You’re now trying to water down dog-whistling to a mere ‘plausible deniability’
Actually, I said a couple of paragraphs later: “Maybe those cases shouldn’t be categorized as dog-whistling, but I think there’s a continuum from there to the cases where the message is intended not to be heard by everyone.” I disagree with your statement that these cases “are essentially opposites”; they have in common (1) an innocuous face-value meaning and (2) a less-innocuous meaning intended to appeal to a subset of the audience. In cases of either type I would expect the speaker to prefer the less-innocuous meaning not to be apparent to most listeners. The only difference is in how hard they’ve tried to achieve that, and with what success.
(And if a politician is sending not-too-explicit messages of affiliation to people whose views I detest, actually I don’t care all that much how hard he’s trying to have me not notice.)
we are still left with the puzzle of why opponents can hear the allegedly inaudible whistle.
Leaving aside (since I agree that it’s doubtful that they should be classified as dog-whistling, though I disagree that they’re “essentially opposite”) cases where the goal is merely plausible deniability: this is puzzling only if opponents in general can easily hear it, but I think what’s being claimed by those who claim to discover “dog-whistling” is that they’ve noticed someone sending messages that are clearly audible to (whoever) but discernible by the rest of the population only when they listen extra-carefully, have inside information, etc. (Of course once it’s been pointed out, the inside information is more widely available and people are prepared to listen more carefully—so fairly soon after an alleged dog-whistle is publicized it becomes less dog-whistle-y. If someone says now what Reagan said earlier about welfare abusers, their political opponents would notice instantly and flood them with accusations of covert racism; but when Reagan actually said those things before, they weren’t immediately seen that way. Note that I am making no comment here about whether he actually was dog-whistling, just pointing out that what’s relevant is how the comments were perceived before the fuss about dog-whistling began.)
Consider the example from the UK
An advertisement saying “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” isn’t dog-whistling, and I don’t think anyone claims it is. (Some people might claim it’s lying, but that’s a different accusation entirely.) But if there are a lot of people around who are (but wouldn’t admit that they are) anti-immigration because they don’t want more black people in the UK, then vocal opposition to immigration may convey to those people the message “we prefer white people too”, and some of what a political party says about immigration may be designed to help the racists feel that way.
Whether any of what the Conservatives say about immigration would rightly be classified that way, I don’t know. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to what they’ve said about immigration. (I’m pretty sure they’re happy enough to get a slice of the racist vote, but that on its own isn’t dog-whistling.)
The payoff, if they are deliberately courting the racist vote, would be that racists in the UK feel that the Conservatives aren’t merely cautious about immigration in general but will pursue policies that tend to keep black people out of the UK (that would be the content of the dog-whistle over and above their explicit policies), and accordingly are more inclined to vote for them rather than turning to (say) the BNP or UKIP than they would have been without that reassurance.
“family values”
It seems likely to me that at least some social conservatives some of the time are intending this to suggest more than they would be happy defending explicitly—e.g., a willingness to get Roe v Wade overturned if it looks politically feasible, or to obstruct the teaching of evolution as fact in school science lessons, or to restrict the rights of same-sex couples.
(Imagine that you are a socially conservative politician. A substantial fraction of the votes you get are going to come from conservative Christians. If you have a choice of two ways to express yourself, no different in their explicit commitments, little different in their impact on people who will be voting against you anyway—but one of them makes it that bit more likely that your conservative Christian listeners will see you as one of them and turn out to vote for you … wouldn’t you be inclined to choose that one? And isn’t that exactly what’s meant by “dog-whistling”?)
An advertisement saying “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” isn’t dog-whistling, and I don’t think anyone claims it is.
Yet according to the Wikipedia article you linked, that was claimed to be “the classic case of dog-whistling.” So I find this discussion frustrating because you don’t seem willing to come to terms with how the phrase is actually used.
What the page says was called the classic case of dog-whistling is a whole advertising campaign.
I checked what Goodin’s book (cited at that point in the Wikipedia article) actually says. It doesn’t reference any specific advertisements in the campaign, and in particular doesn’t describe the specific one you picked out as dog-whistling. It does, however, say this:
The fact that the practice is noticed, that it has acquired a name and a bad press, suggests that the message is not literally inaudible to others beyond its intended target. They have noticed it. And by identifying the trick and giving it a name, they have (after a fashion) worked out a way around it.
all of which seems to be in line with what I’ve been saying.
