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Monday, January 7, 2019

Dog-whistle Racism

(University of California, Berkeley) law professor and author of the 2014 book Dog Whistle Politics Ian Haney-López ... argues that such rhetoric pushes middle-class white Americans to vote against their economic self-interest in order to punish "undeserving minorities" who, they believe, are receiving too much public assistance at their expense. According to López, conservative middle-class whites, convinced by powerful economic interests that minorities are the enemy, supported politicians who promised to curb illegal immigration and crack down on crime but inadvertently also voted for policies that favor the extremely rich, such as slashing taxes for top income brackets, giving corporations more regulatory control over industry and financial markets, union busting, cutting pensions for future public employees, reducing funding for public schools, and retrenching the social welfare state. He argues that these same voters cannot link rising inequality which has impacted their lives to the policy agendas they support.    -Wikipedia

Got that? We would all be rich if we looked the other way on illegal immigration, crime, higher taxes, more regulation, everybody paid union dues, we paid more for public schools, we allowed all public employees to have 1950s style defined benefit pensions and if we all got behind the social welfare state.

Occasional-Cortex used this term, "dog-whistle racism" in an interview. The beauty of the phrase is that it IS a political dog-whistle. It if fraught with meaning for those who support Occasional-Cortex and blows right by normal people.

1 comment:

  1. I chuckle every time you use the Occasional-Cortex aphorism.

    ReplyDelete

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