In advance of the January Georgia runoff elections, Doug Collins, the motor-mouthed former Georgia Congressman and ardent Trump supporter, exhorted Georgia conservatives to go to the polls to support Kelly Loeffler, saying that Democratic Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock has failed to uphold the values of Georgia. “The things that he’s been spatting down here are not consistent with Georgia values,” Collins told Fox News in a December 29 interview.[i] It seemed unusual to me that Collins, as a former Baptist pastor, would challenge the values of another, Warnock, particularly given that Warnock is pastor of the renowned Ebenezer Baptist Church. Furthermore, Warnock is the son of 2 Pentecostal pastors, therefore one could reasonably assume that he was raised with strong Christian values that led him to the ministry himself. So I was confused, but I let it pass. Nonetheless, I kept feeling as if I had heard this before. Then I realized that I had, and not that long ago. And I now find it deeply troubling and dangerous.
A few months before Collins’ comment, during their second debate for South Carolina Senate, Lindsey Graham said, in warning people away from his opponent, Jamie Harrison: “To young people out there, young people of color, young immigrants, this is a great state, but one thing I can say without any doubt, you can be an African American and go to the Senate but you just have to share our values.”[ii] The media interpret this comment as a way of saying that conservatives share South Carolina values and liberals do not. Maybe so, but when the same comment is uttered in another race where a White Republican is running against an African-American with substantial credibility and status, I hear a dog whistle. And the comment is not a new one, hatched just for the 2020/2021 campaigns. We have heard this before as part of Mitt Romney’s disastrous attempt to seem presidential with his early campaign trip to London in 2012. While there the Romney campaign opined that Romney would be a better President than Obama because only he understood the “shared Anglo-Saxon heritage” common to Britain and America.[iii] The statement at the time was treated as a gaffe, given the strong influence of Normans on the culture and language of the UK and how so much of modern UK has its roots in non-Anglo-Saxon culture. To the target audience, however, it was a clear reminder that President Obama is “not one of us,” that is to say, “doesn’t share our values.”
Dog whistles have been used in political dialogue for generations, and no one political party owns them. And not all dog whistles are political. They are sometimes used in advertising in a way that connects with a certain demographic without the general population being aware of their presence. Simply put, a dog whistle is code that is apparent only to the party to whom it is directed. This all sounds like a lot of work, so why do politicians go to the trouble to develop a dog whistle strategy? The great advantage of the strategy is that it imparts total deniability to the user. If the speaker is accused of racism, the accuser can be made to look paranoid or overly sensitive. Meanwhile, the speaker sends a clear message as intended and walks away from the scene of the rhetorical crime with clean hands. When caught in the act, the defense is often that accused never spoke in racial terms or insinuations. Except they did exactly that to the cognizant audience.
Dog whistles, by their very nature, can be hard to pick up for the linguistically uninitiated. That is why it is so important for us to be on the lookout for them in order to understand what our leaders are saying and to whom they are directing their message. Sometimes the code is simple, but more often the words are only understandable within a specific context.
One of the more potent dog whistles has been the word “globalist.” This sounds as if it is a philosophical issue, calling out someone who is looking to an inclusive set of policies rather than focusing entirely on the inner society at home. But that is not how the word translates to the target audience when verbalized as a dog whistle. The term has been used as code for “Jewish” for decades. Ultra-right-wing publications such as The Daily Stormer no longer even attempt a pretense when using the word, and in its writing “globalist” is half of the pejorative “globalist Jew.”[iv] So it is no coincidence that Trump’s supporters rail against Janet Yellen, Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and, of course, George Soros as globalists, all of them being Jewish. This particular dog whistle has been sounded for hundreds of years and the term gets resurrected each time there is a new communication technology that enables a further reach into society’s consciousness.[v] Because we now know how to translate the code, we know enough to call out those who use “globalist” as a negative descriptor for enabling anti-semitism.
