Politics Why Bigotry Still Works At Election Time

When politicians rail about crime, welfare or Big Government, they are often really talking about race

Demagogues don't yell "nigger" or "Jew boy" anymore. They've learned better. Just as David Duke shed his Klansman's sheets and Nazi uniform for the well-groomed banality of a suburban stockbroker, he traded in his bigoted rhetoric for a slick new glossary of coded appeals to racial resentment, market tested over the past two decades by mainstream conservative politicians. When Duke, following Richard Nixon's lead, denounces hiring "quotas," many among his white working-class supporters hear him saying, The government is going to give your jobs to blacks. When Duke, like Ronald Reagan, castigates "welfare queens," nobody has to be told what color...

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