Dog whistle
Language that carries an ordinary meaning for most of the audience and a second, sharper meaning for a target group, so that the speaker can send the sharper message while denying it.
A dog whistle is a double message. To the general audience the words are innocuous, even admirable: law and order, states' rights, family values, real Americans, globalists. To the intended group the same words name a grievance or a target that could not be named aloud without cost. The device gives the speaker both audiences and a defense against either: challenged, the speaker points to the innocent meaning and accuses the challenger of hearing things.
The deniability is the design. Lee Atwater's 1981 description of how explicit racial appeals had been replaced by abstract policy language is the most quoted account of the device from the inside. Exploits In Group Favoritism and Confirmation Bias.
Historical examples
In a 1981 interview with the political scientist Alexander Lamis, the Republican strategist Lee Atwater described the evolution of Southern campaign language from explicit racial slurs in the 1950s to "states' rights" and "forced busing" in the 1960s and to abstract talk of tax cuts by the 1980s, with the underlying appeal unchanged but "a lot more abstract." The interview was published anonymously in 1984 and under his name after his death.
Lamis, Alexander P. The Two-Party South. 2nd expanded ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990; Haney López, Ian. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Victor Klemperer's diary-based study of Nazi German traced how ordinary words were charged with second meanings, "fanatical" as praise, "international" and "cosmopolitan" as accusations, so that a newspaper could signal a target without naming it. The book is the earliest close reading of coded political language in a modern state.
Klemperer, Victor. LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen. Berlin: Aufbau, 1947; English edition The Language of the Third Reich, translated by Martin Brady. London: Athlone, 2000.
In advertising and commerce
Advertising uses the device in a milder register: "for people who get it," "if you know, you know," "not for everyone." The general reader sees an ordinary tagline; the intended buyer hears membership in a group the advertiser cannot name without excluding everyone else. Holt's work on cultural branding describes how brands signal to a tribe while selling to the public.
Holt, Douglas B. How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.
Find a phrase that means something different to two groups of people. Where did it come from? What does each group hear?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
"We need to take our neighborhoods back for the people who built them." Asked who he meant, the candidate said "everyone."
What to notice. An innocent reading and a sharper one; the retreat to "everyone" when challenged is the signature.
A flyer describes the school board candidate as "committed to protecting our children from certain influences," and names none.
What to notice. "Certain influences" is heard one way by the target group and denied to everyone else.
"This brand is for people who get it." The advertisement never says what "it" is.
What to notice. A public tagline carrying a private membership signal, deniable to anyone outside the tribe.
Sources
- Haney López, Ian. Dog Whistle Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0199964277
- Lamis, Alexander P. The Two-Party South. 2nd expanded ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. ISBN 978-0195063356
- Klemperer, Victor. The Language of the Third Reich. Translated by Martin Brady. London: Athlone, 2000. ISBN 978-0826491305
- Mendelberg, Tali. The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN 978-0691070711