 From the conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vanitha Srivastava. The fact that the Republicans understand they can no longer win elections with a white suburban homogenous social base and that they need to start figuring out where other political energies would come from. And the fact that they're going to folks who actually do feel either ambivalent, distrustful about larger systems means they're also recognizing that we're at a moment of widespread uncertainty about what the future holds. If the Republicans can say we can marry a deeply nativist policy agenda to the expansion of Latino voters, it shows things are possible in politics. And in that sense, there is a lesson there about the need to really think in bold new ways about how political appeals and voters are mobilized. Did you watch the U.S. primary debate last week? There were seven candidates, including three candidates of color. And I have to tell you, as a U.S. citizen of South Asian descent, it was shocking to see them as intensely invested in the messages of the alt-right as any white politician. It was hard to watch. And it left me wondering, why are we seeing so many brown and black people supporting the far right with its white supremacist ideas that would seem to work against them? This is a question Daniel Martinez-Hosang has been exploring for a long time. He's a professor of ethnicity, race and migration and American studies at Yale University with a background in community organizing. He's also the co-author of this amazing book. It's called Producers, Parasites, Patriots, Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity. And we're so lucky he is with us today to discuss what he calls the politics of multicultural white supremacy. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks. I'm really happy to be here and for the invitation and looking forward to this conversation. Last week's Republican primary debate included a number of candidates of color, namely there are Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Vivek Ramaswamy, all vying to be presidential candidates. And given that 70% of Republicans believe in the replacement theory, which is the false belief that there's a secret cabal of elites pushing to import immigrants and people of color to, quote, replace the white populations in the United States, can you explain what's going on here? Like, why are we seeing an increase of racialized Republican candidates right now? And why would they sign up? It just seems counterintuitive to me. It's a very tricky thing to get our heads around collectively. It's something that's unfolding as we're speaking. The paradox seems to be this, that after the 2016 election, the deeply nativist and racialized sentiments, but also movements that were activated by it, I think for many observers, the last thing they would have expected is actually to see the Republican party both attract more voters of color and continue to increase their ranks among elected officials of more and more, especially black and Latino candidates, including some very successful ones. We've called this some version of multicultural white supremacy, and they seem like they can't quite go together. It might help to back up just a little bit to think about how the parties have approached race in the last few decades, leading up to the early 1960s, and especially the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Republicans often and quite enthusiastically competed for the votes of especially black voters. The Democratic Party was the party of white supremacy, the party of the South. And historically, the Republican Party was aligned with at least the abolition of slavery. Gradually starts to shift as the Republicans become more focused on business, the Democrats become more aligned with labor and sections in the North start to and more actively recruit black voters. But this is important because by the late 1960s, after Lyndon Johnson wins the 1964 election on the land side, there's a set of Republican strategists that say, you know what, not only should we not compete for black votes, we should actually frame our appeals in such a way as to say, the Democrats are the party of black voters. In fact, their strategy members mentioned this very explicitly. And this build on a longstanding white supremacist assumption, which is that if a party or a candidate or a set of policies is broadly understood by white Americans as being in the interest of black people, then it's inherently against their interest. So they say, let's make the Democrats the party of black people and we'll recruit all of these other white people. Now that's quite familiar as a kind of like how Republicans might position themselves. But at the time, it was deeply contentious because there were many today they'd be called moderate Republicans who thought, why would we do that? Why would we not make these broad appeals? But eventually that wins over and we get the silent majority of Nixon, the so-called Southern strategy that really seeks to realign those white voters. Can you explain that, the silent majority of Nixon? So the silent majority is the idea that in the 60s with the wave of civil rights, feminist, broad social movements. And so the silent majority was meant to capture the kind of white, coded as working class who didn't cause all this trouble, weren't marketing the streets, they were just working hard, paying their taxes and watching their country slip away. And you can see there's many resonances between that account and political rhetoric today. Yeah, it's like being picked up again. Yes, yeah. There's of course many people who thought of themselves as white who were deeply aligned with civil rights. But the idea that the Republicans were going to build their base and win national elections almost entirely on white votes is something that's relatively recent. It's really the 1960s and 1970s. Now by the time Ronald