Faculty Lounge Language Redux

Friday, the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way published a memo titled “Was It Something I Said?” Its premise is familiar:

For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying. The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness. To please the few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.

They break down the offending word and phrases into several categories:

1. Therapy-Speak (that can signal a judgmental tone)

• Privilege
• Violence (as in “environmental violence”)
• Dialoguing
• Othering
• Triggering
• Progressive stack
• Centering
• Holding space

2. Seminar-Room Language (that can feel academic or detached)

• Subverting norms
• Systems of oppression
• Critical theory
• Cultural appropriation
• Postmodernism
• Overton Window
• Heuristic

3. Organizer Jargon (that may sound institutional)

• Radical transparency
• Small “d” democracy
• Barriers to participation
• Stakeholders
• Food insecurity
• Housing insecurity

4. Gender/Orientation Correctness (that may seem overly technical in casual communication)

• Birthing person / Inseminated person
• Pregnant people
• Chest feeding
• Heteronormative
• Patriarchy

5. The Shifting Language of Racial Constructs (that may appear performative)

• Latinx
• Intersectionality
• Minoritized communities

6. Explaining Away Crime (that can sound soft on offenders)

• Justice-involved
• Carceration
• Involuntary confinement

This is, as noted, a rather familiar criticism. Jim Carville famously scolded his co-partisans for their use of “faculty lounge language” more than four years ago. In the main, I agree that, while most of these terms are well-meaning, and some of them quite useful as professional jargon, almost none of them are useful in talking to ordinary people, and a handful of them are downright silly.

The thing is, while I hear and, especially, read these terms all the time from academics and pundits, I hear few of them from politicians talking to the public. They’re not words that I recall Kamala Harris using in her stump speeches, debates, or television interviews.

Indeed, political scientist Lindsey Cormack does the hard work of doing a content search of “the DCinbox archive of 208,000+ official congressional e-newsletters from 2010 to today to see who uses the words and terms outlined in the Third Way memo” and finds that twelve of the 45 words never appeared. Not once. Most of the others were used five or fewer times—often as much by Republicans making fun of their use than Democrats actually using them. The only ones in widespread use were variations of LGBTQ (unspecified number) and privilege (11,691 uses by Republicans vs. 4,492 by Democrats).

She concludes,

Looking at actual usage, the Third Way memo reads less like an audit of Democrats’ language and more like a list of terms Republicans tell us Democrats are saying. The data show that many of these phrases barely exist in constituent communications, and when they do, Republicans are often the ones writing them either to lampoon Democrats or to spotlight them as proof of “wokeness.” But again, these are not campaign emails, and I’m far out of campaign world for the most part.

But in doing this version of a check and in my understanding of how American politics can move forward in a more functional way, I agree we need to get away from what Third Way calls “the eggshell dance of political correctness.” People and politicians should be willing to adapt words when they don’t land and should be open to trying out new terms that capture novel experiences/problems that we need to deal with.

But as long as Republicans can keep defining Democrats by terms Democrats themselves rarely use, and everyone comes to believe this through repetition is a much bigger challenge for the impressions of the Democratic Party than any lefty words they might on occasion.

Here, I’m willing to extrapolate beyond the data: if Democratic congressional newsletters being sent to journalists aren’t using this jargon, they’re sure as hell not using it in campaign materials. It’s conceivable they’re using it in highly targeted fundraising materials aimed at the sort of people who do use those words, but it’s just not how 99% of them talk.

It is, of course, how a lot of Democratic elites talk and, especially, write. But I can’t imagine that has much impact on the turnout of Democratic-leaning voters or impacts the voting behavior of the truly undecided.