increasingly focusing its messaging on college-educated voters.
“There’s nothing especially radical about this argument,” said Haney López. “Government and the marketplace should work for the vast majority of Americans, and not for the one-tenth of one percent, the big corporations and the wealthy family dynasties. That should be, and was, for decades, perfect common sense, and frankly, entirely consistent with regulated capitalism.”
But what Haney López is describing is more than a new campaign slogan for Democrats; it’s an entirely new form of politics, one that not only acknowledges class divisions, but promises war.
Such a message could be poison to many of the affluent Democratic centrists whose money and political influence lifted Joe Biden to victory in the 2020 Democratic primaries. Many of those supporters coalesced against Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren explicitly to prevent the kind of economic populism Haney López advocates. But he believes his message will have strong appeal, even if it's not precisely what rich cosmopolitans and suburbanites want to hear.
“Do you want to live in a society governed by an ethos of mutual care, and mutual engagement, and curiosity and celebration?” asked Haney López. “Or do you want to raise your children in a society defined by fear, distrust and violence?”
“I think there’s a lot of middle-class and upper-middle-class families who would leap at the chance to have that kind of society if they were confident it was also a good way to be secure financially.”
