Initially published in 2013, Ian Haney-López's Dog Whistle Politics
offered a sweeping account of how politicians and plutocrats deploy
veiled racial appeals to persuade white voters to support policies that
favor the extremely rich yet threaten their own interests. As he showed,
such appeals generate middle-class enthusiasm for political candidates
who promise to crack down on crime, curb undocumented immigration, and
protect against Islamic infiltration, but ultimately vote in favor of
corporations and the rich. Rejecting any simple story of malevolent and
obvious racism, Haney-López linked the two central themes that dominate
American politics today: the decline of the middle class and the
Republican Party's increasing reliance on white voters.
The book proved to be remarkably prescient. Donald Trump's 2016 campaign
was built almost entirely around dog whistle politics, and he won the
presidency because of it. This new edition of Dog Whistle Politics
updates the book by a substantial new chapter on Trump that examines his
appeal and places his campaign in the historical context that the first
edition of Dog Whistle Politics so perceptively uncovered.