This is the theory. In reality, it’s mostly ideological opponents who accuse the speaker of using dog-whistles, whereas supporters understand the words at face values, which is precisely the opposite of what the theory would predict. So, for example, Democrats often say that Republican policies to restrain welfare spending are racist dog-whistles—but how would they know? Surely the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims. Whereas Republicans swear up and down that they really do believe in low government spending and not rewarding sloth. In the end, if you can hear the dog-whistle, you are the dog.
I think the real meaning of “dog-whistle politics” is trying to ascribe an unpleasant secret meaning to your ideological opponents’ straightforward positions, and therefore avoid the unpleasant task of having to consider whether their ideas may have merit.
For the avoidance of doubt, I was not endorsing any claim that anyone is dog-whistling, I was explaining what the term means. Having said which:
supporters understand the words at face value
I don’t think we know this is true. (It may be true that supporters generally say they understand the words at face value, but since dog-whistling accusations often concern things one is Not Supposed To Say it wouldn’t be surprising if supporters claim to take the words at face value even if they hear the whistling loud and clear.)
the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims
No, I don’t think that’s the claim—I think you’re taking the metaphor too literally. What it predicts is that these claims should have an innocent face-value meaning but also be understandable by their intended audience as saying something else that the speaker doesn’t want to say explicitly; that’s all.
I think the real meaning [...] is [...]
I think it is most likely that (1) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others say things intended to convey a message to some listeners while, at least, maintaining plausible deniability and/or avoiding overt offence to others, and (2) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others get accused of doing this when in fact they had no such intention. Because both of those seem like things that would obviously often serve the purposes of the people in question, and I can’t see what would stop them happening.
(In some cases the speaker may expect the implicit meaning to be clearly understood by both supporters and opponents, but just want to avoid saying something dangerous too explicitly. 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.)
When you say “In reality” and “the real meaning [...] is”, are you claiming that the phenomenon described on (e.g.) that Wikipedia page never, or scarcely ever, actually happens? To take a couple of prominent examples, would you really want to claim that
or that they don’t also intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy-and-positive than, say, “opposition to same-sex marriage, treating transgender people as belonging to whatever gender they were assigned at birth, opposition to abortion”, and all the other specific things that actually distinguish those organizations dedicated to “family” and “values” from their ideological opponents?
during the US Democratic primaries in 2008, nothing Hillary Clinton’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight Barack Obama’s race in ways that would make him less appealing to white voters, and nothing Obama’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight his race in ways that would make him more appealing to black voters?
OK, that’s fair. It’s possible that the sympathetic hear the alleged dog-whistle but deny it, although I still think our default assumption should be to believe the supporters unless we have specific evidence otherwise. But we are still left with the puzzle of why opponents can hear the allegedly inaudible whistle.
What it predicts is that these claims should have an innocent face-value meaning but also be understandable by their intended audience as saying something else that the speaker doesn’t want to say explicitly; that’s all.
No. Let’s look at what wikipedia says:
Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup.
You’re now trying to water down dog-whistling to a mere ‘plausible deniablity.’ These are two distinct theories:
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ most people think I’m arguing about the government’s aqueduct-building. But members of the Anti-Bristol Society understand this to mean that I really want to persecute Bristolians, and so will vote for me. (Dog-whistling).
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ everyone understands that I really mean that I want to persecute Bristolians, and that I’m reaching out to the Anti-Bristol Society. But because I didn’t say I want to persecute Bristolians, I have just enough plausible deniability to not get thrown out of polite society. (Plausible deniability).
Note that these two ideas are essentially opposites.
When you say “In reality” and “the real meaning [...] is”, are you claiming that the phenomenon described on (e.g.) that Wikipedia page never, or scarcely ever, actually happens?
Scarcely ever. Consider the example from the UK—how on earth is that dog-whistling? Both the Conservative manifesto at the last election and the official policy of the Coalition government explicitly state the goal of limiting immigration. These policies have been criticised as, inter alia, racist. So they run adverts arguing that “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration.” Where’s the dog whistle? Isn’t the simpler story that they’re trying to defend their stated policies? If this is a dog-whistle, what is the content of the dog-whistle, over and above their policies? What’s the payoff? It doesn’t really make sense.
