Democrats are presently in their normal state of total disarray. President Donald Trump’s historic return to the White House seems to have caught the party off-guard and scrambling for an explanation.
Of course, the Democrats went through their normal list of guilty parties: men, whites, Russian bots, and brain-addled women and minorities, before concluding their loss was due to messaging. It’s not the policies that are the problem, they reasoned, it’s just the way we communicated them.
Thus, a new post-mortem from leftist think tank Third Way purports to have a panacea to all the Democrats’ woes, stop using stupid language.
“For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters,” the memo reads, “Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying.”
Some of the new verboten words come from eggheads in ivory towers who need to touch grass. “Privilege” and “triggering” and “body shaming” apparently sound holier than thou and make Democrats come off as condescending. Other phrases like “Birthing person,” “Pregnant people,” and “Chest feeding” are offputtingly Orwellian attempts at redefining biology.
By scarpering this kind of language, Third Way argues, the Democrats can build back relationships with Americans who view them as woefully out of touch and stop the bleeding.
But this is simply whistling past the graveyard and belies the reality that it’s not just the language, it’s the policies behind it too.
Take “privilege” for example. Often combined with “male” or “white,” the term is consistently used as a cudgel to enact policies that benefit minorities or women at the expense of supposedly well-off white men. Affirmative action and DEI initiatives explicitly cite privilege as their raison d’être, a rhetorical trick to codify anti-white and anti-male bias into law.
The term “privilege” is obviously not the problem here. Calling it anything else would still make the policy behind it utterly abominable and off-putting to those who value merit over race-based handouts.
Dystopian attempts to rewrite biological reality are also a question of policy rather than language. “Pregnant people” almost comes off as laughable until you realize it comes from people who are genuinely invested in allowing perverted men to expose themselves in women’s restrooms.
Attempting to paint these indefensible positions behind a veneer of opaque wordplay doesn’t change their unpopularity, it just makes Democrats look craven for trying to cover them up.
That’s what the Left and their allies seemingly fail to understand. Trump’s election wasn’t a result of miscommunication. Democrats are actually very good at messaging what their true positions are.
Consider Trump’s most popular campaign ad, “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you.” The ad features failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris saying, on the record, that she supported sex change surgeries for illegal immigrants sitting in jail cells. The ad was so potent not because it misconstrued what Harris said or that she phrased it poorly. It was because that’s an insane position to hold.
There is zero way to justify that policy unless you’re an utterly rabid leftist, which is why just changing the language wouldn’t change how well it would go over with the public.
Democrats would be far better served by reexamining their agenda in its entirety rather than fiddling over how to sell it. Men in women’s sports and racist redistribution are political stinkers no matter how desperately the party tries to paint it.
Perhaps Democrats can take some advice from their former leader, Barack Obama. In 2008, he famously mused that “you can put lipstick on a pig; it's still a pig.”
And boy, is the current Democratic platform one ugly pig.
Doug Blair is a conservative commentator and author of the Blair Broadcast.