This video clip recalls how Ronald Reagan – “the great communicator” – used racial tensions.
In this interview with Bill Moyers, Ian Haney López discusses how Ronald Reagan used “racial tensions to sway middle-class white Americans to vote for policies not in their self-interest.”
As reported by Moyers & Co., “In Dog Whistle Politics, author and legal scholar Ian Haney López describes how politicians use subtle, racially coded messages — “dog whistles” — to manipulate Americans in the voting booth.”
Haney López uses the example of Reagan telling a story on the campaign trail in 1976 as a means of demonstrating this method, going on to explain Reagan was able to successfully use racial stereotypes to convince middle-class whites to vote against self-interest through supporting “economic policies that helped corporations and the wealthy.”
He goes on to explain to Moyers:
“Over the 1980s, the Reagan tax cuts transferred a trillion dollars to America’s top one percent. Yes, voters got the tax cuts they thought were aimed at cutting off undeserving minorities, but, in fact, it was a politics that was showering money on the very richest Americans.”
“We used to understand that the biggest threat in political life was the power of concentrated money… but now, Republicans for fifty years have been telling voters the biggest threat in your life is minorities are going to hijack government.”
You can watch the clip, below:
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