leftwing dog whistles

At an event yesterday, The Politics of Hope, Les Back mentioned something I'd not heard before. Apparently 'Yes We Can' (translated into Spanish) was the organising slogan of a hispanic labour union in Texas. I doubt this is well known, or even necessarily provable as the origins of a pretty bland mantra. Some, after all, have attributed it to Bob the Builder.

Then consider the subtle reference to Sam Cooke's Change is Gonna Come in Obama's acceptance speech: "it's been a long time coming... but change has come". Was this the same change - i.e. civil rights - that he was referring to throughout his campaign? Suddenly that would make him seem a far more radical politician. The sort of black politician that, in contrast to the centrist post-racial one he projected, America would have been unlikely to elect.

So was Obama blowing dog whistles? It would be extraordinary if both of his favoured slogans - 'yes we can', 'change' - were selected or derived from parts of American political history that the Democratic party has spent the last 20 years trying to disentangle itself from. But it would be a brilliant piece of strategy if labour activists and civil rights activists could de-code these messages, but the media and the Right could not.

The Left tends to have a bigger problem knowing how to relate to its long ideological tail than the Right. In Europe this is partly (simplistically) explicable by the fact that some on the Left took much too long to criticise the gulag. In the United States, there is the shadow of '68 violence and George McGovern self-obsession to cope with. It is also because, a la the People's Front of Judea, the Left's tail tends to tear itself to pieces. The Right has its own problem, which is that people fairly close to its core speak a language that is not appealing or, sometimes, deemed acceptable. Hence Cameron's 'de-toxification' of the Tories.

So the Right has to blow dog whistles simply to communicate to some of its core supporters. As Michael Howard's deeply creepy slogan ran, 'Are you thinking what we're thinking?', the implication being that the media, Westminster, London, capitalism and who knows what else had created some vast cosmopolitan hubub, that crowded out the thoughts of both the Conservative Party and the electorate. Through some act of telepathy (or rather a Lynton Crosby focus group), the Conservatives would adopt the anti-immigration policies that this mystical demos actually wanted.

But could the Left blow dog whistles to sections of its long tail? Under Blair and Clinton the centre Left sent them in the opposite direction, sending out coded messages to the right, that bi-passed its own historic base. But there are votes in that historic base, and they can no longer be counted on in Britain (and haven't been countable on in America since the Reagan Democrats of 1980 onwards). To this end, it might be time for Gordon Brown to think what aspects of socialist history he might want to subtly allude to in speeches, in the hope that they might be picked up in the heartlands.

To suddenly drop the word 'comrades' in might be too much. But with neo-liberals in retreat, there are aspects of Labour that needn't be swept under the carpet - the welfare state, industrial policy, work (as opposed to 'hard working families'), nationalisation - that mere references to might awaken the odd dog around the North East and North West. Precisely what Labour's Leftist dog whistles would sound like is, quite rightly, not divinable by a London toff such as myself. But Obama didn't win in Indiana through Clinton-esque appeals to middle class mothers, and the same will very soon be true for Labour in Newcastle and Liverpool.

Comments

[G]

>At an event yesterday, The Politics of Hope, Les Back mentioned something I'd not heard before. Apparently 'Yes We Can' (translated into Spanish) was the organising slogan of a hispanic labour union in Texas. I doubt this is well known, or even necessarily provable as the origins of a pretty bland mantra. Some, after all, have attributed it to Bob the Builder.

I think that's the UFW slogan. More here. And it's quite well known within the activist circles, so perhaps it is a 'dog whistle'.

[Anamik]

Very interesting.

I too originally thought Obama had taken his narrative of Change from the Sam Cooke song, and that eventually the connection to the civil rights movement would be made more explicit. But as the campaign wore on it remained unspoken, to the extent I resigned myself to the fact it was a mere coincidence. Needless to say I was thrilled and reassured when he made that lyrical reference in his acceptance speech; I certainly do not think I was imagining it now.

But of course it's only meaningful if it's backed up by real commitment to social change. And I hope someone reminds Gordon of this if his strategists are acute enough to deploy the same technique. Otherwise it becomes cynical exercise that amounts to little more than lip-service. And as much as we might initially feel smug about being able to decode the message, as soon as dog-whistling is revealed as mere gesture politics, then you run the risk of alienating your core further.

[Will Davies]

One other thought on this:

At the Politics of Hope event, it was odd that the words 'modernity' and 'Enlightenment' weren't mentioned once. There's a particular issue about the temporality of hope, especially deriving from A&H's Dialectic of Enlightenment, connected to these two concepts. They write somewhere that the point is not to recover the past, but recover the hopes of the past. For those of a Weberian ilk, modernity has become a technological juggernaut, with the promises of the Enlightenment left in its wake - i.e. we need to look back in order to look forward. Something analogous is true of Americans seeking hope - they look to their founders for a brighter vision of the future, as Obama kept doing.

Now connect this to Obama's mantras. Modernity=Change, Enlightenment='yes we can'.

Here's the Weberian, Frankfurt School take on Obama's message. Change itself is not the source of hope. Change simply happens, and there is nothing to convince us that it pursues any greater goal. Only with the added recognition that 'yes we can' does change amount to anything. We need to look back to an era of 'yes we can', to find a version of 'change' that is not simply frenetic, pointless modernity... (I think Tony Blair misunderstood this, incidentally)