GOP runners ‘divide and conquer’

Throughout history, those in power have used the "divide and conquer" technique (based on gender, race or ethnicity, religion, etc.) to thwart the unity of ordinary working people, though of course, racism and other forms of discrimination are not simply the creations of the rich and powerful to be tools for economic gain. However, in the last few weeks the Republican Party has revived the overt "divide and conquer" tactic in increasingly racist ways.

In the post-World War II United States this "divide and conquer" strategy has most prominently taken the form of manufactured antagonism between African-American and white workers, though manufactured antagonism between undocumented immigrants and primarily white Americans has also been a strategy as of late. Employers have historically blamed the economic struggles of one group of workers on another group, obscuring the fact that the economic struggles of all workers are rooted in their exploitation. Similarly, employers in normal working conditions have kept white racial anger high, and wages and benefits low, among their workers by threatening them with replacement by non-white workers. In the end of the 1960s Richard Nixon also adopted this racially divisive technique to divide the working class politically. He used the fictional story of a Chicago woman dubbed the "Welfare queen," who he said, "has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards ... She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000." She was understood as being black, and this caricature became the infamously epitomizing example of the power of coded racism. He used this racist demonization of welfare in order to get elected by swinging the South from the Democrat to the Republican stronghold it remains today. The same strategy is used in xenophobic demonizations of undocumented immigrants, implying that they don't pay taxes, but benefit from public programs paid for through taxes. It is ignored that they pay such taxes as the payroll and sales tax, and even around six million undocumented immigrants file individual income taxes each year. Furthermore, they pay about $9 billion per year into Social Security, a program which they don't benefit from, and play an absolutely crucial role in the United States economy. The bigotry extends towards all Spanish speakers, as exemplified by Newt Gingrich who once said that Spanish was, "the language of living in the ghetto."

Though the "divide and conquer" technique has been employed countless times since Reagan, in the last few weeks we have seen possibly the most overtly racist rhetoric of this kind since then. Republican presidential candidates have been using it in fighting to attract white working class support for their candidacies and for the slashing of what little social safety net remains. The Republicans have attempted this through racist demonization of African-Americans and social safety net programs such as SNAP (Food Stamps). They have been dog whistling to the white working class and implying that their economic woes are because their white-person tax dollars are being used for entitlements for lazy and poor minorities, the implications being that non-whites are poor through their own faults and whites do not benefit from entitlements. Newt Gingrich provided the most obvious example of this vile rhetoric with his comment that, "Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So, they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash' unless it's illegal."

Then again, sometimes the racism of the Republican candidates has been put so bluntly it removes even the remotest chance of deniability. When being questioned about his position on entitlements Santorum responded, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money." Ron Paul reiterated earlier this January that he was against the Civil Rights Act, because outlawing segregation interferes with Ron Paul's fetishism of property rights. At best the Republican candidates obscure the fact that social safety net programs such as food stamps are beneficial for the entire working class and ignore inconvenient facts such as whites are the overwhelmingly largest users of food stamps and that systemic black poverty (like all poverty) is due to structural causes. At worst, they endorse a mentality that blatantly considers African-Americans as less than fully human.

—Jon Bix '14 is a sociology and political science double major.