Reagan was the master of racist "dog whistles", plausible deniability that allowed Reagan to protect himself. It has allowed the Republican Party for the last four decades to deny who Ronald Reagan was and turn him into a hero. Matt Tyrnauer, director of "The Reagans" on Showtime, joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, welcome to theAnalysis News podcast. I'm Paul Jay. Please don't forget there's a donate button at the top of the webpage.

 

There's a segment in the Showtime series, The Reagans, about dog-whistling – Reagan's pandering to racism without using overtly racist words. Again, it's impossible not to see the model for Trump in all this.

Excerpt from The Reagans

"Let us pledge to each other with this great lady looking on that we can and so help us God, we will make America great again."

 

Reagan's reputation as a dog whistler has not had a sufficiently negative impact on his legacy. Dog-whistling is all about plausible deniability that allowed Reagan to protect himself, and that has allowed the Republican Party for the last four decades to deny that that's who Ronald Reagan was and turn him into a hero. To insist that he really did care about the average American working family. But when people stand back, they see that, in fact, Reagan was a divisive figure, someone willing to do what he knew was wrong to divide Americans as a way to win power. Reagan's genius as a politician was that he wrapped his racism in a facade of fatherly love.

Paul Jay

Now joining us is the director and writer of The Reagans Matt Tyrnauer, who's also the filmmaker of Valentino: The Last Emperor, which was shortlisted for an Academy Award for best documentary feature, and Where's my Roy Cohn another must-see if you want to understand the political forces that gave us Trump. Thanks for joining us, Matt.

Matt Tyrnauer

Thank you.

Paul Jay

So talk about the evolution of Reagan. We talked about from FDR-ish, liberal-ish head of a union, to a pro-Goldwater politician who then becomes Goldwater-ish politician himself, but also this arc to adopting as a tactic, this dog-whistle racism. So how does that develop and tell us the story?

Matt Tyrnauer

Well, Reagan was on-trend because after the Second World War leading into the Johnson and civil rights era, the use of overt racist language really was not going to be permissible in the public arena. So clever politicians figured out that you could use coded language and have the same effect. And this eventually became labeled as dog-whistle racism. So Goldwater, I think, practiced it. But I think Reagan really elevated it to an art form and was the master of the form.

Excerpt from The Reagans

The question of whether my father was racist is a troubling one for me. There was a concerted effort to undermine the civil rights movement. A new language developed to trigger unacceptable social hatreds.

 

"Our city streets are jungle paths."

 

Reagan can turn around and say, me, I didn't say anything about race.

Matt Tyrnauer

A lot of this he wrote himself, he was very good at coming up with little bumper sticker phrases that stuck in your mind. So some of his classics were "welfare queen" which he based on a real character named Linda Taylor, there was recently a book,