Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.

• Author: TerBeek, Calvin
• Position: Book review

DOG WHISTLE POLITICS: HOW CODED RACIAL APPEALS HAVE REINVENTED RACISM AND WRECKED THE MIDDLE CLASS. By Ian Haney Lopez. (1) New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. 2014. Pp. ix + 277. $24.95 (cloth).

Ian Haney Lopez's new book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, has a provocative thesis. Lopez contends that dog whistling, that is, coded racial rhetoric, "explains how politicians backed by concentrated wealth manipulate racial appeals to win elections and also to win support for regressive policies that help corporations and the super-rich, and in the process wreck the middle class" (p. xii). Lopez does not ignore other factors that led to the rise of the New Right political regime, but to him, dog whistling is first among equals (pp. 7-8, 29-30). If this thesis holds up to scrutiny, it has much explanatory purchase, not only for understanding ordinary or "low" politics, but perhaps for helping us navigate the Court's turn to racial conservatism over the past 40-plus years.

Lopez's argument is consonant with the relevant literature. "Many white Americans hold negative views of African Americans, and these racial predispositions are powerful predictors of opinions on a host of political issues." (3) Or as Rogers Smith and Desmond King put it in their elegant study: "on issue after issue involving a wide range of the most foundational structures in American life, almost all of the same actors have lined up on one side or the other of positions framed by support for or opposition to race-conscious policies designed to alleviate material racial inequalities." (4) However, when one digs down further, Lopez's argument cannot carry all the water he claims. As we will see, dog whistling has perhaps given politicians a new way to talk about race, but dog whistling has not "wrecked" the middle class. What is more, Lopez does not advance the ball in understanding the Supreme Court's latest iteration of racial conservatism. (5)

But this hardly obviates the interest with which we should engage Lopez's argument. Lopez has identified an interesting aspect of contemporary politics, and has ably told a story integral to understanding the politics of race. When one party is as racially homogenous as the modern Republican Party--eighty-eight percent of the people who voted for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney were white (p. 1)--surely race must have some explanatory factor. Moreover, as Jack Balkin recently noted, the two major political parties have not been this polarized since the Civil War. (6) Lopez has then perhaps identified one of the culprits--dog whistle racism.

The careful reader will have noticed that Lopez's explicit thesis is about politicians, but the Court plays a role in his story as well. However, Lopez's analysis of the Court is discursive. This is unfortunate. To fully vet Lopez's thesis, we need to include the Supreme Court--a political actor (high politics, yes, but a political institution nonetheless)--as a central player. That is, if we are to fully understand Lopez's claim and finger the dog whistling coming from all relevant political actors, we need to look at what the Supreme Court has been doing to support the policies of racial conservatives. As Cornell Clayton and J. Mitchell Pickerill have put it: "[r]ather than a check on majority power, the federal courts often function as arenas for extending, legitimizing, harmonizing or protecting the policy agenda of political elites or groups within the dominant governing coalition." (7)

What is more, perhaps some of the justices engage in dog whistling of a jurisprudential sort. Recall that Justice Scalia, in 2011, writing in dissent in Brown v. Plata (the California prison case) stated: "many [of the released prisoners] will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym." (8) This rhetoric was pointless to any legal issue presented in the case and was both anachronistic and largely inaccurate. (9) To give one more example: we know that President Reagan wanted to appoint anti-affirmative action judges to the federal courts such that the judiciary could carry out the "politically charged" work of ending affirmative action. (10) Thus, it is crucial to address the Supreme Court for a full examination of racial conservatism. (11)

This review essay will proceed in the following fashion: I will follow Lopez's political narrative, stopping, as he does, at each successive presidential election, but I will supplement his analysis--and, where needed, question it--with an assessment of what the Court was doing during and in between the elections in regard to race and constitutional politics. In other words, we need to analyze what I will call the color-blind jurisprudential regime (12) of the New Right--is this regime acting in concert with Republican elites to help implement racial conservatives' preferences?

Before beginning, though, let us set forth a full-fledged definition of our analytical set-piece: what is dog whistling? Lopez gives a lengthy definition of dog whistle politics complete with a fighting metaphor (pp. 3-5). The most insightful aspect of Lopez's definition is the plausible deniability it gives its users because the whistler never explicitly mentions race. But one would be hard-pressed to improve on Lee Atwater's infamous definition (which Lopez cites):

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, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.... "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger." (13) The first politician that jumps to mind when reading Atwater's quote is George Wallace. Lopez explains Wallace's electoral gambit (pp. 13-17), (14) but the story of how the modern political parties became racially identifiable (the Democrats as racial liberals and the Republicans as racial conservatives), starts in 1964, as Lopez rightly notes. Political scientists have persuasively shown this presidential election as the partisan cleavage point in the modern era of racial politics. (15)

At around this same time, "History's Warren Court" (1962-1968) was hitting its stride. As Lucas Powe argues, the Warren Court was a partner with the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations in supporting the New Deal coalition and dragging a recalcitrant South into line with national expectations regarding its treatment of largely African American criminal defendants. (16) An in-depth history of the Warren Court's criminal procedure jurisprudence is unnecessary here (it has been recounted countless times), but a reminder of its "greatest hits" is useful: Gideon v. Wainwright, (17) Escobedo v. Illinois, (18) and Miranda v. Arizona. (19) These were the cases that the liberals cheered and the conservatives blanched at. (20)

And as much as liberalism seemed ascendant in 1964, (21) not all were on board. When Chief Justice Warren was invited to speak at Georgia Tech University in 1963, "Bircher" Frank H. Benning distributed signs imploring "Help Impeach Earl Warren." (22) These were Goldwater voters. Movement conservatives in the "Draft Goldwater" camp, with an efficiency that Lenin would have admired, had systematically overtaken the levers of power in the Republican Party (23) and removed moderate Republican New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller from serious consideration on Goldwater's way to the nomination. Citing no sources, Lopez contends that Goldwater "probably harbored prejudiced views" (p. 35). The evidence suggests otherwise. Goldwater had been a member of the NAACP, helped found the National Urban League chapter in Phoenix, and was "a strong supporter of voluntary integration." (24) Indeed, when his lagging campaign created a political ad that was overtly racial, Goldwater refused to run the ad, stating: "I'm not going to be made out to be a racist. You can't show it." (25)

But if Goldwater was not a racist, some of his supporters decidedly were. (26) And, at all events, Lopez is correct that Goldwater knew full well how to blow the dog whistle: "We're not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are," Goldwater said (p. 18). Other examples in historian Michael Flamm's telling abound, including Goldwater's convention speech where he decried "the license of the mob and of the jungle." (27) The jungle, needless to say, was the urban environment. What is more, consistent with Lopez's analysis, the Goldwater camp consistently denied that any of their rhetoric was racialized in nature. (28) Goldwater also attacked the Supreme Court for its criminal procedure decisions. (29) In reaction to Escobedo, Goldwater invoked "law and order" and tied the Court to the (putatively) (30) rising crime rate. And it was none other than a young staffer named William Rehnquist who devised a "non-racial," in Goldwater's eyes, color-blind approach to the issue of integration: the right to associate (or not) (pp. 83-84). (31)

One might question, however, if Goldwater was not dog whistling so much as, to mix metaphors, preaching to the already racially conservative choir. Sociologist Katherine Beckett has shown that it was political elites, like Goldwater, who raised the issue of crime via the rhetoric of "law and order"--that is, crime was not a concern in public opinion polls when Goldwater, among others, began talking about it. (32) However, as Beckett also notes, those who said they were most concerned about crime were also much more likely to be racially conservative. (33) Moreover, dog...