Welcome to the final part of my series on the Communism/Socialism/Marxism Dog Whistle. My claim is that the sounding of the Dog Whistle is immoral because we historically used it to sustain wealthy male domination over women and the poor.
In a previous video, I explained how dog whistles work by covertly saying that we must hide from the light of day because it cannot be said aloud and subverts our values.
I’ve explained how civic republicanism presumes we invest as a society in the infrastructure, insurance, and insulation necessary to ensure we are all expressively equal politically so that all citizens can look at each eye-to-eye without fear that the other takes away our basic liberties.
And I’ve explained how to know when we legitimately describe something as communist/socialist/Marxist.
In this final video, I will finally turn to my thesis. I want to persuade you that those who use the communist/socialist/Marxist label as a political dog whistle act immorally and subvert our republic when they do so.
Let’s begin by remembering how we have used that dog whistle in our history.
Before and after the Civil War, Lincoln’s Republican reformers advocated for expanded citizenship rights for non-Anglo males and Anglo females.
They focused on rights such as voting, property ownership, marriage, and work across cultural boundaries.
They also pushed for public investments in infrastructure like roads, schools, and hospitals accessible to non-Anglos. This battle involved the rights of white women and formerly enslaved males. It also involved Tejanos in Texas and Californios and Asians in California.
From sea to sea, wealthy Anglo males fiercely opposed these reforms, fearing a dilution of their cultural dominance if States extended voting rights to non-Anglos and females. They predicted that expanding suffrage would increase taxes to build infrastructure in areas inhabited by people experiencing poverty.
They objected because:
(1) it would be unfair, as they owned most of the nation’s property and would pay a disproportionate share of the needed taxes.
(2) They also saw it as wealth redistribution, with the poor and middle class benefiting more from the improved infrastructure than the wealthy. Of course, the rich already cared for the wealthy’s infrastructure, insurance, and insulation needs.
To maintain their power, they fiercely opposed the passing and enforcement of the 15th Amendment, which granted voting rights to previously enslaved men.
They also enacted laws to prevent or hinder non-Anglo voting, impacting groups such as formerly enslaved individuals, el Norte, and Native Americans who preceded Anglos in settling in California and the Southwest, Latino immigrants in Florida, and Chinese immigrants on the West Coast.
Anglo-male voters established unequal treatment under the law for 70 to 100 years. White women got the vote in 1920. Asians were allowed to become citizens in 1945.
We finally empowered all women and the non-Anglos oppressed by Jim Crow to vote when we passed the Civil Rights Act of 1965, a hundred years after the war that ended legal enslavement practices.
The key point to note is the propaganda used to justify excluding and suppressing non-Anglo and female citizens. The winning strategy arose in the 1870s as part of efforts to resist our First Reconstruction.
Wealthy former Confederates opposed the idea of granting voting rights to women and Black males by comparing them to the communards, who were supporters of the Paris Commune of 1871. The communes were French socialists who briefly took over Paris in response to the suffering caused by the Franco-Prussian War.
Wealthy male landowners aimed to create fear among Anglo citizens that non-Anglo and female enfranchisement would lead to a violent socialist takeover of the United States. They generated that fear by labeling Black and female suffrage supporters as communards.
This deployment of the Communist/Socialist dog whistle justified Jim Crow laws.
The Communist/socialist refrain was so successful that it spawned the rise of the KKK, its first terror campaign, and the suppression of voters through the implementation of Jim Crow laws. Affluent Anglo males defended our actions as necessary to safeguard the American Way, arguing that taxes for public improvements constituted unjust wealth redistribution.
During the Jim Crow era, wealthy Anglo males continued to use exclusion and violence against voters who supported the rollback of Jim Crow laws or taxes that mainly helped America’s poor. We justified it with the constant use of this Communism/Socialism/Marxism dog whistle.
One lasting impact of this era is that it ingrained in Anglo culture the belief that maintaining minority rule through the suppression of non-Anglo voting and wealth creation is in line with good citizenship and the protection of the American Way
Labeling Black and women suffragists as communists became a highly effective political strategy.
It led to a coded language that always conveys the same message.
We are to see anyone labeled as a communist, socialist, or Marxist as a threat to the American Way, which good citizens should resist. If not, a socialist takeover will occur, leading to the permanent loss of the American Way. We have to stop them to maintain our minority rule. That’s the message the dog whistle encodes.
