‘A cynical ploy to hold power': how the US right has exploited racial division

The Guardian

4 days ago

In the year 1968, a group of housewives in Dearborn, Michigan, then a nearly all-white suburb of Detroit, gathered for a workshop on how to shoot a gun. The women at the pistol range, mostly late-middle age and grandmotherly, were reacting to rhetoric from Richard Nixon's presidential campaign, which fixated on a so-called crime wave. They were scared, defensive, willing to pick up a gun as a guard against what Nixon called 'cities enveloped in smoke and flame'.
The neighboring city of Detroit was 40% Black, and the 'crime' supposedly overtaking US cities meant, in this context, Black people, and white suburbia's racist fear of them. Nixon knew this, though he didn't say it outright – 'You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to,' he once said, as quoted in the opening minutes of White with Fear, a new documentary on decades of Republican political strategy to stoke and manipulate white racial resentment.
As White with Fear immediately makes clear with footage of the old ladies with their pistols braided into clips of contemporary Republican 'migrant crime' soundbites, the political tradition of dog-whistling white fear remains strong. The only difference between Dearborn housewives with, as a 1968 newscaster put it, 'suburbia's new tranquilizer', and the viral photo of a white Missouri couple pointing an AR-15 at Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, is the quality of the footage and the openness of the hostility.
That couple, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, went on to speak at the 2020 Republican national convention and folded easily in Donald Trump's 'Make America great again' (Maga) movement, which harnessed and turbocharged the 'white fear industrial complex', as CNN host Brian Stelter put it in the film. Over 90 minutes, White with Fear traces the development and success of said complex post 1968, when Nixon rode the so-called 'southern strategy' – subtly endorsing racial segregation, discrimination and resentment to court erstwhile white voters in the South – to the White House. Nixon's approach demonstrated that 'when you appeal to whites on the basis of race, they will go all the way to changing their political party,' said Andrew Goldberg, the film's director. 'Nixon takes this slightly used strategy and puts it on steroids and makes it national policy.'
And it stayed national policy, at least as a conditional strategy of the right and propellant of the ongoing culture wars. White with Fear outlines numerous waves of the white fear industrial complex, such as anti-bussing actions in the 1970s, the popularity and endurance of Fox News, the post-September 11 anti-Muslim agenda, the Obama birtherism conspiracies first propagated by the US president, all the way through to the current Maga movement built on 55 years of Republican dog-whistling.
'Back in the 60s and 70s, they'd say: 'I'm not talking about Blacks, I'm talking about bussing,'' said Goldberg. 'Now you would say: 'I'm not talking about Chinese people, I'm talking about Covid.'' (Trump, of course, called the virus 'kung flu' as president.) 'Or: 'I'm not talking about Muslims, I'm talking about terrorism.' But after we've used those phrases so much, who comes to mind?'
'These are words that are silent about race. And yet, when you say the word 'thug', who do you think about?' he added. For most white Americans, there's an association with the color of one's skin. 'And that's the nature of how these words are dangerous.'
The film differentiates between the emotions provoked in white constituents, and the cynical political thinking that sees such emotions as a way to win elections. 'From a strategic point of view, there's a certain intelligence to how they approach this, and it's very successful,' said Goldberg. Steve Bannon, a chief architect of Trump's anti-immigrant campaign strategy, appears in the film to confirm an approach based around the idea of appealing to white voters scared of outsiders and alienated by the Democratic party. 'They're so willing to talk about it,' said a bemused Goldberg. 'They don't blur the actions, as if they're trying to make it sound less or more virtuous or not. Bannon just loves to tell you what he does.'
Goldberg spoke to several former or current Republican operatives who attest to numerous examples of politicians knowingly stoking racial resentment, including former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh; Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesperson for the Oath Keepers who defected and warned against the rising risks of rightwing militant groups; and former Fox News host Carl Cameron. 'We really tried to avoid having a collection of Democratic pundits pointing their finger and making accusations of Republicans,' said Goldberg. 'It was so important to us to have as many first-person sources who told us what they did. Or if there was an opinion to be cast on a situation, we wanted to get a Republican, or at least a former Republican, to tell us that story.'
The stories are indicative of a line of political thinking that has only grown more dominant and cynical. Tim Miller, a former Republican National Committee spokesperson who was one of the early GOP critics of Trump in 2016, remembers how Republican campaign mailers in 2008 referred to the Democratic candidate as 'Barack Hussein Obama' because 'Hussein' drove engagement among older white voters. McHugh recalls working directly with Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of policy and arguably the most racist and extremist of his advisers, while a writer at Breitbart. A political consultant expresses no moral qualm with dog-whistling, as the job of a political consultant is to attract as many votes as possible, motivation irrelevant. At one point, Goldberg asks Sam Nunberg, a 2016 Trump campaign staffer, why Trump doesn't do normal Republican talking points like small government and lower taxes. He responds: 'Because that shit is boring and we're not going to win! Straight up policy? That's Mitt Romney, and we're not winning.'
What is winning, at least at the moment, is outright racial baiting – decrying 'migrant crime' that doesn't exist, claiming that immigrants who are in fact reviving US cities are instead 'destroying' them, fanning flames that critical race theory is hurting children, in the latest mutation of fear-based rhetoric that has converted more suburban mothers into rightwing political activists via Moms for Liberty. Even Hillary Clinton, who appears briefly to comment on the rise of Trumpism, concedes that 'it's brilliant' to stoke fears that books with diverse characters could threaten the safety of white children.
Some do believe it; many others know better. 'The amount of planning and strategy that goes into all these actions are designed to keep the base engaged,' Goldberg noted. 'When you win elections, you hold power. This is all a cynical ploy to hold power.'
White with Fear is available to rent digitally in the US on 3 June with a UK date to be announced