Dog Whistles Are Concretized Misunderstanding

I once had a friend. Our friendship ended over forty years ago. She occasionally asks a mutual friend about me but doesn’t contact me. Why? Because of a misunderstanding.

The four of us were in her apartment. Our mutual friend, her, my wife and me. He was going on an anti-Semitic tirade. She was Jewish. I did a reductio, in a sarcastic tone of voice, on one of his views. She thought I was anti-Semitic and decided to never have anything to do with me again. Ironically, she’s in touch with the true anti-Semite among the four of us.

A man comes home after a long day. His wife laments that the dishwasher can’t be used because the plumbing doesn’t work. They can’t afford one.

He yells at her. “Nothing I do is good enough for you. I am not a plumber, and I don’t make enough money to hire one right now.”

Women have noticed for maybe thousands of years how men misinterpret what they say. The wife was just lamenting. Nothing more.

I was in an elevator. A man, a graduate student in history like me, and the boyfriend of the above Jewish woman’s best girlfriend, called me a fascist. Why? Because I said something about believing in personal freedom. Huh?

That leads me to the topic of this essay. Dog whistles.

Dog whistles used to be called “speaking in code.” Richard Nixon, the fourth most popular president of the United States (after Washington, FDR, LBJ, and up in rank from Reagan) said that there must be law and order in the country. He was thinking of the rising crime rate. Crime was up in the 50s and 60s. It kept going up until 1989 when it plummeted and stayed down until 2012 when it started to rise again.

It was a problem. Movies were made and soared in popularity expressing this frustration. Charles Bronson’s career was made in Death Wish. Everyone wanted to be like him. They couldn’t legally until, well, this year, actually, in New York, although for 84% of the states, that came in the 1990s. New York being a little slow. (Yeah, I know about Bernard Goetz — he was acquitted of the murder charge and it turns out that his “vigilantism” was mainly in his head and on the pages of the New York times.)

Why wasn’t anything done about the crime wave? Because “law and order” really meant, you know, “racism and repression.” It wasn’t about murder, armed robbery, rape, and assault; it was about repressing dissent from the war in Vietnam, black activism, and hurting Black people.

Um, no it wasn’t. It was about making the streets safe to walk on. It was about women taking back the night, people not worrying about serial killers climbing through their windows, about facing the point of a gun as they did a transaction in a bank.

Today if you say, “I think people should show ID before they vote,” that is taken as code for “I don’t want Democrats, especially black and brown people to vote.” That position is derided as “a dog whistle.”

I suppose code was too polite.

The thing is, it wasn’t true in Nixon’s time, the time of the fourth most popular president. It’s not true in Joe Biden’s time, the least popular president. (If polls keep on going, his popularity may have to be measured in negative numbers. The only way he will survive or a Democratic party in power will survive is if the Republicans shoot themselves in the foot. Unfortunately, for them, they are well-armed and have great aims.)

Wisconsin has the same voting laws as Texas. Only in Texas, it’s racist, right? No, such laws exist because of past events in all states. Multiple voting in Illinois (“This is Chicago. Vote early; vote often.”) Because of a southern city where voters opposed to the Boss Hogg style political structure were intimidated and ballots lost. It took armed citizens, vets, to stop this.

In Canada, even, they ask for voter ID. I was shocked. I had friends who worked in Canada, who weren’t Canadians, and who were encouraged to vote.

To call a position a dog whistle is to set in concrete misunderstanding. You refuse to listen to what the other person is saying. To their fears. You don’t address crime; gun ownership skyrockets. You preside over an economy assaulted by everything from massive deficit spending, to a supply chain crisis, and interference with a Russian war that’s none of your business. But when people don’t want their jobs taken away by people who aren’t vetted to be here — well, that’s a dog whistle, isn’t it?

My dog has more understanding of people than a lot of people do. Maybe because he doesn’t listen to dog whistles.

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