For decades, racial appeals in American politics were most effective when they could be denied. Today, that carefully maintained distance between coded language and explicit hostility is rapidly eroding. In this episode, Saladin Ambar joins Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to examine what this transformation reveals about American politics and democracy.
Racist appeals in American politics used to require deniability. Increasingly, they don’t. Critics on both the left and the right are writing articles with titles like “The G.O.P. Has Gone Off the Deep End" (Jamelle Bouie, New York Times, September 16, 2026) and "The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem" (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, February 23, 2026).
In this episode of Terms of Engagement, Archon Fung and Stephen Richer talk with Saladin Ambar, a political scientist at Rutgers University, about how political discourse has moved from dog whistles to racial invective, what this shift tells us about the fracturing of America and the basis of our democracy, and whether trying to rein such speech in would help or backfire.