The attached summary of an excellent recently published book, Merge Left, contains what I have been arguing for several years ought to be the strategy for progressives. It’s worth careful attention. Unfortunately, too many on the “Left” have lost sight in recent years of the comprehensive vision of a unified progressive strategy that is required if we are to be successful in the long run.

MERGE LEFT
Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America
By Ian Haney López
“With great clarity and thoughtfulness, Ian F. Haney López shows why the path to a truly just society lies in a multi-racial coalition of poor, working and middle-class Americans. . . . Powerful, urgent, and timely.”
—Robert B. Reich
From presidential hopefuls to engaged voters to journalists to activists, people across the country are grappling with how to think and talk about racism in American politics. Ian Haney López, a distinguished UC Berkeley professor and the acclaimed author of Dog Whistle Politics, offers clear insights and a way forward in his highly anticipated new book. Endorsed by Robert Reich, Van Jones, Jane Fonda, and the leaders of the AFL-CIO, SEIU, Voto Latino, Color of Change, Equal Justice Society, ROC United, and more, MERGE LEFT: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America (October 1, 2019; $26.99) offers a powerful, truly original, and even hopeful new strategy for defeating the Right’s racial fearmongering and achieving bold progressive goals.
In 2014, Haney López in Dog Whistle Politics named and explained the coded racial appeals exploited by right-wing politicians over the last half century—and thereby anticipated the 2016 presidential election. Now, the country is heading into one of the most consequential elections ever, with the Right gearing up to again exploit racial fearmongering to divide and distract. Meanwhile, the Left is splintered. Some want to confront the Right’s racism head-on; others insist that a race-silent emphasis on class avoids alienating white voters. Can either approach—challenging white racism or going colorblind—build the progressive supermajorities necessary to break political gridlock and fundamentally change the country’s direction?
After the 2016 election, Haney López co-founded the Race-Class Narrative Research Project. With the Right utilizing focus groups, polling, and careful message testing to hone their dog whistles, Haney López and his collaborators—including union activists, racial justice leaders, pollsters, and communications specialists—set out to use the same tools against them. Based on conversations, interviews, and surveys with thousands of people all over the country, the team found a way forward. By reframing racism as a weapon of the rich, the race-class approach shifts people’s conception regarding whom to view as their allies and enemies—and thereby builds greater enthusiasm for racial justice, economic populism, and the cross-racial solidarity needed to win elections.

Here’s what their research brought to light:
• Most white people hold contradictory views about race
Against the prevalent assumptions of many progressives, they found that most whites hold egalitarian views on race—although they also swing back and forth to deeply internalized racist beliefs. This is relatively good news, Haney López says, because it means that the Left does not need to tear down a mountain of white racism. Instead, the task is to help the majority of whites connect their economic self-interest to the antiracist values most already hold.
• Voters of color also accept messages about “undeserving” people Again contra the conventional wisdom, the majority of Black and Latinx voters find large parts of the Right’s coded rhetoric convincing—the use of terms like “criminals” and “welfare cheats” resonates powerfully within communities of color. This means that neutralizing the Right’s narratives of racial fear and resentment is key when addressing white voters and communities of color.
• The political “middle” toggles between progressive and reactionary The Left’s base, roughly one-fifth of all voters, embrace racial equality, believe circumstances more than individual effort explain wealth inequalities, and want government to regulate the market. Opposite them and just slightly fewer in number, the Right’s core supporters resent people of color, credit hard work for economic success, and want government out of the way. That leaves three-fifths of Americans—including a majority of people of color—in between. They agree with and bounce between both progressive and reactionary views, largely without noticing the tensions between them.
• The persuadable majority gives more credence to messages of racial fear than to color-blind language or to challenges to white racism
The persuadable middle finds messages promoting economic populism that ignore racial issues less convincing than the Right’s racial fear message. And the other main progressive response—calling for racial justice in ways that implicitly condemn white racism—is even less popular, including with people of color. In other words: With the crucial persuadable middle, neither of the Left’s two principal responses defeats Trump’s racial fearmongering.
• Retelling the story of America in terms of class war waged through racial division is more convincing than racial fear messages
The good news is that the Right’s racial fear message loses decisively to a narrative condemning fearmongering by greedy elites and calling for cross-racial unity. Explicitly urging voters to distrust economic elites sowing racial division and to join together across racial lines to demand that government promote racial and economic justice beats dog whistling. This race-class message consistently proved more convincing—to whites as well as people of color—than the Right’s racial fear story.