And now we have a new dog whistle emerging: “sharing our values.” The phrase is sufficiently vague that it is hard to know what it means. I suggest that we must decode it so we can bring to light the prejudices of those who use it. Collins’ use of the phrase is seemingly without context. Graham’s usage is a bit more open, but not fully subject to decoding. Fortunately, we were recently handed the Rosetta Stone by the Maricopa County Republican Committee. The Committee debated censuring Cindy McCain in the aftermath of the GOP’s losses in the past 2 elections. The reason for the censure? Besides her failure to line up behind Dear Leader Trump, McCain is accused of supporting “globalist policies and candidates” and not supporting policies that run counter to “Republican values.”[vi] If Cindy McCain was a dominating force in local politics, this could all make sense. Her support for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris might have swung the election in the most important political county in Arizona. But she does not hold that type of power. She is a symbol of a different era in politics and is now a scapegoat. A disturbing yet consistent explanation, and one that connects intimately to the new dog whistle, is that Maricopa County demographics are changing. Comparing 2000 to 2020, the population of Maricopa County has changed from 12% to 28% Latinx.[vii] Over the same period of time, the Jewish population of Maricopa County grew by over 19%.[viii] This is not to say that the Jewish, Hispanic, and Latino populations vote as blocks. Instead, I make the case that the dog whistle is demonstrating that previously entitled (namely White Christian) voters feel aggrieved and threatened by demographic changes. “Sharing values” and anti-globalism is a cloaked way of saying that “our tribe is under attack by the other, and the other cannot be trusted. You already know why they cannot be trusted.”
It is often believed that this type of campaign rhetoric dissipates after the election has settled. I submit that recent events prove otherwise. We are living the horror of dog whistles leading to mob violence with murderous results in the Capitol. That is bad enough, but more importantly, dog whistles have a corrosive impact on the economic health of the middle class which, in turn, degrades the overall health of the country. There are historic dog whistles excoriating “welfare queens,” “food stamp fraud,” “the group of takers vs. makers,” and the like. Politicians warn us that we are rapidly becoming a society dependent on government largess, and that progressive policies are creating a subset of people who prefer handouts over work. We heard this quite explicitly during the debate leading up to the CARES Act in 2020. These objections and the signaling dog whistles are designed to cast a racist pall over policies developed to help people struggling near and below the poverty line. Such is the power of the dog whistle that the result of providing a racial overlay whistle has been that the average voter shies away from progressive policies that help the middle class and those that support it. But the data show that the fears ginned up by the whistle are without merit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities issued a report clearly showing that the rhetoric is covering up for decidedly regressive policies. While the political shouting suggests the creation of a class of loafers paid to stay home and do nothing while living off government handouts, only 9% of 2010 entitlement dollars went to individuals that were neither elderly nor seriously disabled. In addition, 78% of the money headed to non-working households went for medical care, unemployment insurance benefits (which individuals must have a significant work history to receive), Social Security survivor benefits for the children and spouses of deceased workers, and Social Security benefits for retirees between ages 62 and 64.[ix]
On the other hand, the same study reports that the richest 20% of the population receive 66% of the Federal tax expenditure benefit, while the bottom 20% receive only 2.8% of the benefit.[x] In other words, the dog whistle serves the purpose of redirecting attention away from the wealthy who dine at the Federal trough, while encouraging the majority of the population to vote against their own self-interest.[xi] Thus does the dog whistle continue the status quo of supporting regressive policies that hurt the middle class.
