A number of posters have wondered if we’ve reached the moment in the Democratic nominating contest where we’ve jumped the shark. In part, this reflects concern as to whether the dominant narratives around race, ethnicity, gender, and whiteness will stop. Embedded in this question, I think, is a fundamental concern: Despite the ‘math’ has the Sanders’s campaign found a more lasting momentum deriving from a winning and diverse coalition that can put a stop to the dog-whistling politics?
Whistling? Democrats don’t dog-whistle!
William Safire, often credited with coining the phrase dog-whistle politics, defines it as
The use of messages embedded in speeches that seem innocent to a general audience but resonate with a specific public attuned to receive them (p. 190)
In 2005 in the New York Times Magazine On Language section, he elaborated:
The idea behind the political metaphor -- dog-whistle politics -- is not who hears your signal, but who does not have the special sensitivity to catch the message. Your whistle is pitched high enough to rally your "base" without running the risk of turning out your opposition's base. Nice turn of phrase. (emphasis added)
The key is that listeners will respond to different frequencies, allowing alternative interpretations of what is being said. Like discerning porn from art, it is inexact even as ‘you know it when you see it’.
Although Republicans are probably better known for this strategy using common phrases such as “family values” and “state’s rights” (just to name two), Democrats have and do whistle. The bi-partisan strategy is detailed by Ian Haney Lopez in Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class dedicating an entire chapter to Bill as well as some limited attention to Hillary’s messaging in the 2008 campaign against Obama. Notably, while the Democratic presidential race has not been as acrimonious as that of the Republicans, there’s been plenty of whistling primarily centered around Angry White Men.
Michael Kimmel, a sociologist, captured the sense of alienation and discontent in his book Angry White Men. Though an accessibly written scholarly work, Rosin’s book review provides a sharp snapshot of the nuances of the AWM phenomenon:
A longtime feminist, Kimmel maintains a delicate balance when handling his sources. He wants to be sympathetic to the people he interviews and yet loyal to his academic principles. After a series of humbling recessions and other economic shifts, men like Rick feel emasculated and humiliated, he writes, “betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway.” Their sin, according to Kimmel, is a failure to adjust. These guys refuse to admit they’ve been handed privilege all these years by a world that puts white men on top. White men, he writes, “have been running with the wind at our backs all these years,” and “what we think of as ‘fairness’ to us has been built on the backs of others.
Failing to concede this, men get stuck in a permanent dysfunction Kimmel calls “aggrieved entitlement,” in which they “refuse to even be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable future” of greater gender and racial equality. Instead they rage, not at the corporate overlords who have actually shipped their jobs overseas but at the amorphous feminists, or more likely “feminazis,” who have stolen American manhood.
Again, the AWM phenomenon in politics is not new, it is recalibrated every election cycle. Currently, we are told, they are the source of the success of not just the Republican front-runner (whose hands we’ve sized up to better assess his ‘masculinity’), but also to Sanders’s win in Michigan, so that this has been declared “the year of the angry white man” or the “Election Cycle of the Angry White Person, Mostly Men”.
Most know Sanders’ AWM as Berniebros, a term so strongly attached to supporters that Greenwald declares
It’s become such an all-purpose, handy pro-Clinton smear that even consummate, actual “bros” for whom the term was originally coined — straight guys who act with entitlement and aggression, such as Paul Krugman — are now reflexively (and unironically) applying it to anyone who speaks ill of Hillary Clinton, even when they know nothing else about the people they’re smearing, including their gender, age, or sexual orientation.
The apparent ubiquity of the ‘Berniebro’ led Tromble & Hovy at the Washington Post to undertake a more quantitative analysis. Conducted back in February, they found
that 23 of the 30 gendered slurs were directed at Clinton. However, out of a total 52,181 tweets mentioning @HillaryClinton, just 606, or 1.16 percent, contained these insults. While these slurs only represent one particularly overt form of sexism, the fact that so few were present in these tweets is remarkable…This is quite a small number. But any such slur is troubling. And we still need to know who is responsible for the invective…The vast majority of the slurs were associated with Twitter users on the right — particularly self-identified Trump supporters.
Yet, the adapting nature of bigotry and misogyny in the USA (including, alas, among progressives) and the internet facilitates such expression, the myth of the BernieBro persists. This myth marginalizes a key demographic of Sanders’ coalition: young, vocal, white male progressives. Like racial demagoguery, the BernieBro “did more than resurrect old stereotypes; [it] altered them in ways that combined assaults on nonwhites with attacks on liberalism (Lopez, p. 101).”
