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What is "woke" you ask? In the mouth of a Republican, it's a dog whistle. [1]
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Date: 2023-07-19
While it’s difficult to know just how long Republicans and their media will continue to use “woke” as an all-purpose accusation of… whatever they want it to be, it’s worth discussing why and how they are using it. It’s dog-whistle politics, the use of coded language that can go under the radar of many people, but right to the lizard brains of its target demographic who ‘know’ what it’s really about. It’s an analogy to actual dog whistles which are pitched so high, dogs can hear them, but people can’t.
What is a political dog whistle? The concept has been around for a while. Tim Murphy at Mother Jones looked at this in 2022 with:
The speech isn’t coded so much as loaded.
Republican strategist Lee Atwater is the godfather of the modern political dog whistle. He didn’t go around calling it that—I can’t actually find any evidence that he even used the term—but in a 1981 interview about how the GOP won the South, Atwater offered a concise description. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘[n-word]’—that hurts you, [it] backfires, so you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’” Atwater explained. “And you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about ‘cutting taxes.’”
Woke used to have a far more positive connotation. Someone who is “woke’ is someone who is aware of injustice in its many forms, someone who is informed and knowledgeable about issues and willing to address them. The Right has appropriated it and turned it into an insult and a signifier of whether “you’re with us or against us.”
Depending on the context, when a Republican calls someone or something “woke” it can mean:
Casey DeSantis in Iowa wearing a jacket with the words “Where woke goes to die” over a map of Florida.
people of color favored over white people for jobs, college entry, etc. — the ‘real’ racisim
grooming, pedophilia — the LGBTQ agenda that discriminates against normal men/women there-are-only-two-sexes-thank-you-very-much and targets defenseless children.
a scheme to steal money from white people in the name of ‘reparations’ for things that happened before they were born that they never did and have no responsibility for.
regulations and policies that force businesses and agencies to accommodate the incompetent, the unqualified, the sexual deviates, women, etc. in the name of diversity and inclusion
an attack on the faith of God-fearing Christians by not allowing them to live their values by discriminating against those they believe are abominations.
gun grabbers who would leave honest Americans defenseless against the hordes of violent criminals infesting liberal enclaves and pouring over the borders.
radicals who would raise everyones taxes to redistribute wealth from honest hard-working people to lazy bums who don’t want to work, in the name of Socialism/Communism/Fascism AKA “Social Justice” and “Identity Politics”.
demanding people give up their cars, their gas stoves, and rely on expensive electrical stuff that’s going to fail and leave them in the dark because of the climate hoax.
giving stuff like medical care, housing, food, etc. to people who don’t deserve it at the expense of hard-working (white) Americans.
popular culture that showcases people simply because of their skin color, their ethnic background, their gender preferences, etc. and not because anyone really wants or needs to see them.
The list goes on and on.
The advantage of is that it’s non-specific and can be fact-free. It doesn’t even have to make sense. “Woke” can mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean — and the audience it is intended for can hear whatever they want to hear. It’s a way of saying really horrible things in a way that can’t be called out because they aren’t doing so explicitly. It allows them plausible deniability — but they all ‘know’ what it really means.
It can’t be easily refuted — and responding to it in the manner in which it is meant risks being counterproductive. It’s related to the strategy developed by Newt Gingrich, of using language as a key mechanism of control. It’s not just the words that matter — it’s the associations that get attached to them and the way they are employed.
Pete Buttigieg has proven remarkably effective at responding to coded language and booby-trapped framing — at about 3 minutes in see how he responds to that bizarre DeSantis video attacking Trump over LGBTQ issues. Buttigieg is calm, polite, and goes past the appeals to the gut DeSantis is trying to invoke by calling it weird and defusing the message before switching to talking about positive actions coming from the left. Who is actually trying to help versus who is trying to pick a fight — and isn’t actually getting anything done?
That’s the other side of the”woke” strategy: try to make the targets of the the attack angry and left floundering trying to respond to the irrational and the deceptive. It’s about domination.
The intent of political dog-whistling is to make people react, not think — but do so in a negative manner because angry and fearful people can be manipulated. Invoking a positive reaction counters that — and just might get people to think as well as feel if done skillfully enough.
Of course, there’s an asymmetry in the invoked response. Fear and anger tap into instinctive levels and can motivate people to respond in ways that warm feelings don’t. It’s why the kind of demagoguery Republicans employ gets their base to turn out, and why their smaller numbers can have a bigger effect. We shouldn’t be reluctant to frame things in a way that can invoke a survival response. Done properly, it can bring a community together in common cause — the trick is getting them to unite around a cause that can have a positive outcome.
Political dog whistling is not going to go away anytime soon. The use of “woke” with subject-noun-verb soundbites makes the whole process streamlined. The Republican Party Platform for 2024 is likely going to be summed up as fighting “woke” as their justification to radically reshape the Federal government.
Murphy concludes his discussion of political dog whistles by observing we are now in the Train Whistle era. They now say the quiet parts out loud, following the example of you know who.
Our former president was the least subtle man in American life. The point of his rhetoric wasn’t to see what he could get away with; it was to be deliberately transgressive—to be seen as defiantly saying what others were too timid to, and to get other people mad at him while he did it. Trump, we were told over and over again, said “the quiet part out loud.” He was “a modern-day George Wallace”—according to Wallace’s own adviser. To be a MAGA Republican is to be both bigoted and proud to be called a bigot.
The message isn’t coded any more, it’s loaded as Murphy says.
The question is, now that it’s out in the open, can we get people to actually see it and acknowledge it? How? And then what? That’s what’s going to make things interesting.
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https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/19/2182145/-What-is-woke-you-ask-In-the-mouth-of-a-Republican-it-s-a-dog-whistle
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