The whole point of speaking in dog whistles is to provide deniability, so I imagine it’s possible that misinterpretation can occur. I can’t recall any examples.
Not a dog whistle. To be a “dog whistle” the word or phrase must, like a real dog whistle, be heard only by its intended audience. Pretty much everyone hearing “Barack Hussein Obama” (unless in the context where his middle name is required) hears that as a slur against Obama, implying that he’s at best foreign and at worst Muslim.
A real dog whistle is one only a dog can hear. In politics, a dog whistle is a phrase that carries a message that only the intended audience can “hear”. A good example is the one that Goofus linked to, in which George W. Bush promised not to appoint the sort of justices who decided the Dred Scott case. To most people, it sounds like he’s making an unexceptional promise. To evangelicals, he’s saying that he won’t appoint justices who support Roe v. Wade. This is because evangelicals have argued that Roe v. Wade is as bad as the Dred Scott decision.
I wouldn’t call the phrase “states’ rights” a dog whistle. It wasn’t intended to be a secret message that the opposition wouldn’t detect. Everyone at the time knew what George Wallace and his ilk meant when they used the phrase. The term “states’ rights” was intended to frame the argument in terms that weren’t morally objectionable. It was dishonest, but I don’t think it was a dog whistle.
Sorry, I dont accept this. Do you have cites from evangelicals that say GWB quote means that to them? Or a cite from GWB saying that what he meant?
Do we have any cites at all from a politico admitting he used a “dog whistle” phrase?
I did some Google searches on this. It’s always a writer of the opposite persuasion (usually a Liberal writer) stating that so & so used a phrase, and it 'clearly" was meant as a dog whistle.
So far, I have seen nothing but innuendos. if it is so damn common, surely* someone* must have admitted using them by now.
Yeah, right. A politician is going to say “whoops! You caught me! When I said “problems with our cities” I really meant “problems with black people.” Busted”.
Nixon was pretty open about it, at least in private. He just didn’t use the term dog whistle.
I have no doubt that speakers will use phrases that have different connotations to their different listeners in order to slip something past the opponents.
However, it seems to me that “dog whistle” is an overused accusation, usually invoked to allow the opposition to argue against what they *wanted *the speaker to have said instead of what the speaker actually did say. Makes it easier to demonize people on the other side.
Well, yes. A dog whistle is a type of innuendo.
Decades later? After retirement? Or even after death? To sell books? or he went over to another party, that happens.
I expect it to be rare, but there’s nuthin.
I think RNATB’s link is pretty definitively exactly what you’re looking for.
Except that quote is taken out of context. Lee Atwater was trying to show that the "new’ GOP wasnt racist, than now rather than talking about race, they are now focusing on economics.
He did admit that maybe* subconsciously* that racism is part of it. Sure. Maybe. Subconsciously .
He did not admit to anything like “dog whistles” . You can listen to the entire 42 minute conversation. It is quite clear that his quote is taken out of context.
And the Haldeman quote immediately preceding it?
Not germane to “dog whistles”. Ya got nuttin so far.
Well, other than the fact Nixon and staff were assholes, which is a given.
As Paul Simon said, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
I eagerly await enrollment information for DrDeth’s School of Handwaving. Is financial aid available for those who qualify?
Find something that validates "A statement or expression which in addition to its ostensible meaning has a further interpretation or connotation intended to be understood only by a specific target audience"" your quotes do not do this.
One of the points of a true rhetorical dog whistle is NOT that it is indecipherable to the opposition in the way an actual physical dog whistle absolutely can’t be heard by humans.
There may have been a time in the past when the various groups were so insular that a northern liberal would not have been aware that “states rights” was southern racist code for the good old days before the Civil Rights era.
That insular past is long gone. Nowadays everybody knows the other side’s code words too well for that standard to hold. As such DrDeth’s insistence that that’s the necessary threshold to achieve genuine dog whistleness is quibbling at best and disingenuous at worst.
In modern parlance, a “dog whistle” is any rhetorical device that gives plausible deniability as judged by a *favorable *audience.
When somebody says “state’s rights” to a KKK rally it means “freedom to be a racist” to the KKKers. And within that context it also means “freedom to be a racist” when heard by a mainstream liberal or conservative audience as well. There’s no secret code here. The only point is whether the words “state’s rights” give the speaker, and the KKK audience, enough of a fig leaf to hide behind to say “Oh no it doesn’t mean anything racist” without their nose extending a couple feet *a la *Pinocchio. As long as supposedly neutral observers (e.g. the media) are unwilling to call them on it, their nose remains ungrown and the code remains unbroken.
With the ever increasing level of brazen pure BS in politics and of social polarization we’re getting to the point the US was at with the Soviet Union wherein we’d produce recon photos of tanks and they’d say to the UN General Assembly with a straight face: “those are farm tractors.”
As long as somebody else on their team was willing to pipe up with “Yep, looks like a farm tractor to me”, they’ve got plausible deniability to their own satisfaction.
Unsurprisingly the other side sees nothing plausible about that flimsy level of deniability.
And the difference of opinion about the denial’s plausibility is the entire point. It’s what separates a dog whistle that only one side hears from a referee’s whistle both hear. The “silence” is in the plausibility.
Can this be overplayed? Sure. Sometimes a cigar is truly just a cigar and accusations of hidden meanings are bogus.
But I submit that in an era where political BS runs rampant there’s a lot more of politicians speaking carefully coded “plausible deniability speak” than are speaking plainly. It’s gradeschool playground level rhetoric at best. That some factions fully expect to fool grown ups with it speaks volumes.
At the republican onvention in 2008, Sarah Palin, quoting “a writer”, said:
Sounds pretty innocuous, right? Typical Republican pining for a mythical small-town America. Except that the “writer” was Westbrook Pegler, a guy who was kicked off the John Birch Society’s journal for being too Anti-Semitic, who said Jews were instinctively sympathetic to Communism, and who lamented that would-be assassin Giuseppe Zangara had missed FDR. Pegler had been largely forgotten except by the likes of Pat Buchanan, who quoted Pegler in a 1990 book.
To most of the audience, she’s just quoting some vaguely pleasant line about small town folk. To those that recognize the quote, though, she’s… Holy crap, quoting that guy! Luckily in the Internet Age, everyone now hears dog whistles. Within a week of the speech, a reporter had dug up the source of the quote and shared it with the world.
Did Palin ever admit that she was using that as a dog whistle to signal to the troglodytes that she was one of them? I don’t know. I would tend to doubt it, though.
ETA: http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/09/palins-source-011713
How about the recently mentioned “New York Values”?
The New Yorkers said, yeah, those are just ‘values’.
When Cruz was asked what he meant, he said something like the voters in South Carolina know what he means: the people in New York who dominate media and money. In other words, Jews.
A dog whistle is intended to galvanize some population, yet be without any measure of legally accountable decibels. These things will be more and more apparent to the opposition, but will still be used to galvanize the faithful.