The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    The Death of the Dog Whistle

    By Doctor Cleveland on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 11:58am | Politics

    There's been a lot of post-election hand-wringing about how the Republicans can "reach out" to minority voters. If they can't win just by energizing their shrinking base of white people, what's next? Immigration reform? Marco Rubio? What's it going to take?

    At the same time, you have former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan blaming the Romney loss on voters from "urban areas." Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

    Maybe I'm overthinking this, but if one chunk of your party is talking about reaching out to minority voters, and another chunk is publicly talking about minority voters in code, you are on the fast track to nowhere. And if your national candidates are using racial euphemisms in public, don't act surprised when people who aren't white don't want to vote for you.

    Filing petitions talking about secession from the Union doesn't help, either. Um, Party of Lincoln? Hello?

    The Republicans have made their political living for a generation on the racial dog-whistle, the coded appeal that comes across loud and clear to white racists but not to whites who don't like to think of themselves as racist. Lee Atwater famously explains the procedure:

     

    You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”



    Couldn't be clearer. But here's the problem for the Atwaters of the world now that more than a quarter of the electorate isn't white:

    Racists aren't the only people who can hear the dog whistle. Minorities hear it clear as a bell.

    When people say that people who aren't racists don't hear the dog whistle, they mean other white people can't hear it. And that conflation of "other white people" as "people" is part of the problem.

    This is where a term like "white privilege" becomes useful. A white person who isn't actively hostile to other races, but has the luxury of not noticing racist hostility is enjoying white privilege in a pretty clear way. Does that make them racist? No. But giving yourself permission to remain clueless does pretty clearly help maintain the problem. And when white people bend over backwards to avoid offending anybody by calling an unrepentant dog-whistler a racist, that's white privilege in a pretty toxic form.

    The Atwaterite Republican strategy is to say things that get the racist elements in their base worked up but that other whites will give them a pass on. (And, if anyone tries to call them on their BS, they take elaborate umbrage on cable news, and accuse their critics of "playing the race card." Obviously, white people who don't notice the dog whistle think "playing the race card" is a terrible, terrible thing.)

    But getting away with your B.S. on cable TV isn't enough when we're talking about an electorate that's 25%-30% non-white. Those voters won't give people a pass. They know a dog whistle when they hear it. They can't afford not to.

    Time to go back to the drawing board, fellas. How about "Party of Lincoln?" It's worked before.

    Topics: 
    Politics

    Comments

    This is all a misunderstanding for heaven sakes.

    Representative Ryan meant to say

    URBANE!

    He was in a hurry and misread his notes.

     


    by Richard Day on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 12:25pm

    Dick wins - Line of the day.

    He's so full of fellow-feeling for the (defeated) Republicans these days that he's even cutting Ryan some slack.

    Good to see, Dick! hahahahahahaha


    by Qnonymous (not verified) on Fri, 11/16/2012 - 8:15am

    Oh it is soooooooooo very wonderful when someone gets my point.

    hahahahah


    by Richard Day on Fri, 11/16/2012 - 6:50pm

    Either Ryan is dog whistling, or he's completely incompetent.  The only non-racist way to parse what he's saying is something like, "People who live where most people live voted for Obama."  Did he not see that coming?  Did they fail to anticipate the existence of urban centers?


    by DF on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 12:42pm

    Of course, he could be dog whistling AND completely incompetent. That is not an unfair reading of the Romney/Ryan campaign.


    by Doctor Cleveland on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 3:11pm

    So, never attribute to malice what you could attribute to both malice and incompetence?  Now we're getting somewhere!


    by DF on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 3:55pm

    Romney's latest remarks, IMO,are a good example of this (his blaming his loss on all the 'gifts' Obama bestowed on minorities).

    A wise person told me long ago that people only use behaviors as long as they perceive it delivers them what they want. When initially their long used actions aren't working for them, they ramp them up - it isn't until they 'hit the wall' will they moderate/change.

    Sadly, for decades the dog whistling has achieved what they wanted, but just maybe their going to hit that wall in the near future.


    by Aunt Sam on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 1:23pm

    Ramping it up as it becomes less effective is a good description of what's happening, Aunt Sam. Thanks


    by Doctor Cleveland on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 3:16pm

    You know, Doc, I always wondered if this was a real quote, so I'm glad to be able to hear it myself. It sounded plausible and certainly comported with what I saw happening, but it's good to know that it really happened as quoted.

    What's interesting here, however, is, if I heard him correctly, he's trying to say that race is becoming less and less of an issue as the dog whistle necessarily becomes more abstract and thus less effective as a motivating tool.

    IOW, according to him, the racism in the dog whistle becomes more diluted as the operative using it is forced to express it more abstractly and less emotionally. And as it becomes more diluted, according to Atwater, it becomes less effective. 


    by Anonymous Peter... (not verified) on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 2:22pm

    It's interesting to hear the tape, isn't it?