Regarding your specific examples:
I have no idea how those specific organisations, with which I have no particular familiarity, react to an individual phrase.
Republicans certainly intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy and positive than “heteronormativity.” But there is a world of difference between using the most positive language to describe your own position and the most negative to describe the opposition (pro-choice vs pro-death, death tax vs estate tax, Obamacare vs Affordable Care Act, etc) and dog-whistling, or even plausible deniability. Social conservatives are not hiding anything by saying they favour “family values.” They are perfectly willing to defend each and every one of the policy planks, but they want one phrase to sum it all up.
I’ll never be able to prove that nothing they did was intended like that. But I certainly don’t believe that the most-remarked-on incident (Bill Clinton comparing Obama’s win in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s win in the South Carolina primary) was in any way a dog-whistle, and I certainly do believe that what really happened there was that an innocuous comment was seized upon by people as a stick with which to beat Clinton, with the convenient excuse that the very innocuousness of the comment is the evidence for its malignity, because the evil is somehow hidden.
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.]
Surely the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims.
That shows that they wouldn’t recognize a well done dog-whistle, but they may still recognize a poorly done one where the Republicans attempt to make it something only racists understand, but do not succeed at doing so.
I think the real meaning of “dog-whistle politics” is trying to ascribe an unpleasant secret meaning to your ideological opponents’ straightforward positions
You describe the flip side of dog whistle politics, which are false accusations of dog whistle politics. I think both happen.
Sometimes the accusations are justified, but it is an extremely poisonous tactic to the discussion, and even to your own thinking. It’s easy to project secret evil intent where you already have some fundamental disagreement with a person, and it relieves you of actually having to confront the argument as given. “He really means...”
As I noted before, in forums like these, where people come in and out of threads, and haven’t read all that goes on, I think the accusations are an extra loser, as you just end up looking like a putz, objecting to the unobjectionable.
Argue against posts as given.
if you can hear the dog-whistle, you are the dog
That’s a catchy comeback on the less than perfect metaphor, but not literally true. Sometimes people really do dog whistle, and sometimes you can hear it even if you’re not the dog (the intended audience).
This is the theory. In reality, it’s mostly ideological opponents who accuse the speaker of using dog-whistles, whereas supporters understand the words at face values, which is precisely the opposite of what the theory would predict. So, for example, Democrats often say that Republican policies to restrain welfare spending are racist dog-whistles—but how would they know? Surely the very theory of dog-whistles should predict that Democrats wouldn’t recognise that these are racist claims. Whereas Republicans swear up and down that they really do believe in low government spending and not rewarding sloth. In the end, if you can hear the dog-whistle, you are the dog.
I think the real meaning of “dog-whistle politics” is trying to ascribe an unpleasant secret meaning to your ideological opponents’ straightforward positions, and therefore avoid the unpleasant task of having to consider whether their ideas may have merit.
For the avoidance of doubt, I was not endorsing any claim that anyone is dog-whistling, I was explaining what the term means. Having said which:
I don’t think we know this is true. (It may be true that supporters generally say they understand the words at face value, but since dog-whistling accusations often concern things one is Not Supposed To Say it wouldn’t be surprising if supporters claim to take the words at face value even if they hear the whistling loud and clear.)
No, I don’t think that’s the claim—I think you’re taking the metaphor too literally. What it predicts is that these claims should have an innocent face-value meaning but also be understandable by their intended audience as saying something else that the speaker doesn’t want to say explicitly; that’s all.
I think it is most likely that (1) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others say things intended to convey a message to some listeners while, at least, maintaining plausible deniability and/or avoiding overt offence to others, and (2) it sometimes does happen that politicians and others get accused of doing this when in fact they had no such intention. Because both of those seem like things that would obviously often serve the purposes of the people in question, and I can’t see what would stop them happening.
(In some cases the speaker may expect the implicit meaning to be clearly understood by both supporters and opponents, but just want to avoid saying something dangerous too explicitly. 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.)
