The Dog Whistle Gone Astray
There are several phrases that have been making the rounds for the past few years in the political pundit community. I hear them repeatedly on MSNBC and they always jangle my sensibilities for some reason, most likely due to their recent overuse. The one I really don’t like is “gaslighting”. It means to cause someone to question their sense of reality. It comes from a play Gas Light produced in 1938 and it is often applied to situations where a man is making a woman feel guilty about her sense that she is being abused by the man. It has also been used a lot politically for reasons that the more aggressive and unscrupulous politicians (from my vantage point theses days, mostly Republicans) push a set of alternative facts or alternate reality like the Big Lie as a means of denying that they have lost an election or done something wrong. There is nothing intuitive about the expression to me because I cannot relate a gas light to that particular perversion of reality.
The other expression I hear all the time now is Dog Whistle. A dog whistle is an expression or message that is intended as almost a code to people of the same political persuasion to rile them up and galvanize support. It is called a dog whistle because like a high-pitched dog whistle that is outside the normal decibel or frequency range of human audibility, it is intended to rile up supporters without alerting the opposition. Now this is an expression that makes sense to me because I know what a dog whistle is and does and I’ve even owned a dog whistle at one time or another. The analogy makes sense, unlike gas lighting. But then, if you asked me about which is more prevalent and more dangerous to our civil society today, I would be forced to say gas lighting is far more pernicious than any dog whistle being used. The mere recognition and labeling of a dog whistles effectively renders them less harmful because they are not so very secretive as they are intended. But gas lighting is so very much more troubling because it is a win-at-all-costs strategy which preys on another person’s civility and candor by making bald-faced lies that not only have the effect of distorting reality, but also frustrating and possibly enraging the counterparty. It is a proverbial poke in the eye of truth and it is highly intentional and tactical. In fact, where dog whistles are mere tactics, gas lighting is more of an evil act in and of itself.
Once in a while, something can be both a gas light and a dog whistle. From what I can tell, I think that Critical Race Theory is just such a case. CRT is an academic movement that involves legal and sociological scholarship that tries to consider how the U.S. legal system has created a de facto policy of racial injustice. It is hard for people to agree on what racism is. Just this morning, a friend who is very red and greatly dislikes most of the tenets of liberal democracy and government in general, called the defendants in the Ahmaud Arbery case “real racists”. He also mentioned that he felt the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse case did the right thing since he felt Rittenhouse was naive but did not have murder in his heart. While I’m not sure I disagree with that, I am equally not sure that Rittenhouse shouldn’t receive some punishment for his actions, since they were violent, intentional (he chose to go to Kenosha) and pre-meditatively dangerous to human life unnecessarily (protection of property does not cause me to think otherwise).
We have had lots of grist for the CRT mill this past year with Charlottesville (outcome pending), George Floyd (outcome favoring racial justice), Kyle Rittenhouse (some would say the outcome goes contrary to racial justice even though the three “victims” were white) and the Ahmaud Arbery case (also pending). It’s interesting to note that CRT does not focus on hanging the racist banner around the necks of individuals like Rittenhouse, Chauvin or the McMichaels, but rather on the far more subtle institutional dynamics at play in the judicial system. We have all seen what a sympathetic judge and an unsympathetic judge look like at this point if we’ve been playing attention. We also begin to realize with direct examples why the Republican Party has focused so intently on judicial appointments over the past twenty years. It has been a smart and very effective social strategy which may or may not run contrary to the norms the majority of us hold about social justice.
It seems to me far less smart and effective for the Republican Party to now focus on fighting CRT as a bogeyman of sorts. Witness the recent gubernatorial election in Virginia where Glenn Youngkin spent an inordinate amount of time on the campaign trail Dog Whistling about Critical Race Theory and riling up his constituents in Virginia when Virginia does not teach Critical Race Theory in the schools. One might therefore say that Youngkin has turned a Dog Whistle into a Gas Light. What we do know is that it was an effective campaign tactic that netted Youngkin the governorship. That is, in my opinion, a false flag for the Republicans for one simple reason. If CRT is about racial justice and if white supremacy intersects with it, as seems to be the case, the affiliation of anti-CRT with white supremacy is likely to turn off voters more often than not. While there are clearly racist voters that like and support white supremacy, 89% of Americans say that they oppose neo-Nazism and White Supremacy. If only their underlying views and actions more closely matched those big picture idealistic views.
It is very hard to deny that Critical Race Theory is anything more radical than civil rights as we have come to know and legislate them, It is true that there has been an ebb and flow in the support for complete civil rights (I would suggest that we are currently in a ebb-tide), but generally the trend has followed the demographic trends that show the browning of America as factual and inescapable. That says to me that civil rights continue to make progress, perhaps like the itsy bitsy spider, but progress nonetheless. That suggests that anything that connects politicians to white supremacy is a dangerous political stand to take and that it will eventually bite a politician or party in the ass.
I would guess that if you gave a quiz to the population about what exactly Critical Race Theory is, you would uncover a surprisingly high degree of misunderstanding about what it really means. In some ways that makes it a perfect dog whistle, but in other ways that makes it a dangerous gas light that will eventually be shunned as a perfectly reasonable scholastic discipline and one which would be highly unlikely to ever be taught at any level of education lower than a graduate program in law and society. This is one dog whistle which risks going astray and biting its users when they least expect it.