[EDITED to fix a spelling and add: I don’t have a copy of Goodin’s book; I checked it using Amazon’s “look inside” feature. This means that while I was able to look up the bit quoted in Wikipedia and the bit I quoted above, I couldn’t see the whole chapter. I did, however, search for “not racist” (two key words from the specific advertisement you mentioned) and get no hits, which I think genuinely means they don’t appear—it searches the whole book even though it will only show you a small fraction.]
Actually, I said a couple of paragraphs later: “Maybe those cases shouldn’t be categorized as dog-whistling, but I think there’s a continuum from there to the cases where the message is intended not to be heard by everyone.” I disagree with your statement that these cases “are essentially opposites”; they have in common (1) an innocuous face-value meaning and (2) a less-innocuous meaning intended to appeal to a subset of the audience. In cases of either type I would expect the speaker to prefer the less-innocuous meaning not to be apparent to most listeners. The only difference is in how hard they’ve tried to achieve that, and with what success.
(And if a politician is sending not-too-explicit messages of affiliation to people whose views I detest, actually I don’t care all that much how hard he’s trying to have me not notice.)
Leaving aside (since I agree that it’s doubtful that they should be classified as dog-whistling, though I disagree that they’re “essentially opposite”) cases where the goal is merely plausible deniability: this is puzzling only if opponents in general can easily hear it, but I think what’s being claimed by those who claim to discover “dog-whistling” is that they’ve noticed someone sending messages that are clearly audible to (whoever) but discernible by the rest of the population only when they listen extra-carefully, have inside information, etc. (Of course once it’s been pointed out, the inside information is more widely available and people are prepared to listen more carefully—so fairly soon after an alleged dog-whistle is publicized it becomes less dog-whistle-y. If someone says now what Reagan said earlier about welfare abusers, their political opponents would notice instantly and flood them with accusations of covert racism; but when Reagan actually said those things before, they weren’t immediately seen that way. Note that I am making no comment here about whether he actually was dog-whistling, just pointing out that what’s relevant is how the comments were perceived before the fuss about dog-whistling began.)
An advertisement saying “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration” isn’t dog-whistling, and I don’t think anyone claims it is. (Some people might claim it’s lying, but that’s a different accusation entirely.) But if there are a lot of people around who are (but wouldn’t admit that they are) anti-immigration because they don’t want more black people in the UK, then vocal opposition to immigration may convey to those people the message “we prefer white people too”, and some of what a political party says about immigration may be designed to help the racists feel that way.
Whether any of what the Conservatives say about immigration would rightly be classified that way, I don’t know. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to what they’ve said about immigration. (I’m pretty sure they’re happy enough to get a slice of the racist vote, but that on its own isn’t dog-whistling.)
The payoff, if they are deliberately courting the racist vote, would be that racists in the UK feel that the Conservatives aren’t merely cautious about immigration in general but will pursue policies that tend to keep black people out of the UK (that would be the content of the dog-whistle over and above their explicit policies), and accordingly are more inclined to vote for them rather than turning to (say) the BNP or UKIP than they would have been without that reassurance.
It seems likely to me that at least some social conservatives some of the time are intending this to suggest more than they would be happy defending explicitly—e.g., a willingness to get Roe v Wade overturned if it looks politically feasible, or to obstruct the teaching of evolution as fact in school science lessons, or to restrict the rights of same-sex couples.
(Imagine that you are a socially conservative politician. A substantial fraction of the votes you get are going to come from conservative Christians. If you have a choice of two ways to express yourself, no different in their explicit commitments, little different in their impact on people who will be voting against you anyway—but one of them makes it that bit more likely that your conservative Christian listeners will see you as one of them and turn out to vote for you … wouldn’t you be inclined to choose that one? And isn’t that exactly what’s meant by “dog-whistling”?)
Yet according to the Wikipedia article you linked, that was claimed to be “the classic case of dog-whistling.” So I find this discussion frustrating because you don’t seem willing to come to terms with how the phrase is actually used.
What the page says was called the classic case of dog-whistling is a whole advertising campaign.
I checked what Goodin’s book (cited at that point in the Wikipedia article) actually says. It doesn’t reference any specific advertisements in the campaign, and in particular doesn’t describe the specific one you picked out as dog-whistling. It does, however, say this:
all of which seems to be in line with what I’ve been saying.
[EDITED to fix a spelling and add: I don’t have a copy of Goodin’s book; I checked it using Amazon’s “look inside” feature. This means that while I was able to look up the bit quoted in Wikipedia and the bit I quoted above, I couldn’t see the whole chapter. I did, however, search for “not racist” (two key words from the specific advertisement you mentioned) and get no hits, which I think genuinely means they don’t appear—it searches the whole book even though it will only show you a small fraction.]