How?
In as far as these passionate supporters have often Berniesplained, questioning why people of color (POC)—in particular African Americans, don’t ‘get’ Sanders, they have raised long-simmering questionings about the left’s ability to ‘get’ the experience of POC. This reductionism of the intersectional realities of POC is evident among both Hillary’s and Bernie’s supporters. Prime examples were Madeline Albright’s hell and Gloria Steinem’s ‘where the boys are’ comments, which told young women of all colors that they had their priorities screwed up. Likewise, Sanders’ use of the term ‘ghetto’ when talking about his racial blind-spot grated, reminding us that despite improvements he still has work to do.
Such whistling allowed Sanders’ wins in “lily white” states to be dismissed even as pushback from women moved race to the forefront. What this race narrative speaks to is what Matthew Yglesias calls “Demographic Determinism”, and sees as a confirmation of
Washington Democrats' conviction that demographic headwinds are at their backs and complicates their hazy sense that faith in demographics is a substitute for political strategy.
It also highlights just how different non-white groups were seen—or rendered invisible. First, as we moved south, African Americans were repeatedly dubbed Clinton’s “firewall” by the media as well as surrogates—most disappointingly by Clyburn. Despite being noted to be ‘deeply offensive’, when Sanders pulled off “one of the greatest upsets in modern political history” in Michigan, earlier questions regarding cracks and missing bricks in the firewall resurfaced.
Analysis of the Michigan win remained focused on youth and African Americans, with some offering that the smaller margins of the AA vote reflected how “Clinton took the African-American vote for granted”. As Hass noted
the greatest barrier right now is Sanders’ inability to reach African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinos. He has built an impressive coalition of young people (both men and women), but the limits of that coalition—and its lack of diversity—are making the math increasingly difficult for him. (emphasis added)
Generally silenced was the role of Arab and Muslim Americans. Nevertheless, with each move to ‘more diverse’ states, the Clinton ‘firewall’ expanded to include Latin@s and more quietly, Native Americans. As with #OscarsSoWhite, little notice was taken of Asian Americans, a group that favors Sanders. And that brings us to Birdie.
Pacific Portent?
When #BirdieSanders landed on a certain lectern in a certain city noted for ‘putting a bird on it’ the audience and Twitter-verse exploded. Indeed, the pop-culture synchronicity was noted by the television show itself, which tweeted “Put. A. Bern. On. It.” Basically, as BuzzFeed noted, people “LOST. THEIR. SHIT.” This perfect alignment of place, space, and meme was mostly seen as a wonderfully pleasant moment in an otherwise ugly Republican primary and increasingly tense Democratic primary season.
Sanders quickly used this serendipitous moment to call for world peace, offering the bird was a symbol. For those sensitive to symbols it was, in point of fact, a rich moment. Animal rights activists saw it as the ‘bird vote’, while more generally environmentalists saw it as Mother Nature giving Sanders the nod. For the more semiotically inclined, discussions about whether Birdie was a sparrow or a finch and the possible differences in meaning were had, with an official statement from the Audubon Society of Portland chiming in that it was the latter. Even further, it was remarked that since the House Finch is really native to Mexico there was, perhaps, something to be said about immigration, competition, and cooperation. For the spiritually inclined this was taken as a good omen, indeed a divine message
Personally, I marveled that this happened on two Christian feast days: Good Friday/the Incarnation (all Christians) and the Annunciation of the Virgin (Catholics) a calendar event that rarely ever happens. In fact, it only happened 3 times in all of the 20th Century and will not happen again until 2157. And, it happened just two days after the Jewish celebration of Purim, a holiday where effigies are burned, linking in my mind to the planned (and successful) burning of papier-mâché Donald Trumps in Mexico.
Regardless of how one makes meaning of it, “Sanders got a social media gift that keeps on giving” demonstrating, as Sainato at the Observer observed, that “Mr. Sanders has won the Internet this election cycle.” Not skipping a beat, the Sanders campaign posted its own Birdie meme with the tagline: Together.