Reagan gets elected in 1980, it's the strategy. And all these Republican issues during that time, taxes, public safety, investments in schools, they're all can be coded for the Republican standing up in the interests for white voters. And I think what's shifted since that time is, in some ways, the incorporation of civil rights and multicultural rhetoric. So if you look at ads from the 1960s, all of the actors featured in them, they're all white, and the kind of mythical consumer base is white. Mass advertising is shifted completely, right? Our codes and cultural codes and vision of who constitutes the public are not the same as the Democrats have embraced multiculturalism as corporate America has all the consumer brands. It's not surprising that if you're a national entity trying to compete for relevance and popular support, you have to have some strategy to be able to kind of work and participate within that framework. In your book, you talk about this idea of a cultural appropriation in a way that a white based Republican Party embraced black culture or indigenous culture. Yeah. And I would just say it happened across really the political spectrum and even the culture itself. So it's not appropriation, the sense of claiming it as your own. Right. So what they want to do is legitimate, look, we're not opposed to this. We're actually on the side of progress as well. Yes, right. But without the much more far reaching forms of redistribution, recognition, the sharing of power and democracy, et cetera. So that absolutely sets the stage up for that for what we're seeing now. So you're talking about the 60s, the 70s, the silent majority. How different would you say the current Republican Party is from the Republican Party of the past? It does feel like it's a lot more right leaning. I would absolutely say that. I mean, you know, even we're at the point where a figure like Reagan would in today's politics would seem probably like a moderate who would get laughed off the stage. Totally. And just the idea that we're going to stand up for some kind of fiscal austerity and control, a kind of conservative social values, I don't think would follow the current Republican script of trying to speak to and harness a certain kind of skepticism and cynicism disillusionment with all of these institutions. Reagan, even Bush, these were largely institutional figures. They might want to shrink government, but they would still stand by the role of government and international diplomacy and the markets. That those positions are far more ambivalent about them today than they are then. Even as the party is demographically nominally more diverse than it was 30 or 40 years ago. I know you heard me use the term alt-right. Is it okay to say that? Like that I feel like the Republican Party has swung to the alt-right, if that's... Yeah, not only that, there used to be a time when you could talk about kind of establishment Republicans as distinct from, let's say, Trump's populism, the kind of alt-right of groups like the Proud Boys. I think partly what we saw at the debate is the full-on integration of the two, so that the figures who are trying to make these kind of like faint and totally ineffective calls to return to a more modest and appropriate Republican Party have just been shown the door. We can see some of them, there was John McCain, it's Mitt Romney, it's other figures like that. They're not really relevant to the kind of energy and vision of the Republicans today. Republicans today, like what is their strategy when it comes to racialized candidates? Is there a broad strategy here? Yeah, I think there's not a single strategy. In the past, scholars who interviewed Black Republicans would really talk about all of just the rank racism they had to negotiate in the day-to-day. Party leaders thought we don't need you, we'll tolerate your presence, you have no real role. I'm not suggesting that doesn't exist, but there is some sense. Someone like Tim Scott, born and raised in South Carolina, narrates his own life as a single-parent household, mired in poverty. Not a lot of formal education. By the time I was in the fourth grade, I went to four different elementary schools. As a freshman in high school, I filled four subjects. Gets a mentor who works in Chick-fil-A franchise, works, works, works, and says, look, I'm not a colorblind conservative. I'm not saying there's no such thing as racism. He will talk about it in relationship to police. His own experience is a Black man. The issue of discrimination that I have faced is an issue of the heart. He'll say, I also know and believe that it's through the market and entrepreneurialism and saving, not the government, that's going to provide the best possibilities for Black communities and for the country as a whole. So the candidates are not colorblind, basically. Like Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, they openly discussed, like you say, the racial issues. They embraced their racial identities. I was elected the first female minority governor in history. America's not racist or blessed. But at the same time, they do appeal to conservative white voters. So how do you think they've managed to navigate this without alienating their electoral base? Yeah, sometimes it's tricky for sure. And there's not like one strategy that can let you do both. As you say, they're constantly referencing the specificity of their own background. And I'll also say that in and of itself doesn't drive voters away. So if you look at gatherings at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, when they have panels of Black conservatives, they will often get from the all-white audience the biggest and most enthusiastic cheers. And it's almost like they're standing in for the exemplar of a kind of pure unadulterated conservatism. So someone like Mitt Romney, who has a long family background in politics, he himself came out of Bain Capital