Haney López MERGE LEFT summary 3
HOW THE RACE-CLASS STRATEGY WORKS
The GOP shifts attention from economic to racial concerns
As early as 1963, Republicans recognized they could win votes by fashioning a new identity for themselves as the defenders of white America. There would be no open references to maintaining white dominance. They would use dog whistles. But even so, the GOP’s basic strategy would be to shift attention from class to race by encouraging voters to focus their social and economic resentments on nonwhite groups rather than on concentrated wealth. This con, writes Haney López, “fits Trump to a fake-gold T.”
Typical Democratic and progressive messages fail
With racial conflict as the core threat narrative promoted by the GOP and right-wing media, the two dominant progressive responses struggle. One, a race-silent emphasis on class, leaves messages of racial fear and fundamental racial division operating without challenge. The other, attacking Trump as a racist, actually helps him—it deepens the panic that the country is splintering into racial sides.
Fusing race to class shifts voters’ sense of the source of danger in their lives
The race-class approach transforms voters’ sense of the root conflict in society. Dog whistling implies the fundamental conflict pits whites against nonwhites. The race-class narrative says it those sowing division against the rest of us, whether we are Black, brown, or white, native or newcomer. The race-class approach shifts the conflict from whites versus nonwhites to a racially-divisive 1 percent against a race-conscious 99 percent. It specifically names whites as beneficiaries of cross-racial solidarity.
Economic inequality threatens everyone, but racial division is the key
The race-class strategy is not a “class more than race” frame. Yes, it says that class war threatens almost every family. But it insists that racial division is the principal weapon and must be directly addressed rather than pushed to the back burner. The race-class approach is not colorblind but instead race-forward.
Ending state violence against people of color requires cross-racial solidarity
The single greatest driver of state violence against nonwhite communities is dog whistle politics. When politicians campaign by demonizing “thugs,” “illegals,” and “terrorists,” they govern through mass incarceration, mass deportation, and mass surveillance. This makes cross-racial coalitions to defeat dog whistle politics an indispensable step toward racial justice.
Connecting race and class in our narratives and politics is a must
Many progressives understand that racial as well as class injustices should be addressed. The race-class approach makes clear that in fact “should” is “must.” The race-class strategy starts by recognizing that race and class in the United States are welded together by history as well as current politics. Haney López argues that the Left can prevail only by turning this fusion to progressive advantage. He maintains that the Left must not only pursue racial and economic justice simultaneously, but must consistently link the two in voters’ minds in order to make big gains on either front.

Haney López MERGE LEFT summary 4
THE RACE-CLASS STRATEGY AND TODAY’S POLITICS
MERGE LEFT places the findings of the race-class narrative project in a larger political and racial context, offering practical insights into the most troubling dilemmas and explosive elements of today’s politics, such as:
The evolution of dog whistling
• Attacks against Latinx and Muslim communities accelerated during the Obama era to become today’s most pervasive forms of racial fearmongering.
• Trump won through dog whistling and has NOT shifted to a bullhorn of white supremacy, at least as far as the vast majority of his supporters are concerned.
• Racial fearmongering has destroyed moderation within the Republican Party but they cannot walk away from it. Every GOP candidate knows that in the primaries the most racially reactionary candidate will have a leg up.
Flaws in the Democratic response to dog whistling
• Democratic party leaders for five decades and counting distance themselves from racial justice arguments, hoping dog whistling will fade on its own.
• The Clintons’ responded to dog whistling by imitating it in the 1990s, and it came back to bite Hillary in the 2016 election, even though she adopted strong racial justice positions in that campaign.
• Economic populists like Bernie Sanders and Robert Reich rely on impoverished accounts of race when they take a “class first” approach.
Centering and mobilizing communities of color
• Dog whistling is at the root of most state violence against communities of color.
• Among activists, there’s a strong demand that racism be directly challenged—but in the larger community many people struggle with concepts like pervasive white
supremacy and structural racism.
• A narrative of strategic racism resonates within communities of color: divide-
and-conquer is easier to understand than structural accounts, and also raises the prospect that whites have their own interests in fighting racial division.
Dangerous trends among whites
• Trump draws on and also accelerates dangerous new trends in white identity.
• The Left already competes effectively among white voters who are not evangelical
Christians, coming close with the working class and winning big among women.
• The Left must promote racial solidarity even among whites in the Democratic
base, because white liberals remain susceptible to racial fear.
• Moral suasion, while it can be genuine and galvanizing, by itself will not move
most white voters to actively support racial justice. They must also see that their
own interests are served by it.
• Explicitly naming whites as beneficiaries of cross-racial solidarity significantly
boosts support among both whites and people of color.

Haney López MERGE LEFT summary 5
EVERY PROGRESSIVE GOAL REQUIRES CROSS-RACIAL SOLIDARITY
Today, Haney López maintains, every bold progressive vision depends on building cross-racial solidarity first. This is obviously important to assembling broad support for racial justice initiatives like abolishing mass incarceration and creating a humane immigration system. But it is also pivotal to enacting progressive legislation seemingly distant from racial issues, such as publicly funded child and elder care, affordable and excellent healthcare, or a Green New Deal. Only a sense of linked fate across color lines will foster the supermajorities necessary to sweep away the politicians who dog whistle on behalf of rule by the rich. The best response to divide-and-conquer, Haney López says, is unite-and-build.
“Our fates have always been bound together,” Haney López writes. “For centuries, our greatest heroes—radicals like W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and César Chávez—have insisted that American salvation requires cross-racial alliances. Repeatedly, this insight has been suppressed, forgotten, and abandoned. Today, some of the wealthiest, most powerful forces in this country bend their will and money toward driving us apart so they can tighten their grip on government and the economy. Yet the very wreckage they have created—and the president they helped elect—open up another opportunity to build a broad cross-racial movement with the will and the political power to promote racial reform and shared economic prosperity. This book explains the good evidence that cross-racial solidarity for racial and economic justice is possible, today.”
In this lively, provocative, and often surprising narrative, MERGE LEFT draws on important new research to explain where the Right’s racial strategy came from, how it works, and how it can be beaten in the coming election and beyond.