« Mid-Morning Art Thread | Main | At Least Two Innocents Killed at Shooting at Catholic Church in Minneapolis; Shooter Is Dead »

Wednesday Morning Rant

It Must Be How We're Saying It

Whether or not it has staying power - or results in lasting reform - remains to be seen, but it has become undeniable that the Left has been taking a drubbing recently. Society has not exactly turned on its gimbals and lurched the other direction, but it is more aggressively pushing back on the leftist takeover of everything. Examples abound. American Eagle. Bud Light. Cracker Barrel. The SEC sorority dances. The contempt and refusal to bend the knee and call the Estronauts heroine space pilots. The tentative first steps in the crackdown on DEI.

And with these baby steps away from rigidly-enforced leftist conformity, the Democrats are finally concerned that their position at the center of Left Pole is not conducive to continued success. Sort of. Perhaps more precisely, they are concerned that the perception of the Party as being at the center of radical leftism is harmful. As always, it isn't what they do, say or believe. The problem is, of course, merely how they describe it. It's the wording. It's a "messaging problem."

A story has made the rounds for a few days now about a leftist organization encouraging the Dems to change their public language. Not their beliefs, not their policies, but their language in order to reverse recent declines. The memo is interesting for just how much it says but doesn't mean to. The memo itself is straightforward. Summarized, it's "we're losing and we need to quit alienating people with stupid language." What's more interesting to me, however, is how some of it is framed.

... many Democrats are aware that the words and phrases we use can be profoundly alienating. But they use it because plain, authentic language that voters understand often rebounds badly among many activists and advocacy organizations. These activists and advocates may take on noble causes, but in doing so they often demand compliance with their preferred messages ...

That's interesting. That is a tacit - and likely inadvertent - admission that the Party is the plaything of major academic and NGO machinery. This leftist think tank just put paid to the entire notion of "grass roots" left-wing activities. The Party is controlled by and beholden to those interests. In black and white.

Over the years we've conducted, read, and analyzed hours upon hours of focus groups, and we've yet to hear a voter volunteer any of the phrases below except as a form of derision or parody of Democrats.

So for years Democrat insiders and machinators have known that nobody likes it and nobody listens except for those inside the power complex, yet only now that they've been smashed in the mouth are they concerned? "Yeah, we've known for years that everyone hates this crap, but we didn't really see any reason we should care about what the rubes think" is probably not what they were hoping to convey to outsiders who might read that memo.

The latter part of the memo is structured as a segmented list of words and phrases the think tank compiled that are particularly bad and should be avoided. The headings to introduce each section are much more enlightening that the list itself.

Therapy-Speak
These words say "I'm more empathetic than you, and you are callous to hurting other's feelings."

Seminar Room Language
This language says "I'm smarter and more concerned about important issues than you. Your kitchen table concerns are small."

Organizer Jargon
These words say "we are beholden to groups, not individuals. People have no agency."

Gender/Orientation Correctness
These say "your views on traditional genders and gender roles are at best quaint."

The Shifting Language of Racial Constructs
These words signal that talking about race is even more of a minefield. You will be called out as racist if you do not use the latest and correct terminology.

Explaining Away Crime
This says: "The criminal is the victim. The victim is an afterthought."

All of these say the same thing: "we are arrogant, unapproachable, holier-than-thou elitists who can no longer communicate with outsiders because of our highly-refined internal language that we use to signal each other while engendering the distrust and contempt of outsiders."

True enough. The modern Left uses academic language so skillfully that it has become its own dialect and outsiders neither understand it nor care to. But outsiders can - and do - get the gist of it. That is the problem. Hearing leftist duckspeak tells normals two distinct things. The first is what this memo is all about. People hear this spew and think, "what an asshole." The second thing is very loudly not addressed in this memo. That second thing is, "I get it well enough to know I want nothing to do with it because it sucks and is miserable and dangerous."

Yes, the message and the messaging do suck. Tons of people do feel revulsion and contempt when encountering it. Many do feel like a bunch of elitists are talking down to them when they hear it. That is all true. The broader problem, though, is that this is all downstream from the beliefs underpinning it. Calling it by different words doesn't change what it is, and that is the root problem. Improving the messaging will not improve the message. The message is still what it is, and it is abhorrent. Aping rubespeak won't change that other than compounding the problem by accidentally introducing clarity.

They don't get it and can't. They're so deep in the machinery that they are actually unable to figure that out. The core problem isn't their elitism or incomprehensible language, the core problem is that they're fully-committed ideological warriors and people are increasingly sick of their ideology. They don't see their ideas as possibly being the root issue.

We will never abandon our values or stop doing things to protect those who need help, encouragement, trust, a second chance, acceptance, a fair shake, and the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness.

Yes, they will never abandon their awful values. We all know it. And that - not their messaging - is their real problem.