Consulting. In 2012, he famously talked about the makers and the takers, the 47% who make that in this moment of like profound inequality. And that's just not a persuasive message. Tim Scott's account of coming up Black and poor in the South is a much more powerful testament to the kind of impact and possibility of the free market. And so he is both the exemplar and the protector of it is, I think, really resonates with many white voters. And if you look, he's deeply popular. He's much more popular in South Carolina than Lindsey Graham, the other Republican senator. And it's not among Black voters. These white voters adore Tim Scott, or many of them do, because he seems to exemplify these traits. And certainly offers a pass that any of the kind of racialized history in the country is not their concern as such. You mentioned a poll that was taken that showed white conservatives are open to voting for candidates of color, even over white ones. And I guess that's what you're saying is this is like an explanation of that poll in a way. The other thing is if we think about racism, racial domination as just about bigotry and phobia or dislike, what we're missing there, it's not just that. It's also tied to a whole set of politics, right? Politics around the nation, around who belongs, who contributes, around the inevitability of certain kinds of hierarchy, winners and losers, ideas about gender, et cetera. So sometimes that just gets dropped out and we imagine that the racism of the right is just about like and dislike. And if we saw a version of that, I would say the closest is Charlottesville in 2017, the so-called take back the right march. That's where you're getting Richard Spencer, these figures who would say something like we envision a white homeland. There's a long history of that in this country, but that is not gonna, at this moment in 2023, be a majoritarian strategy. That's just not gonna win, it's not gonna win elections. It's not gonna gain influence. It's not gonna allow them to tap into the insurgent kind of energy. So many folks on the right, when that happens, said this is not the way to go. And are they saying this can't be our message because strictly because of numbers, because they need voters? That's part of it, the kind of insurgency, right? Having Tim Scott as the leadership in the party also signals that you are not just the defenders of a crumbling and unequal status quo, but you're the insurgent party of change. That's partly how blackness gets interpreted, right? As being on the outside looking in. And they desperately, that is the kind of calling card of the all itself is it's not associated with defending institutions, but being in opposition to them, institutions of all kind. You can't do that while making claims to be speaking solely in the voice of whiteness. From a tactical and strategic perspective, they absolutely need it. I also think that there's ways and people who have done more like ethnographic work, their orientation isn't just walking around spitting phobic things about who they'll tolerate and who they won't. So they make distinctions, and this is a longstanding thing between kind of like good and bad, right? Good and bad immigrants, good and bad black people and good and bad white people. So for them, there's whites that understand the true exceptional nature of the nation, understand it has to be protected, understand the families, the cornerstone of that, and rise to that occasion obligation. And there's those willing to sell it all down the river. So it's not just about what we would call identity, but it's also about how they distinguish what they stand for. So Republican party base clearly is not just white voters. One in five black men voted for Trump, for example. You've also talked about going to Trump make America great rallies back in the early days in 2016. Can you tell us about some of what you saw there? This is also in the Pacific Northwest, although I would say this is true for Trump rallies everywhere. You were in Oregon, right? Yes, this was in Oregon, yes. The crowd is largely, we could say, overwhelmingly white, although that was also true for many of the Democratic candidates that came through as well, like our politics are segregated like many other aspects of life in the US. I think what we are struck by in writing this book and talking to folks on the right is the declining significance of actual policies. So if you ask folks in the alt, what's bringing you here? What do you stand for? They don't have, I really want to lower taxes. I want to increase military defense. I want to fight for school vouchers, post-teachers unions. It's a much broader mishmash. They might have a critique of big pharma. They might also talk about the carceral system. So it's much more about a kind of locating yourself in relationship to what they would describe as the kind of collapsing state and society. That's partly what when, what we were really struck by at the Trump rally is the talking points that get the cheers aren't like a good policy that people are really excited about. Even the build the wall, it's like a theatrical thing, right? Where you just get to ritually participate in some kind of act of dissension. No one is then asking, can I see the plans for the wall? What's the funding mechanism you have in mind? How might this work with a new version of ICE? People are not interested in the policy. They're interested in that sense of like, when Trump kept saying we're being humiliated, we're being humiliated as a nation, we're humiliated as people. Some of that, I think maps on to the sense of white humiliation and white loss, but not all of it. I think other people have inroads. And at the time, remember, you had Hillary Clinton saying, our best days are ahead of us. We have the spirit to do that. And Trump was in some ways narrating a more honest account of people's sense of the decline of their own lives, the nation, the