NBC News (Opinion)
By Stephen A. Nuno
July 23, 2015
Malcom
X would often say, "Racism is like a Cadillac, they bring out a new
model every year." However, for many Mexican-Americans and to many other
Latinos, the Cadillac
Donald Trump has ridden all the way down to the border in Laredo, Texas
is the same old jalopy Republicans have been driving for decades now.
Over
the years, the GOP has been able to stay ahead of what is allowed in
civil conversation by appealing to what author and legal scholar Ian
Haney López calls "dog whistle
politics," coded language that packages old racial sensibilities into
an acceptable set of ideals and policies.
"They
bring in drugs. they bring in crime. They're rapists, and some, I
assume, are good people," said Trump about primarily Mexican immigrants
who have crossed the U.S.
border illegally.
Note that Trump cannot state for a fact there may be any "good people" crossing our Southern border.
"[Trump]
avoids racial epithets and direct references to race, preferring to
talk of immigration, nationality, and criminal behavior; these are,
though, coded terms,"
says López. "In fact, his basic message is a racial one: this is a
white country, under threat from invading minorities."
In other words, Donald Trump is simply the newest in a long line of pied pipers playing dog whistle politics.
On Wednesday GOP presidential hopeful and former Texas governor Rick Perry called Trump's candidacy "a cancer on conservatism."
But
this cancer has been metastasizing and in some ways, Donald Trump is a
convenience. Trump's brashness certainly straddles the limits of
acceptability and is a convenient
foil that the GOP can use to distract voters from its history.
The
Donald's race-based appeal has been known as the "Southern Strategy," a
set of tactics that Ronald Reagan's deputy director, Lee Atwater, once
came clean on in his
infamous interview on how Republicans can win the vote of racists
without sounding explicitly racist:
"You
start out in 1954 by saying, "N***r, n***r, n***r." By 1968 you can't
say "n***r"— that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh,
forced busing, states' rights,
and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract," said Atwater.
"Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're
talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is,
blacks get hurt worse than whites … 'We want to cut
this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell
of a lot more abstract than "N***r, n***r."
Two
RNC Chairmen, Ken Mehlman and Michael Steele, have since acknowledged
that the Southern Strategy has been an underlying approach within the
GOP since Richard Nixon.
After
Romney's stark 2012 loss, current RNC chair Reince Preibus has been
pleading to anyone in the GOP who will listen that the party's continued
reliance on language
that offends minorities is not a sustainable strategy in the face of a
country whose demographics are changing so rapidly.
But
those appeals go unheard among candidates like Trump, who know they can
appeal to a subset of voters who will choose not to support facts over a
worldview of "us against
them."
Immigration
and the border are legitimate political issues, and there is ample
debate - even within the Hispanic community - on these topics. But
Trump's focus on the
scourge of border crossers is flat-out wrong on the facts.
A
new report released by Pew Research finds that the unauthorized
immigrant population has effectively been zero for the last five years.
"The number of new unauthorized
immigrants is roughly equal to the number who are deported, leave the
U.S. on their own, convert to legal status, or (in a small number of
cases) die," according to the Pew Research analysis.
Despite this, Trump and his own band of brothers don't let the facts get in the way.
For
now Trump is dominating the headlines. But while this language clearly
has its appeal, can it continue to sustain a Republican candidate
throughout a primary election?
Efrén Pérez, assistant professor of political science at Vanderbilt
University who studies how racial bias drives political behavior,
believes the "Trump bump" in the polls is a temporary phenomenon that
will eventually flame out.
Though
Trump is currently riding high on the dog-whistle jalopy, "he's going
to run out of material," says Pérez. "People want to know what kind of
vision he is going
to offer for the future."
But
as the GOP struggles to manage the latest Trump temper tantrum catering
to a withering base, one wonders how the party recuperates from The
Donald in time for 2016.
Al
Cardenas, former head of the American Conservative Union, said "Our
party needs to realize that it's too old and too white and too male and
it needs to figure out how
to catch up with the demographics of the country before it's too late".
It may not be too late, but if late looks like anything, it probably looks like Donald Trump.
Folks
like Cardenas have been hoping to trade in yesterday's Cadillac for
something entirely new. Despite claims that Marco Rubio symbolizes the
future of the party or
that Jeb Bush represents the sensible middle of the GOP, these leaders
seem content to be waiting in the wings for the Trump jalopy to run out
of gas. That's not exactly the bold leadership either promised when they
announced their candidacy for president.
Rubio
and Bush might want to keep two things in mind. It's not just Latinos -
including Republican Latinos - who are turned off by dog whistle racial
politics. There are
Republican primary voters disgusted by Trump's tactics.
But there's another reason to out Trump. For the party and for the country, it's the right thing to do.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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