Ian Haney Lopez

2 months ago

Key Merge Left insights

*Intentional racial division is the principal weapon in the class war the rich have been winning since Reagan.

Today's massive wealth inequality reflects rule by and for the rich. But how did this happen? More particularly, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory when he promised to transform the New Deal into a War on Poverty. What changed between then and Reagan's victory in 1982, when he promised to break unions, shred the social safety net, and enact tax cuts for corporations? More than anything else, the party of corporate America used racial stories about crime and welfare queens to turn people against each other and against progressive government as well.

*Universal programs to redistribute wealth downward and outward require social solidarity--and social solidarity has been purposefully destroyed and must be purposefully rebuilt.

The Mercers funded Breibart and Bannon. The Kochs funded the Tea Party. The Trumps promote racist beliefs. They know that breaking social solidarity is the key to maintaining rule by the rich. When will the left recognize that fostering social solidarity is the key to making sure government works for working people?

*Building social solidarity must be race-conscious rather than colorblind.

The left understands that any progressive movement must be multiracial. But it often tries to build unity by suppressing attention to what divides us, including especially racial issues. This approach inevitably fails. No team wins by leaving the opposing team's best player unguarded. For the right, their best player is racism. And no team wins by benching its own star players. For the left, people of color provide tremendous energy, but feel demoralized and marginalized by a strategy that urges unity through colorblind silence about racism. If you want to build a vigorous multiracial movement, it must be race-conscious.

*We need a paradigm change in how we talk about racism. We must move from seeing racism as fundamentally a conflict between whites and people of color, to fighting it as a weapon of the rich against all of us.

A race-conscious approach risks alienating whites if it presents them as the enemy. In contrast, talking about racism as a class weapon creates space for whites to see themselves as valued allies in a multiracial movement and a multiracial future.

This paradigm change also resonates powerfully with people of color. Communities of color feel overwhelmed by racism. And they're dubious of any claim that whites (or white politicians) will fight for them out of the goodness of their hearts. Talking about racism as a class weapon gives people of color confidence that whites will struggle alongside them as powerful allies, precisely because whites have their own interests in joining and building this multiracial movement and future.

*You cannot understand America--its past, its present, its potential future--without seeing how capitalism and racism are completely fused.

This was true in the decades after 1619 when the planter class invented "white" and "black," and it's true of neoliberalism today. The left must merge its fights against racism and capitalism because these are completely fused, mutually reinforcing forces. Neither can be defeated by organizing against one at a time.

*The true revolution rests on America overcoming racial division in order to actually build government by and for the people--all of the people.

Economic populism alone will fail. Indeed, it already has. We had economic populism, from the New Deal to the War on Poverty. It was destroyed by strategic appeals to racist fears and resentments. Economic populism can succeed only by fighting for racial solidarity and economic populism together and with equal fervor.

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These bullet points come across as sloganeering, as any quick summary must. But they are backed by a deep historical analysis, as laid out in my book "Dog Whistle Politics." And the power of this merged race-class approach has been demonstrated in a national research project I co-founded and ran with communication specialists, pollsters, union activists, and racial justice leaders, as explained in "Merge Left." ... See MoreSee Less