future, et cetera. And I think that's what we really noticed was being mobilized there. I think you maybe said Martin Luther King or maybe it was James Baldwin. The house is on fire, basically. Yes. Yeah, no, that's right. And that's partly the insurgency as well, right? Like I'm calling it like I see it. I'm not gonna pull any punches. I'm gonna be honest. And that kind of like very visceral response to that. You mentioned the wall and I just, this is the thing that sort of really confounds me. Like this idea of this multiracial party supporting the idea of building a wall. So building a wall to me is like everybody else out and that to me signals white Americans in. Part of how I understand it. First of all is there's long traditions of nativism in the U.S. that continue to make those distinctions between the kind of good and the bad. When you can say it's not about the group, it's about your characteristics, then it kind of satisfies that nominal notion of fairness. So you'll see now, even in South Texas, Latino candidates, Mexican American candidates are running and saying something like this. I followed the rules, right? I stood in line, I worked hard. I believe in rules, I believe in order. And the chaos at the border doesn't know on any good. The wall helps to impose order and rewards people who follow the rules. Nothing about this is bigoted or prejudice. They might also say my partner's in the border patrol. I understand that they're on the front lines, protecting our freedoms, protecting our nation. That's why they deserve our unqualified support and they need the resources to enforce it. Or I'm outraged by the conduct of the cartels and traffickers who are abusing and smuggling migrants across the border. Biden may abide by that, but I won't. Those are my people. And that's why we need to stand up for this kind of border. So you can see how they can narrate support for the policy without feeling like you're just trading in kind of unqualified bigotry. So this is a bit overwhelming. I'm wondering, despite a growing number of candidates and voters of color, the policies that the Republican party seems to be pushing seem to be in opposition to racial justice. And the increasing racial diversity in the alt what does that mean for racial justice moving forward? Racial justice has really since that time in the 60s been defined by a couple of practices and actions that could be taken. So one, the state taking responsibility to ensure there's not discrimination in housing, employment, healthcare, et cetera. And we have many anti-discrimination laws as a result of that period. And second, some vision that there's like a kind of multi-racial meritocratic order. So even civil rights liberalism isn't tied to everyone getting what they need. The idea, and this comes like directly from the signing of the Civil Rights Act is you're given an opportunity to compete like everyone else. For someone like Tim Scott, if you ask them what's racial justice or what's justice for black communities, they would say entrepreneurialism, the right to compete, getting those pesky regulations out of the way, getting those pesky unions out of the way. And if you say why that as opposed to the strategy of the state ensuring that people aren't facing discrimination, the state has failed pretty miserably on that account. Our schools are as segregated by race and class as they were 50 years ago. Some sense that as a minoritized person you can go into the workplace or go into a healthcare facility and the state will ensure your dignity and your equal treatment is just no longer the case. So I think we shouldn't be surprised that people are losing faith in that account because the account itself has not been robust. It really hasn't been, it hasn't delivered what it's promised. So I think that's opened up other appeals and the appeal I think often goes something like this. They think that you're dependent on them, the state to protect you for welfare, et cetera. I believe in you. I believe in your work ethic, your entrepreneurialism, you're who can be trusted here. And that's your quickest path to living a life of freedom and possibility. And you can just see given the kind of history of the state's inability to do that, why that might have a growing kind of appeal and obviously tracks on narratives of self-reliance and autonomy and self-determination that very much are a part of those same social movements. And also I think as you said in the introductions that I saw about your book, A Wider Freedom, the identity of America is based on that idea. Pick yourself up by the bootstraps. It's very American. It is and not as like repressive, right? Not as just like stop complaining as in, and I think how it's been recoded here is the, again, I believe in you. I believe in your power and your capacity. The other side thinks of you as they just wanna manipulate you. I believe in you. So it's recoding these individual accounts of freedom as emancipatory. Very seductive. That's very seductive. It is and it's very familiar. Even if you would say, well, I don't know about it as like a large social philosophy. Talk to anybody around the corner, the dinner table in your classroom. Everyone has access to those ideas, right? So I think the other versions of freedom that are about interdependency and solidarity and like for one of us to do well, we all have to find something. We just don't have access to those traditions and histories in the same way. On the one hand, you've got this very seductive thing. I believe in you and the Republican Party or the alt-right, their message is fairly seductive, I would say, to an individual. And on the other hand, what I'm hearing from you is that we must ensure that we have our rights. The laws must be in place. I see a lot of them being dismantled at the same time. It's not as sexy. How do we make our calls just as seductive? Yeah, yeah. I think there's a couple of