Forty-Two Dirty Words Democrats Can’t Say on the Campaign Trail

The memorandum from a center-left think tank, Third Way, listing 42 words and phrases that Democrats would be wise to avoid if they hope to win elections could be a linguistic life raft — if the left listens. Third Way reckons that these words erect “a wall between us and everyday people of all races, religions, and ethnicities,” and that they amount to a lexicon that “people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats.”The result of these words — an updated version of George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV,” perhaps — is that Democrats “sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.” This list, though, is organized into several categories — “Therapy-Speak, Seminar Room Language, Organizer Jargon, Gender/ Orientation Correctness, The Shifting Language of Racial Constructs,” and “Explaining Away Crime.”The crimes against language get only worse from there. Among the interdicted vocabulary: “privilege,” “microaggression,” “body shaming,” “othering,” “subverting norms,” “systems of oppression,” “the unhoused,” “person who immigrated,” “cisgender,” “birthing person,” “deadnaming,” “heteronormative,” “LatinX,” “BIPOC,” and “incarcerated people.” If you have never heard of some or all of these words, consider yourself spared.Third Way reckons that “much of the language above is a red flag for a sizable segment of the American public. It is not because they are bigots, but because they fear cancellation, doxing, or trouble with HR if they make a mistake.” The memorandum, addressed to “All Who Wish to Stop Donald Trump and MAGA,” aims to build a “bigger army” to stand athwart what it calls the “catastrophe of Trump 2.0.”The advent of “Trump 2.0,” it could be argued, owes not a little bit to Democrats’ penchant for this dreary language. By some measure, President Trump’s most successful re-election advertisement featured the tag line “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” It aired more than 30,000 times in each swing state, and one Democratic super PAC, Think Forward, found that it shifted the race 2.7 points toward Mr. Trump after viewers watched it.George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” wrote, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” That could be the conundrum Democrats now face. On issues like immigration, crime, gender issues, and more, the left’s cockamamie language is adjacent to poor policy. That dynamic is part of what could be driving Gen Z voters rightward in droves. These columns have marked the plunge in Democratic registration as a “crisis.”A Democratic Party that leans into language that is felicitous and clear may be no lock to retake the White House. Poets and novelists have not always prospered on the hustings. At least, though, the party could start speaking to voters in language that does not feel like a clumsy translation from the original Martian. Nobody would call Mr. Trump a Whitman, but his patois has proven to be a potent political weapon. Democrats could stand to learn a turn of phrase.

Forty-Two Dirty Words Democrats Can’t Say on the Campaign Trail

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