Can You Hear Me Now? About Dog Whistles

Tomorrow, our class on immigration and race is reading and discussing a fascinating research article that attempts to explain how politicians use “multi-vocal” speech to address a mainstream group in one way while at the same time signaling a much different message to a sub-group. 

I quote now from Bethany L. Albertson, “Dog-Whistle Politics: Multivocal Communication and Religious Appeals,” Political Behavior (2015):

President Bush’s use of religious appeals has been the subject of some media attention. As Bruce Lincoln writes in the Boston Globe, ‘‘aware that he must appeal to the center to secure reelection, he employs double-coded signals that veil much of his religious message from outsiders’’ (September 12, 2004). David Kuo, who worked for various prominent Republicans and served in the George W. Bush administration, wrote ‘‘we threw in a few obscure turns of phrase known clearly to any evangelical, yet unlikely to be noticed by anyone else, even Kemp (who he was writing for)’’ (p. 59). Multivocal communication, or ‘‘dog-whistle politics,’’ as it has been labeled is not specific to George W. Bush’s rhetoric, or even Republicans; Bill Clinton used the phrase ‘‘send me’’ to structure his endorsement for John Kerry at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The phrase references a passage in the Bible (Isaiah 6:8). Ronald Reagan used language in his 1984 State of the Union address that closely paralleled another biblical passage: ‘‘Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.’’

Both are examples of language that has religious connotations for a subset of the population. Multivocal communication such as this might be particularly effective because it targets those predisposed to respond favorably to the message and goes over the heads of those who might be turned off by it.”

Albertson offers this example from the left:
For example, Subaru ran advertisements in which the cars’ license plates read ‘‘XENA LVR’’ and ‘‘P TOWN.’’ The references were meant to appeal to gay and lesbians without alienating others who were unaware of the significance of the license plates (Kanner 2000). This advertising campaign, which also included the slogan ‘‘It’s not a choice. It’s the way we’re built’’ was intended to operate as multivocal communication; one of the campaign’s developers explains, ‘‘it’s apparent to gay people that we’re talking about being gay, but straight people don’t know what’s going on.’’

Albertson offers this background on the term “dog whistle”:

The phrase ‘‘dog-whistle politics,’’ draws upon the way that dog-whistles are perceptible to dogs but not to humans due to their high frequency. The term became popular during the 2005 election in the UK, where the exemplar of dog-whistle politics was the Conservative slogan, ‘‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’’ The slogan was said to appeal to those who opposed Labour’s stance on immigration. The term has its roots in Australia where it was associated with a political strategist, Lynton Crosby. Crosby ran Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s campaigns before consulting in British politics. The phrase reached William Safire’s ‘‘On Language’’ column in The New York Times in 2005. The 2005 campaign in the UK was arguably a failed attempt at dog-whistle politics, because the possible meanings of ‘‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking’’ became a topic of debate.
Questions I will pose to students: 

Should we fault politicians for this type of dual-messaging, or is this the essence of savvy political communication? 

Should campaign speech have censorship codes when it conveys hate toward an outcast group? 

Assuming that political censorship is out of the question, how should the public learn about coded-messages that are expressed in politics? 

A final question: whatever your political preferences, are there codes that speak to your interests but fly over the heads of people who are different from you?