[This is the second in a series looking at the growing carnality of American evangelicalism through its assimilation to right-wing politics. You can read the first post here.]
Politicians rarely if ever tell the you the bare-naked truth. They know that if they did, they probably would not get (re)elected. No, politics is not about honesty. It’s about power – gaining power, keeping power, using power, and accumulating more power.
Power and influence are the coin of the realm.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. It all boils down to how is this power used, and who benefits from the use of this power?
The real beneficiaries of this political power are those who give power hungry politicians the most money. Because money wins elections. No, money is not “speech,” as the wealthy, powerful members of the Supreme Court have ruled (for their own partisan purposes).
No, money is power.
Those with the most money have the power to become the most influential. This is why the American political establishment works, not as a democratic body, but as a plutocratic oligarchy, which means the American people are ruled by an elite cabal of rich people (mainly CEOs and corporations).
One of the practical consequences of our political reality is the fact that most political discourse happens in code. Coded language hides the truth. Code talk lets a politician tell people what they want to hear while leaving him/her free to do something entirely different.
Some of the oldest political code language in this country has to do with race, specifically the place of African Americans in our society and how they are treated by the powers-that-be.
The murder of George Floyd sparked a racial upheaval in America, an upheaval that both the political status quo AND the Religious Right are now working very hard to stamp out.
Future posts will examine the ongoing evangelical backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement.
For now, I want to explain the historical background to Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud and how it is actually another example of code language for “too many blacks have the right to vote.”
It’s one more train wreck that no Christian should be riding.
History:
Lee Atwater (1951-1991) was a cutthroat Republican party campaign strategist who got his start in North Carolina politics working with men like Sen. Strom Thurmond (who actively opposed all civil rights legislation in the US Congress).
He would eventually work for both presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush,
helping them to win their presidential campaigns with something called “The Southern Strategy.”
In 1981, when he worked in the Reagan administration, Atwater gave an anonymous (at the time) interview where he explained how he used coded language to divide voters along issues of race.
Below is the relevant excerpt from that interview. Take a listen:
Atwater explains how using “more abstract language” about taxes or forced busing or states’ rights will hit the same racial/racist nerves that are plucked by using the N word.
In this way, white Southern voters understood that the candidate who wanted their vote was as concerned as they were (i.e. were as racist as they were) about maintaining white privilege and keeping “uppity” black folk in check when they heard about policies that they knew would continue to undermine development in the black community.
Opposition to forced bussing was code talk for “we have to keep black people segregated and away from our white children.”
“The War on Drugs” is another example of political code talk deliberately used to fill in for openly racist strategies attacking the black community (and political protesters).
In 1971 president Richard Nixon first declared his “war on drugs.” Almost
immediately, America’s prison population skyrocketed from 300,000 to over 2.3 million. Two-thirds of those new prisoners were African-Americans. (See this article from the Equal Justice Initiative).
Many people know that story. What fewer people realize is that the war on drugs was another instance of code language for “let’s disrupt and oppress the black community.”
John Ehlichman was president Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor. In 1994, Ehlichman gave a very candid interview to Harper’s Magazine. During that
interview he had his own “Lee Atwater moment” where he admitted to the racist intent of Nixon’s war on drugs.
Here is Ehrlichman in his own words (all emphases are mine):
“You want to know what this [the war on drugs] was really all about?”
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Voila! The war on drugs became more code language for shutting down social protest movements and breaking up black communities.
Fast forward to 2020.
President Trump had a similarly candid moment setting up his intended code talk for subverting the 2020 election.
This past March (8 months prior to the election!) Trump gave an interview to Fox News where he loudly objected against the generous voting provisions that Democrats wanted to include in the COVID19 stimulus bill.
Provisions such as expanded mail-in voting, scheduling election day on a week-end, or making it a national holiday.
Why was Trump opposed to making it easier for more people to vote?
As he said (I have also listened to the original TV interview), “If you ever agreed to it [the expanded voting provisions], you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
One Democratic strategist noted, “The official position of the Republican Party for decades has been that they can’t win if people vote. Trump is just dumb enough to say it out loud.”
We will return to this issue of Republican voter suppression in future posts.
Republicans well understand that the majority of African-American voters in this country vote for the Democratic candidate. Therefore, it is in their political interests to prevent black people from voting. They just can’t say it that bluntly, or honestly.
So they talk in code. Like Trump.
It is no accident that all of the contested states where Trump has called for repeated recounts and gone to court in order to overturn results are states with large African-American communities. States in which the black vote for Biden undoubtedly played a large role in defeating Trump.
Political code language is frequently and intentionally used to hide racist intent.
It has a long history in this country.
In a similar vein, the long-standing Christian, evangelical concern for such things as Law and Order and social stability — i.e. the conservative defense of the white, privileged status quo — has always hidden the latent racism of the white church and provided its members with a conveniently “safe way” to express their inherent distrust of black America.
It’s happening again, right now, as evangelical leaders applaud Trump’s damaging efforts to overturn this election and disenfranchise millions of voters (largely people of color). We see it in evangelical leaders who condemn the Black Lives Matter movement, and as entire denominations call damnation down onto “critical race theory.”
I will have a great deal more to say about all of these things. Stay tuned.
We all have got to learn how to read The Code.
biblical Rev. Warnock is when he decries Christian involvement in the military. He represents an ancient Christian tradition.