Dog whistle (politics)
In politics, a dog whistle is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition. The concept is named after ultrasonic dog whistles, which are audible to dogs but not humans. Dog whistles use language that appears normal to the majority but communicates specific things to intended audiences. They are generally used to convey messages on issues likely to provoke controversy without attracting negative attention.
History and usage[edit]
Australia[edit]
The term was first picked up in Australian politics in the mid-1990s, and was frequently applied to the political campaigning of John Howard.[4] Throughout his 11 years as Australian prime minister and particularly in his fourth term, Howard was accused of communicating messages appealing to anxious Australian voters using code words such as "un-Australian", "mainstream", and "illegals".[5][6]
One notable example was the Howard government's message on refugee arrivals. His government's tough stance on immigration was popular with voters, but was accused of using the issue to additionally send veiled messages of support to voters with racist leanings,[7] while maintaining plausible deniability by avoiding overtly racist language.[8] Another example was the publicity of the Australian citizenship test in 2007.[8] It has been argued that the test may appear reasonable at face value, but is really intended to appeal to those opposing immigration from particular geographic regions.[9]
Canada[edit]
During the 2015 Canadian federal election, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported on a controversy involving the Conservative party leader, incumbent Prime Minister Stephen Harper, using the phrase "old-stock Canadians" in a debate, apparently to appeal to his party's base supporters. Commentators, including pollster Frank Graves and former Quebec Liberal MP Marlene Jennings, saw this as a codeword historically used against non-white immigrants.[10]
Midway through the election campaign, the Conservative Party had hired Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby as a political adviser when they fell to third place in the polls - behind the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party.[11] On 17 September 2015, during a televised election debate, Stephen Harper, while discussing the government's controversial decision to remove certain immigrants and refugee claimants from accessing Canada's health care system, made reference to "Old Stock Canadians" as being in support of the government's position. Marlene Jennings called his words racist and divisive, as they are used to exclude Canadians of colour.[10]
Indonesia[edit]
Darmawan Prasodjo notes the use of the concept of "strong leadership" as a dog whistle in the context of Indonesian politics.[12]
Israeli–Palestinian conflict[edit]
The popular Palestinian nationalist and Anti-Zionist slogan "from the river to the sea" has been called a dog-whistle for the complete destruction of Israel by Charles C. W. Cooke and Seth Mandel.[13][14] Pat Fallon called its usage "a thinly veiled call for the genocide of millions of Jews in Israel," and the Anti-Defamation League notes that, "It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland."[15]
From the perspective of Palestinian civilians and pro-Palestine supporters, the full slogan should read "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"[16] and its definition as a dog-whistle is refuted. According to United States Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian-American representative in Congress, the slogan is "an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate."[17] According to Maha Nassar, Associate Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona, "the majority of Palestinians who use this phrase do so because they believe that, in 10 short words, it sums up their personal ties, their national rights and their vision for the land they call Palestine. And while attempts to police the slogan's use may come from a place of genuine concern, there is a risk that tarring the slogan as antisemitic – and therefore beyond the pale – taps into a longer history of attempts to silence Palestinian voices."[18] In an interview with Al Jazeera, Nimer Sultany, a lecturer in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, said the adjective expresses "the need for equality for all inhabitants of historic Palestine".[19]
United Kingdom[edit]
Lynton Crosby, who had previously managed John Howard's four election campaigns in Australia, worked as a Conservative Party adviser during the 2005 UK general election, and the term was introduced to British political discussion at this time.[1] In what Goodin calls "the classic case" of dog-whistling,[3] Crosby created a campaign for the Conservatives with the slogan "Are you thinking what we're thinking?": a series of posters, billboards, TV commercials and direct mail pieces with messages like "It's not racist to impose limits on immigration" and "how would you feel if a bloke on early release attacked your daughter?"[20] focused on controversial issues like insanitary hospitals, land grabs by squatters and restraints on police behaviour.[21][22]
Criticism[edit]
Academics disagree on whether the dog-whistle notion has conceptual validity and furthermore on the mechanisms by which discourses identified as dog-whistles function. For instance, the sociologist Barry Hindess criticized Josh Fear's and Robert E. Goodin's respective attempts to theorize dog-whistles on the grounds that they did not pass the Weberian test of value neutrality: "In the case of the concept of ‘dog-whistle politics,' we find that the investigator's—in this case, Fear's—disapproval enters into the definition of the object of study. Goodin avoids this problem, clearly signalling his disapproval—for example, with his ‘particularly pernicious' (2008, p. 224)—but not letting it interfere with his own conceptualisation of the phenomenon. The difficulty here is that this abstinence leaves him with no real distinction between the general phenomena of coded messaging […] and dog whistling in particular, leaving us to suspect that dog whistling should be seen not so much as a novel form of rhetoric, but rather, to borrow an image from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, as a familiar form misliked."[60]
In effect, the philosopher Carlos Santana corroborates Hindess's criticism of the dog-whistle notion as being dependent on the investigator's social and moral values during his own attempted definition, writing: "We don't want every instance of bi-level meaning in political discourse to count as dogwhistles, because not every instance of political doublespeak is problematic in the way prototypical dogwhistles like welfare queen and family values are. Some, like backhanded compliments to political rivals, aren't a major source of social ills. Some, like aspirational hypocrisy (Quill 2010) and deliberate doublespeak meant to bring diverse constituencies together (Maloyed 2011), might even be socially beneficial. Keep in mind what makes dogwhistles problematic: they harm disadvantaged groups, undermine our ability to have a functioning plural society, and muddle our ability to reliably hold political figures responsible for their actions. Given our interest in addressing these harms, it makes sense to limit our definition of dogwhistles to the types of bi-level meaning which engender them."[61]
For another instance of criticism, albeit from another direction, the psychologist Steven Pinker has remarked that the concept of dog whistling allows people to "claim that anyone says anything because you can easily hear the alleged dogwhistles that aren't in the actual literal contents of what the person says".[62]
Mark Liberman has argued that it is common for speech and writing to convey messages that will only be picked up on by part of the audience, but that this does not usually mean that the speaker is deliberately conveying a double message.[63]
Finally, Robert Henderson and Elin McCready argue that plausible deniability is a key characteristic of dog whistles.[64]