Northwest Saturday, which includes three caucus states—Alaska, Hawai’i and Washington—had a good chance of being won by Sanders, who does well in caucuses. Increasingly their undemocratic nature has been critiques as the time, energy, disclosure, transportation, and childcare constraints make them challenging, especially for POC. Hence, it is typically anticipated that few POC, older adults, or physically limited individuals will participate. Addressing this, Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight explains the caucus + diversity issue this way:
Sanders’s strength in caucuses may also be, in part, coincidental. Every state that has held or will hold a Democratic caucus this year has a black population at or below 10 percent of the state’s total population, and black voters have been among Clinton’s strongest demographic groups. Without those black voters, Clinton just can’t match the enthusiasm of Sanders’s backers.
Given similar grievances arose in 2008 with Obama’s advantages in these contests, one could argue current concerns are not racialized. Unfortunately, the injury of little media attention given to landslide victories was coupled to the insult that these states where deemed ‘lily-white’. More pointedly, the least white state in the nation, Hawai’I, was white-washed.
How did a majority-minority state with Asians, Native Hawai’ians, Pacific Islanders, Latinos, African Americans and individuals identifying as bi- or multi-racial become ‘white’? So people LOST. THEIR. SHIT. making #BernieMadeMeWhite trend on Twitter. Presciently, on March 13 Carl Beijer, in a blog entitled #BernieMadeMeWhite: Clinton and the new three-fifths rule, warned that
For most of the Democratic primaries, Clinton's campaign has enjoyed the opportunity of dismissing Bernie Sanders supporters as largely white. This was always more of a symptom of name recognition problems than anything, but as Sanders supporters have acknowledged from the beginning, it was also a deficit that he needed to remedy.
In fact, back in February a Kos Diarist pointed out that there were multiple trend lines indicating Sanders has been making in-roads with POC, especially young adults. And, Sam Sanders, at NPR, used insights from Edison’s exit polls to underscore that Bernie has both support among people of color and the media has done a poor job of capturing that support. And, Leslie Lee III, who started the hashtag on Twitter offers:
The common narrative in this election that Bernie has a ‘minority problem’ or that all his supporters are ‘bros’ is pervasive, and insulting to the POCs [People of Color] and women who support [him].” But, “it hit a peak… when Hawaii, the least white state in the nation, retroactively became white or ‘not diverse’ due to the fact that Bernie won it. So, I started #BernieMadeMeWhite.” And, Lee tweeted to me, “since my real existence as a black person who supports Bernie is ignored… might as well embrace my new whiteness.”
Now This offered a cute summary of the issue
.@BernieSanders supporters are showing their diversity with the hashtag #BernieMadeMeWhitehttps://t.co/cuHKDIxiMi
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) March 30, 2016
Regardless of the social media pushback (which did result in some corrections), the media doubled-down on the issue of African American voters calling Alaska and Washington “predominantly non-black”, ignoring the beautiful diversity of POC and reinforcing the black-white binary paradigm that is fundamental to race construction in the US. Yet more importantly, we—all citizens—need to wake up to the fact that, as Lopez recently stated:
Racism in the United States is not just about mistreating minorities. Racism is fundamentally about scaring whites…And the people who are scaring whites with racism, they are not doing it because they don't like people of color. They are doing it because this is a way to win votes for politicians who are basically serving the interests of billionaires. (emphasis in original)
The media has been noting that racist dog whistling appeals have been undermining the middle class for a long while now. So, regardless of which candidate you support The “Bernie Bro” smear must go.
Another damn shark...or two or three
During all this MS and social media pull and push, the Clinton campaign got some much needed airtime. Yet, I winced during her recent late night visit to the Jimmy Kimmel show as he man-splained how to improve her performance. While others noted “the truth in the skit” made it “cringe-worthy” I initially just found it sad and painful. There is no question the former Secretary has faced sexism and misogyny: It is a fact, one that must and has been acknowledged.
Later, what struck was the framing: Kimmel offered that such mainsplaining was how “we men can make woman be better”. The media has been ‘allowing’ Sanders to stay in the race because he makes her a better candidate, just a “statement candidate” forcing Hillary to the left. Even this, a potential teaching moment where we could connect to Secretary Clinton’s real struggles (despite layers of privilege) had to have another message.
Then, whether on a roll or feeling cornered by the #BernieMadeMeWhite eruption, the Clinton campaign went into dog-whistling overdrive. First, in declaring that in order to debate in New York Bernie’s tone needed to be toned down. Alas, twitter exploded again with #ToneDownforWhat a glorious riff on DJ Snake & Lil Jon’s Turn Down for What—a tune described as
The year's nutsiest party jam [and] also the perfect protest banger for a generation fed up with everything. DJ Snake brings the synapse-rattling EDM and Southern trap music; Lil Jon brings the dragon-fire holler for a hilarious, glorious, glowstick-punk fuck you. (emphasis added)
And as it trended on Twitter, that is exactly the message sent back to the campaign from young and old alike. But the HRC campaign wasn’t quite done: Coupled with this tone-deaf demand around tone was the assertion by Benenson that:
I think he’s going to campaign like a Brooklynite, and she’s going to campaign like a senator who represented this state for eight years and has lived here for 16.