things. You're also talking about, for example, they're dismantling all these workplace protections, all these labor protections, making it harder for workers to unionize, right? Labor, sexuality, I mean. Attacking books, attacking teachers' discretion. Critical race. I think just to your important question then, how do we make those appealing? I think they have to be part of actual robust commitments. I think if people had the experience of, especially in low-income neighborhoods, of being able to send their kids to schools that they felt would treat them with dignity and respect and possibility, and to interact with a public health care system that did the same, it would be much easier for us to build a constituency around that. But as the Democrats themselves have grown more ambivalent about all those programs, it's very difficult to say, believe in the idea of this, even if in practice it's not there, when people are running from three jobs with no childcare, wondering about where their next illness is gonna take them. So you guys are heading into an election. Yeah. Electro-Politics among community organizers is an increasing topic of differing opinions, because on the one hand there's recognition that it's been through elections, especially that the right has really gained power and authority, and the people who have a different vision have to match that. And on the other hand, the nature of elections is often pouring millions, hundreds of millions of dollars into short-term cycles, media buys, et cetera, that don't actually build real, lasting social movements. So I think there's some sense that it's not just about what's happening nationally, but it's about how elections can be used to mobilize and build things for the long term. I think the other interesting thing is the Republicans have done all this work around gerrymandering, changing around voting districts, making voting harder, also just making people more cynical about voting. Even when it came time, there's this John Lewis Act, which is supposed to ensure more robust protections. But the idea, hey, let's strengthen our right to vote, and that's how we'll change the society. It just doesn't have the same resonance it did 40 or 50 years ago. It sounds like a naive claim, right? Oh, you think voting works? And there's some truth to that, right? The hard thing is that to appeal to people based on policies that they're already ambivalent about, it's, of course, voting protections matter deeply, and they have to be part of a restoration of a vision of democracy, but we shouldn't be surprised that people are deeply ambivalent about them. Any last words that you might want to leave our listeners with? Freedom or hope or what you are hoping to see in the short term in the next year? I do think the fact that the Republicans understand they can no longer win elections with a white suburban homogenous social base, and that they need to start figuring out where other political energies would come from. And the fact that they're going to folks who actually do feel, in some ways, either ambivalent, distrustful about larger systems means we know that they are also recognizing that we're at a moment of widespread uncertainty about what the future holds. If the Republicans can say we can marry a deeply nativist policy agenda to the expansion of Latino voters, it shows like things are possible in politics. Right. We have to be able to reimagine them. So much of this is about trying things out. It's episodic and improvisational. Can we do this? Can we get this group of voters to be oriented towards that? And in that sense, there is a lesson there about the need to really think in bold new ways about how political appeals and voters are mobilized. So what would you have the Democratic Party say? Nationally, I don't have some messages, but I think even though you're right, that the debate itself is like a disaster. And on another account, it's actually quite successful because I think that's the environment that those people on the right circulate in best. And actually, they're kind of vision where everyone feels like no one can be trusted, nothing works, you're just on your own and you're either gonna be predated or be a predator. People need to have experiences where they feel those feelings of like solidarity and connection and moving together. And so beyond who wins or loses the election, I think for people that don't share the vision how we bring people into those spaces and movements matters deeply. And when the U.S. now is in Canada, we're seeing a wave of labor activity, strike activity. I think that's a reinforcement 2020 in Black Lives Matter. People do want those spaces. That's, from my perspective, where the possibility lies. Thank you so much for all your time. Great, thanks. I really enjoyed the conversation. Wow, I have one of those scholarly crushes now. Daniel was so helpful in breaking some of that down. Send me a note if you feel the same way. I'm at Right Vanita on X, formerly known as Twitter. That's W-R-I-T-E-V-I-N-I-T-A. We're also on Instagram at Don't Call Me Resilient podcast. And also, you might wanna pick up Daniel's most recent book, A Wider Type of Freedom, How Struggles for Racial Justice Liberate Everyone. I mean, the title says it all. And please, if you enjoyed this conversation and others on this podcast, please rate us and leave us a review on your podcast app. It just takes a minute and it really does help us out. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. It was made possible by a grant for journalism innovation from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Vanita Sruvasava. Latika Kaki is associate producer, sound design and mixing by Remitula Sheikh. Kika Chimeme is assistant producer. Our fabulous consulting producer is Jennifer Morose. And Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water. Thanks for listening, everyone, and hope you join us again next week.