Curiously, the history of dog whistles may also show a way to combat their insidious nature. The most famous whistle in recent times is the Willie Horton television ad from the 1988 HW Bush/Dukakis presidential campaign. While we forget about this now, race was not explicit in the ad, which had devastating impact on the Dukakis campaign and helped reverse a double digital Bush deficit. Later, when Democratic party officials such as Lloyd Bentsen and Jessie Jackson pointed out that the ad was inherently racist in its message and intent[xii], support for Bush immediately dropped. A controlled experiment was later run that supports the conclusion drawn from observation of evolving public opinion concerning the Horton ad. [xiii] The study worked with two focus groups: one was shown a fabricated news story about a hypothetical candidate for governor containing visual and verbal implied racial content. The second group was shown the same news story, but with text that was explicitly racial. The authors found that white viewers of the implicit story were strongly in support of the candidate. Support for the candidate was substantially lower in the second group where the racial elements were made explicit. This result has been interpreted as evidence that dog whistles work when they are skillfully applied but when the implicit becomes explicit, few want to own the label of being a racist.[xiv]
If the conclusion of the study mentioned above is true, then a solution to addressing dog whistles becomes clear: simply said, we need interpret the code for those who may not be the intended recipients and shame those who accept the language without challenge. Doing so tends to run counter to both political speech and polite society. It is considered to be offensive to call someone out as using racist language. The dog whistle recognizes this and takes advantage of it by being shocked, shocked, to find out that the questioned speech could be construed in a racist context. The data and controlled experiments show that the fake outrage needs to be ignored and the reality hammered home.
We are seeing evidence of this right now concerning the calling out of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her current problem is not that she is bat-shit crazy. Within the current make-up of the Republican Party, many of her hypotheses barely raise an eyebrow. But she went too far when claiming in a 2018 Facebook post that the California wildfires were caused by beams from blue lasers from space. Not much was made of this comment in 2018, but her new status in the US Congress caused a re-examination. It did not take long before people dissected her insane comment and recognized that she was proposing that the lasers were directed by Jews, including the Rothschilds, for financial gain.[xv] These claims have origins in Tsarist anti-Semitic propaganda first published in 1903 and reiterated by the Nazis in 1933. Taylor did not specifically say the photons were of Jewish origin, but it was implicit in her words and her naming of the Rothschilds and other Jewish financiers as the culprits. The revealed context made it clear that her views were not only insane, but also contained insidious anti-Semitic dog whistles. Press reports making her implicit prejudice explicit horrified people, made her lose her committee seats, and made it clear that she is a racist and anti-Semite. When the implicit became implicit, she lost power immediately.
And that is what we must do each time we hear the dog whistles and recognize them for what they are.
[i] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doug-collins-raphael-warnock-georgia-values-campaign
[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/10/lindsey-graham-black-people-immigrants-south-carolina
[iii]https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2012/07/25/anglosaxon_quote_by_mitt_romney_aide_in_uk_raises_hackles_and_chuckles.html. Less reported was the comment that President Obama “doesn’t value the NATO alliance as much. He’s very comfortable with American decline and the traditional alliances don’t mean as much to him.” Funny how that quote never resurfaced as Trump systematically dismantled the traditional alliances, all to the cheering of his Republican enablers.
[iv] https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-how-did-the-term-globalist-became-an-anti-semitic-slur-blame-bannon-1.5895925
[v] https://www.wired.com/2017/03/internet-protocols-elders-zion/
[vi] https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2021/01/10/after-sacking-capitol-arizona-gop-wants-censure-cindy-mccain/6615754002/. For good measure, the debate also included a phrase admonishing McCain for her drug addiction, an illness to which she admitted and had treated almost 30 years ago. Nice adherence by the Committee to the values of forgiveness and redemption.
[vii] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/us/biden-maricopa-county.html
[viii] http://www.jewishaz.com/community/asu-releases-first-study-of-jewish-community-since-2002/article_dc1c1d8e-535d-11ea-9b86-0bde04ff0bb5.html
[ix] https://www.cbpp.org/research/contrary-to-entitlement-society-rhetoric-over-nine-tenths-of-entitlement-benefits-go-to?fa=view&id=3677
[x] ibid
[xi] Ian Haney Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics, Oxford University Press (2014)
[xii] https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/24/us/foes-accuse-bush-campaign-of-inflaming-racial-tension.html
[xiii] Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card- Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality, Princeton University Press (2001)
[xiv] ibid
[xv] https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-jewish-space-laser-mockery-1565325