    As for the abstraction thing ... I wonder if it has gotten less effective. I think on the one hand you do have voters who are expert at translating those abstractions, the way people can follow a changing and evolving street argot if they speak it all the time. On the other hand, I think you have moments where the dog-whistle isn't effective enough, and so conservatives resort to the plain old whistle, loud and shrill. (The GOPster in Maine talking about black voter fraud is one example. Santorum's "give your money to black people" is another.)


    by Doctor Cleveland on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 3:45pm

    You're right about those points, Doc...no question.

    However, I think the printed quote leaves out some of the nuance in what he was saying. He's still "all in" in using the dog whistle and stirring up racial animosity, no question, but there seems to be a bit more to it. Not an exonerating "bit," but...

    I hear he had something of a "death bed conversion," and he may have been moving toward that a bit here. Of course, I'm only speculating here, based on one or two "notes" I thought I heard.


    by Anonymous Peter... (not verified) on Fri, 11/16/2012 - 11:21am

    It's a week after elections - everyone's all remorseful for the obligatory soundbite/talk show. They'll be kicking sand in scrawny guys' eyes by Turkey Day, no worries. Ryan will be rehabilitated; Romney will be laid on the altar as the guy who wasn't conservative enough to win the election. And about them urban areas...


    by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 11/16/2012 - 11:39am

    In the lead-up to the infamous remarks, it is fascinating to witness the confidence with which Atwater believes himself to be establishing the racial innocence of latter-day Republican campaigning: “My generation,” he insists, “will be the first generation of Southerners that won’t be prejudiced.” He proceeds to develop the argument that by dropping talk about civil rights gains like the Voting Rights Act and sticking to the now-mainstream tropes of fiscal conservatism and national defense, consultants like him were proving “people in the South are just like any people in the history of the world.”

    It is only upon Professor Lamis’s gently Socratic follow-ups, and those of a co-interviewer named “Saul” (Carter hasn't been able to confirm his identity, but suspects it was the late White House correspondent Saul Friedman), that Atwater begins to loosen up—prefacing his reflections, with a plainly guilty conscience, “Now, y’all aren't quoting me on this?” (Apparently , this is the reason why Atwater’s name wasn’t published in 1984 but was in 1999, after his death).

    He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he'd absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina’s middle-class  black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater).

    “That voter, in my judgment,” he claims, “will be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.” Because race no longer matters: “In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]... the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.” He continues, in words that uncannily echo the “47 percent tape” (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that “statistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,” the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won't have anything to do with it.


    by Anonymous Peter... (not verified) on Fri, 11/16/2012 - 11:50am

    Ok but Bush managed to get re-elected partly by appearing very inclusive, still playing some kinder, gentler notes (Islam is a peaceful religion, we got to do something about immigration besides walls, etc) and just ignoring the loud dog whistling elsewhere in his party, rather than denouncing it. And his half-Hispanic nephew just filed for starting to run for office And plenty of Hispanic Republicans have ideas about what to do and have been working on it

    It doesn't necessarily mean death of the Republican party if some of its loudest keep dog whistling, just sayin.' Dems have always had their loudmouths turning off large groups of people, too. I think thinking that Limbaugh et.al. dooms them is mighty cocky thinking. It doesn't take winning all the minority vote for them to win things.


    by artappraiser on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 4:59pm

    In what somebody called the 'Revolving Door of Remorse' Mitt will, like former GOP champion Dubya, be absent at the next GOP Convention.


    by NCD on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 7:19pm

    Republicans did not face aggressive push back when they launced attacks on Blacks. They then moved on to Hispanics. Because the racism was couched as debate about immigration, "Self-deportation" slipped under the radar. They then moved on to attacking women. Multiple states have bills that are designed to end funding to Planned Parenthood. The Komen Foundation balked at stem cell research.

    the GOP has a multi-pronged attack on those who are not wealthy white males. They have the support of about half the country. They will aways have a reliabl base that makes it important to remain engaged and actively combat the GOP intrusion on our rights.

     

     


    by AnonymousRm (not verified) on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 7:56pm

    That Jindal bit about how Romney wanted the voters to like him even though he doesn't seem to like a whole bunch of voters is pretty biting.  You can't get away with that divisive garbage any more, not a national scale, though it probably still works in more local races.


    by Michael Maiello on Fri, 11/16/2012 - 10:36am

    Eh - I wouldn't get too worked up about Ryan's comments. Words are easy to discern - "voters from urban areas" doesn't mean the same thing as "urban voters," I think. It's always voters from urban areas that propel liberal Democrats - that's where not only minorities live but upper middle class liberal whites as well.


    by Orion on Sat, 11/17/2012 - 8:44am