How Republicans have made a science out of white working-class resentment [View all]

[sufrommich]

But let’s not kid ourselves about what the term most commonly means in our current political discourse. When a conservative derides “identity politics” he’s saying that white people are getting the short end of the stick. It’s not an academic critique or even more anodyne call for melting-pot solidarity. It’s racist coding, plain and simple. Even if “identity politics” is open for interpretation, there is no mistaking the meaning of Dog-whistle politics:

Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. The phrase is used only as a pejorative, because of the inherently deceptive nature of the practice and because the dog-whistle messages are frequently themselves distasteful, for example by empathising with racist or revolutionary attitudes. The analogy is to a dog whistle, whose high-frequency whistle is heard by dogs but inaudible to humans.

That conservatives use “identity politics” as a dogwhistle is not well understood by the mainstream media. Or, if they do understand it, they ignore it. Here is a perfect example from a story this past Friday in the New York Times about Marco Rubio:

“The identity politics people in the party want a champion who looks like him to mitigate accusations of racism,” said Ben Domenech, a conservative writer. “And the classical conservatives look at him and say, ‘This is somebody who can sell our ideas to the public.’ ”


http://www.salon.com/2015/05/11/how_republicans_have_made_a_science_out_of_white_working_class_resentment/