Dog Whistle Politics

Initially published in 2013, Ian Haney-L�pez's Dog Whistle Politics offered a sweeping account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that favor the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests. As he showed, such appeals
generate middle-class enthusiasm for political candidates who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration, and protect against Islamic infiltration, but ultimately vote in favor of corporations and the rich. Rejecting any simple story of malevolent and obvious racism, Haney-L�pez
linked the two central themes that dominate American politics today: the decline of the middle class and the Republican Party's increasing reliance on white voters.

The book proved to be remarkably prescient. Donald Trump's 2016 campaign was built almost entirely around dog whistle politics, and he won the presidency because of it. This new edition of Dog Whistle Politics updates the book by a substantial new chapter on Trump that examines his appeal and places
his campaign in the historical context that the first edition of Dog Whistle Politics so perceptively uncovered.


"This is one of those books that should be required reading for anyone and everyone who is struggling to understand how and why political elites succeed, time and again, in persuading poor and working class whites to support regressive policies that are a boon for corporations but actually harm them
and wreck the middle class. The answer to the riddle has far more to do with race than most want to acknowledge. But it isn't old-fashioned, malevolent racism that's to blame. No, as Haney L�pez brilliantly and painstakingly lays bare, what is unraveling our nation is not bad people, but a stubborn
refusal to deal openly and honestly with the reality of how race operates today." --Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

"Read this book to understand how dog whistle politics enables the wealth gap to stay the same and even to get worse not just for blacks or other people of color but for the white working class as well. As Haney L�pez demonstrates, the vocabulary of race has changed. Nonetheless, race is still
skillfully used to distract our attention from ongoing and pernicious disparities in economic opportunities." --Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor, Harvard Law School, and author of The Miner's Canary

"A brilliant guide to modern politics, for anyone who wants to understand how outright racist appeals morphed into the genteel rhetoric of 'states rights' and from there into today's 'defund Obamacare' -- and why Democrats too often collude in rather than repudiate dog whistle politics." --Joan
Walsh, Salon.com and MSNBC, and author of What's the Matter With White People

"Grounded in history rather than theory, this is recommended to readers engaged in today's political discourse." --Library Journal