What exactly is a “racist dogwhistle”?
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If you want an excellent example of what this means in practice there’s a very famous/infamous interview with Lee Atwater, talking about the southern strategy while he worked for Reagan as a strategist.
You’d get banned for repeating a lot of what he said here, or linking to it, but it’s incredibly informative of how this worked, and a number of very legitimate serious publications have published the interview (audio only), transcripts and analysis, because well, he was a racist but he was also a white house republican strategist saying the quiet part out loud.
Essentially the logic goes like this: You can’t say overtly racist stuff by the mid 1950s because people don’t like racist terminology and don’t like being called out on their racism.
So you need a way to tell racists you’re going to do racist things, but without using overtly racist language. Enter dog whistles, you’re now going to speak in a language that racists know is racist, but that the mostly naive public aren’t going to immediately catch, and you have plausible deniability. It’s a dog whistle because you can create whistle which dogs can hear but people can’t (high frequency) – the idea is that you’re creating language which racists can hear but the broader public can’t.
So in the 1960’s you start saying things like state’s rights, forced busing, these are ultimately to serve racist goals, but are now abstract language and talking points.
By the 1970s and 1980s people have caught on to how some of the old language was racist or ultimately a tool for racism.
So you have one step further abstraction: tax cuts! Union busting laws, trade policy etc. These are now abstract policies that disproportionately hurt racial minorities.
Fast forward to everyone talking about Trump and Tucker and you’re essentially back in the 1950s and 60s. Poor white racists in the US are also getting hurt by 4 decades of policies that make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and so you need to get them back on your side by making sure they can find the racists to vote for.
Edit:
A couple of things to add. Dog whistles work because the people you’re talking to have a media ecosystem that tells them what to listen for, and they’re engaged in it. You see this a bit with current discussion about say Ron DeSantis or Trump being ‘too online’ which isn’t inherently racist – but they’re speaking in a way (CRT, Wokeness etc.) which their base understand but which to everyone else sounds like nonsense. Good dog whistles sound like serious discussion to the untrained listener, bad ones sound like a Ron DeSantis speech.
The more abstract you get, the more you run into legitimate policy discussions where one side is trying to negotiate in good faith and doesn’t know the other side isn’t. States rights is a solid example. States exist, and what powers they should or should not have vs federal and local governments, and when one state should have different rules from another is a complex legitimate discussion to have. Giving states (or provinces, or territories or whatever) control over certain issues also hurts certain momentum on issues. Think about abortion rights, where if you’re a woman in a blue state the situation for you hasn’t fundamentally changed very much since the end of Roe v. Wade, so a republican can run on “Doing what we did in Iowa” (which is a dog whistle for an abortion ban), but if you don’t know that, you think you might not mobilise to vote against that in the next election. Tax policy is the same thing – taxes on any given type or amount of income can be too high, or too low, and well, someone needs to figure out what the tax rates should be.
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