October 12 – Racial Politics in America; Keeping Racism Alive in Our Politics

With the midterm election three weeks away, we will begin with the underlying issues of race in our politics following consistent and blatant efforts by Republicans in states like Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin to restrict minority turnout at the polls in November in the name of protecting the sanctity of the vote. Doug McAdam, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and a former Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences joins us to discuss his new book “Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Postwar America”. We look into how President Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 led to a break-up of the Democratic Party’s coalition of northern liberals and southern Dixiecrats, and the southern takeover of the Republican Party by these same Dixiecrats whose dominance of the GOP today has led to something of a civil war within the party between the insurgent Tea Party wing who represent the endangered white man in America and traditional conservatives who recognized that race-based voter suppression is alienating the fastest-growing constituency, the Latino vote, and that is not a winning strategy for the GOP over the long term.

Part 2

Then we look further into the politics of race and race-baiting with Ian Haney Lopez, a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class”. I spoke with Ian Haney Lopez back on February 19thwhen we discussed his analysis of our divided politics in which the younger generation are leading us into a post-racial and post-sexual America, while the current Republican Party is heading in the opposite, keeping racism alive to rile up their voters and drive them to the polls.