Defining one’s opponent a communist, Marxist, or socialist – whether true or untrue – became a tried and true way to redefine them as America’s public enemy number one.
In our history, this is the standard way Anglo politicians and their wealthy patrons – a minority of our population – have resisted reforms aimed at improving the lot of the poor and disenfranchised. They fiercely resist policies that (1) dilute Anglo power by fully enfranchising non-Anglos and women or (2) provide infrastructure, insurance, and insulation to protect people experiencing poverty from domination.
Empowering all citizens to vote neither abolishes private property nor establishes government control of the means of production. Nor do policies aimed at ensuring all citizens are free from domination due to insufficient “infrastructure, insurance, and insulation.”1 On the contrary, they strengthen civic republicanism by widening the range of citizens participating in its responsibilities and fruits.
The communism/socialism/Marxism dog whistle was and is nonsense. But it’s highly effective nonsense.
It’s how the Anglo majority rolled back our First Reconstruction and imposed Jim Crow and its cousins to oppress non-Anglos for more than 70 years after the Civil War.
It’s how the wealthy resisted the demands of the labor movement before and after both World Wars, how the Anglo majority resisted the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, and how it resists efforts to address the massive wealth inequality that threatens our democracy today.
Suppose you are a politician whose patrons enjoy asymmetric power in our society. How do you resist efforts to give women the vote? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.
How do you resist efforts to give the former enslaved the vote? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.
How do you resist efforts to give wage-earners the right to unionize so the wealthy elites do not dominate them? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.
How do you resist efforts to build equal-quality schools, roads, and hospitals for low-income people? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.
How do you resist efforts to eliminate discrimination in the workplace based on race and gender? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.
How do you resist efforts to regulate toxic pollution practices that disproportionately impact the only land affordable to people with low incomes? You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle.
How do you resist efforts to eliminate structures of domination so that all citizens share equal freedom and look into each other’s eyes as equals in the 21st century? You know the answer. You sound the Communism/Socialist/Marxism dog whistle. It’s the same old playbook.
For all citizens to be free, we must be expressively egalitarian in ensuring sufficient infrastructure, insurance, and insulation to flourish. That’s not Marx. That’s Aristotle and James Madison—paraphrased—describing what’s necessary for a civic republic to thrive.
So, suppose we’re serious about preserving our civic republic for our grandchildren and their grandchildren. In that case, we need to stop responding to and repeating dog whistles—especially this evil one—and start responding to our responsibility to make all citizens free in the most robust sense.
Let’s do it together!
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Bruyneel, Kevin. Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States. The University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Illustrated edition. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2002.
06: Reconstruction: America's First Civil Rights Movement
In our last episode, Dr. Kate Masur reminded us of important parts of the story of the American Civil War that continues to shape our racial topography today. In today’s episode, we’ll pick up where we left off and remember how we went from the jubilation that arose when Lincoln liberated those who were enslaved to the darkness of our Jim Crow Era.
07: King Cotton Strikes Back
We learned a lot from Dr. Kate Masur about the soaring hopes of Reconstruction after the Civil War and, in particular, constitutional amendments aimed at protecting the basic freedoms of those formerly enslaved. But today, we remember how we fell from the height of these hopes to the darkness of our Jim Crow era.
08: Why and How We Birthed Jim Crow
When Reconstruction collapsed, Jim Crow was born. Virulent racism peaked in the American South in the early 1900s and about twenty years later in the north. In today’s episode, we will remember why and how Jim Crow developed as a formal system of segregation and repression. Our guest is Dr. Kevin Boyle.Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University…
09: Jim Crow: The Yankee Variant
The last episode helped us understand the beginnings of Jim Crow in the south. Today we pick up where we left off, tracing pivotal moments that led similar racial tensions in the north. Welcoming back Dr. Kevin Boyle for this episode of Race on the Rocks, we dive deeper into the genesis of the Jim Crow era. How did the racial tensions of the south follo…
10: Redline Reasoning: Why We Built Segregated Cities
Today, I welcome back Dr. Kevin Boyle, who reminded us in the previous episode the important parts of our nation’s struggle with racial justice, focusing on the first few decades of the 20th century. We will pick up where we left off and take a look at the start of the Civil Rights Movement.
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“Infrastructure, insurance, and insulation” is Phillip Pettit’s framing of the minimum conditions for citizens to achieve freedom as non-domination. In his Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World, he unpacks this in detail.
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