When you say “In reality” and “the real meaning [...] is”, are you claiming that the phenomenon described on (e.g.) that Wikipedia page never, or scarcely ever, actually happens? To take a couple of prominent examples, would you really want to claim that
when a US politician speaks of “family values”, they scarcely ever intend this to be understood as (at least) a friendly gesture by, e.g., supporters of organizations like the American Family Association, the Family Research Council, the Family Research Institute, the Traditional Values Coalition, the Values Voter Summit, etc.?
or that they don’t also intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy-and-positive than, say, “opposition to same-sex marriage, treating transgender people as belonging to whatever gender they were assigned at birth, opposition to abortion”, and all the other specific things that actually distinguish those organizations dedicated to “family” and “values” from their ideological opponents?
during the US Democratic primaries in 2008, nothing Hillary Clinton’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight Barack Obama’s race in ways that would make him less appealing to white voters, and nothing Obama’s campaign said and did was intended to highlight his race in ways that would make him more appealing to black voters?
OK, that’s fair. It’s possible that the sympathetic hear the alleged dog-whistle but deny it, although I still think our default assumption should be to believe the supporters unless we have specific evidence otherwise. But we are still left with the puzzle of why opponents can hear the allegedly inaudible whistle.
No. Let’s look at what wikipedia says:
You’re now trying to water down dog-whistling to a mere ‘plausible deniablity.’ These are two distinct theories:
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ most people think I’m arguing about the government’s aqueduct-building. But members of the Anti-Bristol Society understand this to mean that I really want to persecute Bristolians, and so will vote for me. (Dog-whistling).
When I say ‘aqueducts are bad’ everyone understands that I really mean that I want to persecute Bristolians, and that I’m reaching out to the Anti-Bristol Society. But because I didn’t say I want to persecute Bristolians, I have just enough plausible deniability to not get thrown out of polite society. (Plausible deniability).
Note that these two ideas are essentially opposites.
Scarcely ever. Consider the example from the UK—how on earth is that dog-whistling? Both the Conservative manifesto at the last election and the official policy of the Coalition government explicitly state the goal of limiting immigration. These policies have been criticised as, inter alia, racist. So they run adverts arguing that “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration.” Where’s the dog whistle? Isn’t the simpler story that they’re trying to defend their stated policies? If this is a dog-whistle, what is the content of the dog-whistle, over and above their policies? What’s the payoff? It doesn’t really make sense.
Regarding your specific examples:
I have no idea how those specific organisations, with which I have no particular familiarity, react to an individual phrase.
Republicans certainly intend “family values” to sound more warm-and-fuzzy and positive than “heteronormativity.” But there is a world of difference between using the most positive language to describe your own position and the most negative to describe the opposition (pro-choice vs pro-death, death tax vs estate tax, Obamacare vs Affordable Care Act, etc) and dog-whistling, or even plausible deniability. Social conservatives are not hiding anything by saying they favour “family values.” They are perfectly willing to defend each and every one of the policy planks, but they want one phrase to sum it all up.
I’ll never be able to prove that nothing they did was intended like that. But I certainly don’t believe that the most-remarked-on incident (Bill Clinton comparing Obama’s win in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s win in the South Carolina primary) was in any way a dog-whistle, and I certainly do believe that what really happened there was that an innocuous comment was seized upon by people as a stick with which to beat Clinton, with the convenient excuse that the very innocuousness of the comment is the evidence for its malignity, because the evil is somehow hidden.
There’s a continuum between the two forms of equivocation according to the percentage of the out group that can hear the dog whistle.
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.]
That shows that they wouldn’t recognize a well done dog-whistle, but they may still recognize a poorly done one where the Republicans attempt to make it something only racists understand, but do not succeed at doing so.
You describe the flip side of dog whistle politics, which are false accusations of dog whistle politics. I think both happen.
Sometimes the accusations are justified, but it is an extremely poisonous tactic to the discussion, and even to your own thinking. It’s easy to project secret evil intent where you already have some fundamental disagreement with a person, and it relieves you of actually having to confront the argument as given. “He really means...”
As I noted before, in forums like these, where people come in and out of threads, and haven’t read all that goes on, I think the accusations are an extra loser, as you just end up looking like a putz, objecting to the unobjectionable.
Argue against posts as given.
That’s a catchy comeback on the less than perfect metaphor, but not literally true. Sometimes people really do dog whistle, and sometimes you can hear it even if you’re not the dog (the intended audience).