Dog Whistles and Codes: Covert Republican Message Making

Brendan Beery 5/21/11 

Recent Republican race-baiting, in the person of Newt Gingrich and his allegorical references to Detroit and food stamps, raises anew the issue of Republican “dog-whistle politics.”  That Republicans habitually trip over themselves in the proverbial “race to the bottom” with their appeals to the fears and anxieties of small-mindedness is well understood by any close observer of American politics.  But the well-read and keenly alert are not the electoral targets or concerns of Republican message-makers.  The people Republican strategists seek to reach—or at least not to scare—are the vast numbers of Americans who are not paying attention closely, those whose ignorance renders them susceptible to the game of bait-and-switch that the right-wing has been playing with Americans for decades. 

Republicans mastered the use of dog-whistle politics in the months and years leading up to the George W. Bush presidency.  In his book, The Fall of the House of Bush, journalist Craig Unger described a neoconservative cabal around George W. Bush that understood how off-putting their real agenda—the imposition and spread of Christian fundamentalism—would be to millions of moderate Americans.  So Republicans strategists developed ways to soothe right-wing ambitions with a wink or a nod while keeping mainstream Americans in the dark.  Unger reports, for example, that Bush’s fraternizing with Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach—an avowed evangelical fundamentalist—while it seemed nothing more than celebrity palling around to most Americans, was a strong signal to religious fundamentalists that Bush was one of them.  Likewise, while the catchphrase “compassionate conservatism” was widely understood among neoconservatives to be a euphemism for weaning the poor off of social programs and converting them to Christian living, most Americans, thanks largely to a complicit press corps, saw that phrase as counseling moderation of the harder-edged economic conservatism of the Reagan era.  As I posted earlier, Republicans have continued that name-it-the-opposite-of-what-it-is practice with such disingenuous euphemisms as the “Clean Air Act” and “saving Medicare.”  

While the use of euphemistic misrepresentations in areas of religion and social and economic policy reached its crescendo under Bush, race-related “dog-whistle” politics among conservatives dates to the 1960’s and earlier.  When overt racism became politically less tolerable in the mid-Twentieth Century, public discourse about keeping African Americans “in their place” was characterized by reference to the seemingly race-neutral debate over “states’ rights.”  In 1981, Republican strategist Lee Atwater said: 

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 forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” 

Keep in mind that this explanation came from Lee Atwater, who was a personal confidante of both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush and was at one time Chairman of the Republican National Committee.  Republicans know how to use code. 

Against this backdrop, consider these recent statements by Newt Gingrich:

As I posted earlier, when Brian Gregory of NBC questioned Gingrich about his refernce to food stamps, Gingrich feigned indignation.  And Sarah Palin later claimed that Brian Gregory's question was itself racist because it suggested that African Americans were associated with food stamps.

It's hard to imagine a more cynical game.  Republicans use racist code to appeal to racist voters and then play victims when they get caught.  So this game reinforces myriad right-wing predilections, including the inferiority of racial minorities, elitist liberal bias in the media, and the victimhood of white people in all matters relating to race.