Which start another barrage of tweets with the hashtag #Brooklynite. While many found the humor in an Upstate transplant with three home states knocking Sanders’ Brooklyn creds, others heard this whistle for what it was: classist. Locally the NYNewsday picked up this thread noting:
Hillary Clinton campaign aide Joel Benenson made reference to her Democratic rival’s rough-and-tumble outer-borough roots Monday in a call with reporters, saying Bernie Sanders is “going to campaign like a Brooklynite.” (emphasis added)
Mockingly, Gharib of the Guardian captured the tone-deaf bizarreness of the attack and its sources:
But if you know Benenson’s background – the famous pollster is from Queens, the next borough north of Brooklyn – it seems obvious that the comment was meant as an insult. After all, it was done in the course of a campaign phone call with journalists…We were all left stroking our hipster beards, munching on our artisanal brain food and turning down our vinyl to think better. Why would Clinton’s campaign be insulting Brooklyn? …
people – many of whom live in the outer boroughs, including much of Brooklyn and not Manhattan or Chappaqua – are still struggling. The Clinton camp would do well to underscore Benenson’s revisionist take on Brooklynite campaigning. After all, by population, Brooklyn would, by itself, be the fourth largest city in America, with some two-and-a-half million residents. Despite a comfortable lead in the polls, Clinton wouldn’t want to run the risk of losing any votes in a primary battle that has been closer than anyone expected.
So there you have it, a wonderful whistle. For some, it pits the archetypal Berniebro hipsters of Williamsburg, Bushwick and Bed Stuy against the Blacks and Latinos who have been gentrified out of these neighborhoods. For others, it pits the outer-boroughs against Wall Street and Manhattan. For still others, it highlights the divide between Upstate and Downstate. But for others, listening with a separate set of intersectional realities, they heard just a wee bit more:
And
And
And
And that is the thing about dog-whistles, people hear at different registers. Class, race, or religion based this one was so gratuitous, hitting so many different registers, that we just may have jumped the shark. At least most of us hope this is the case. As Independents become the largest party-nonparty and a fascist demagogue has a real chance of winning the Republican nomination, Jonah Goldberg’s insights are important:
The real source of power in politics resides in personalities, not parties. It’s been hard to see this until recently because the personalities of old were career politicians — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama — hiding behind the partisan light show like the man behind the Wizard of Oz.
What this means for Hillary was noted earlier this month by Milbank at the Washington Post: “Clinton’s shaky campaign has the math, but lacks the message”. Or, as the coiner of the Berniebro phrase just put it:
The Berniebro, as originally conceived, was a tragic figure; his loyalty and dudeish certainty made him a poor proxy for his favorite candidate. But what’s tragic about some Hillary voters is not really gendered in the same way or at all. The tragic Hillary voter, the truly pitiable figure, is the Democrat who would love to line up behind Bernie’s sunny ideals but knows that he just isn’t electable. I speak, of course, of the Hillarealist.
I’d get even more real and say: she needs to stop trying to play us off each other. It didn’t work in 2008 and it won’t work now with an even more hyper-connected electorate.
For Bernie, while multiple analyses demonstrate just how hard it will be for Bernie to get sufficient pledge delegates, he needs to continue driving home his message, demonstrating that rare and improbable is not the same as impossible, and embrace his name: “the one lighting the fires for change and unity”. Tonight, as Residente of Calle 13—Puerto Rican islander born into privilege (the stage name reflects that he was the “resident’ of the gated community whereas his step-brother Visitante was the visitor)—along with Rosario Dawson, a Cuba-Nuyorican native, will rally with Sanders in the South Bronx. The symbolic possibilities are endless: #BernieintheBronx, #BoogieDownBernie, #TheBronxIsBerning and on and on. And, of course, there’s this:
As Hillary’s camp and supporters launch increasingly divisive complaints with the FEC and in the media, it seems the war of personalities is now center stage. Just remember, whoever wins and whatever candidate follows, the young and POC are a substantial part of that coalition.