Democrats have to learn to talk to people, not at them

If you go without eating for a day, are you hungry?

Or are you experiencing food insecurity?

Are people homeless, or are they experiencing homelessness?

If you say the latter, stop reading now. You will probably find the rest of this column indigestible.

My last column focused on, and gave examples of, the Democratic Party’s lost sense of normalcy in so many of their policies that most Americans don’t like.

Today, amidst reports that Democrats are having Deep Thought autopsies about how badly they screwed the pooch in November, here’s my follow-up. The Left wing of the party has lost the ability to talk to people who are not members of the Princeton faculty. 

I am not the first to observe they sound like hoity toity elites, refugees from a progressive linguistic corral, chowing on the hay of group think. Certainly not all Democrats, but the noisest Left wing snatches the headlines.

Listen to Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, perhaps the most successful Democratic governor in a red state.

 “We got to talk to people like real human beings,” Beshear told Politico’s Elena Schneider in February. 

“We’ve sanitized different language so significantly that, you know, people don’t feel like we’re talking to them.” He wants his party  to start talking “like real human beings” and get away from sanitized language and messaging.

He gave examples, such as calling prisoners justice-involved populations, or substituting substance use disorder for addiction.

It’s like I have a twin.

Part of the issue is the linguistics of comfort, trying to protect the feelings of certain groups of people. You know, like using big and beautiful instead of fat. Or otherly abled instead of disabled.

You can argue there is a measure of grace in that.

The other part of it is more insidious — the use of language to alter reality, honesty, and truth.

More than two decades ago I noticed that illegal aliens had disappeared.

Not the people.

What disappeared was the completely accurate and century-old, legal description of people in this country without authorization.

There used to be a difference between emigrant, and immigrant. The first was a person leaving a country, the second was a person arriving in a country.

In the MainStream Media both words have been replaced by the all-purpose migrant, which is deceptively used to cover both legal and illegal people. It sanitizes the distinction. This is deliberate obfuscation, an attempt to erase the line between legal and illegal. As the joke goes, it’s like calling a drug dealer a pharmacist.

Brief aside:  The Left says “no person is illegal,” in an attempt to spare their feelings, I guess. But we use the term criminal for a person who commits a crime. Well, so far, anyway.

This deliberate misuse of language reminds me of Newspeak, in George Orwell’s masterpiece “1984.” 

The official language of the imaginary Oceania, Newspeak, by limiting the words you can use, suppresses dissent. When the government restricts what you can say, it begins to control what you can think.

You may recall that when Nancy Pelosi was speaker of the House, she ordered the replacement of  gender-specific language — such as mother, father, sister, brother — with gender-neutral language in the rules of the House. For what earthly reason?

This gender insanity is a product of the Left, which invented the term birthing parent, and is out of step with most Americans, who are clearly in the right, pun intended.

And if you use the wrong term, you run the risk of being cancelled.

“The language police are in full force in the Democratic Party,” said Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton on Bill Maher’s HBO show last Friday. “We’re so afraid of offending people.”

This leads to a fudging of language that reeks of artifice and inauthenticity. 

Earlier, Arizona Democratic U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego said, “Some words are just too Ivy League-tested terms.” The Harvard graduate added, “I’m going to piss some people off by saying this, but ‘social equity’ — why do we say that? Why don’t we say ‘We want you to have an even chance?’”

He also pissed on the word LatinX, which is ignored by most Latinos and Latinas, who respect their language’s masculine and feminine forms.

“Not every person we meet is going to have the latest update on what the proper terms are,” he said. “It doesn’t make them sexist or homophobic or racist.”

On the other side, right-wing Republicans are quick to call anything they don’t like Marxist or libtard.

Each side has its own buzz words.

On the far Right, the words and phrases are patriotism, small government, low taxes, responsibility, isolation. These are terms most Americans understand. 

On the far Left, it’s intersectionality, racism, patriarchal, cultural appropriation, misgendered. These are terms most Americans don’t understand.

And not because they are stupid. Democrats must learn the art of straight talk to everyday Americans.

To get people to listen, Democrats must learn to talk to people, not at them.