The Plain Language Critique

I like tough women. I married one — she works in mental health and is not a big person, but she was trained in methods to restrain patients without hurting them, and she taught classes on those methods. She often tells me that being a small woman is an advantage when big men want to get violent, because they don’t normally hit small women. That’s small comfort to me.

I was thrilled when Kay said she wanted to write here, because obviously she’s tough. I appreciate everyone who disagrees with me on this blog, but especially the women, because there’s a lot of social pressure for women to be docile and submissive to males.

So I like Cheryl Rofer, who's a tough woman writing a LGM, formerly at Balloon-Juice. She had a good post yesterday. If I disagree with her, or Kay, I have to think long and hard about whether I’m wrong. Here’s the end of her post:

Read the whole thing because I love the way Cheryl doesn’t accept the notion that we need to genuflect to incels.

Anyway, I get her general point on slagging Dems: we’re in a fight against fascism and the importance of our party disputes pales against the overall importance of resisting Trump. I’m sure I’m one of the people she’s talking about, and that’s OK. But I do respect her, so I want to make a point about a certain kind of Dems v Dems critique.

It’s a charge that’s repeated a lot: our language doesn’t connect with “the average person”. We’re the college-educated party. According to this critique, which is often advanced by what I’d call self-hating college-educated males (e.g., Matt Yglesias), a big part of Democrats’ electoral problem is that we’re high-hatting the common man by using big words. Elissa Slotkin is one of the main proponents of this critique when she advises Dems to “speak in plain English.”

Jamelle Bouie, a NYT columnist, educated at the University of Virginia, should be an example of this. But I challenge you to find something in this video that is expressed in anything but plain language.

The beginning of this video is just a recitation of Republican talking points about immigration, along with a refutation of those claims. It’s simple declarative sentences that I know my non-college educated relatives would understand.

When I’m visiting family in my small town, I spend a lot of time with my wife’s non-college-educated relatives. Most of them are pretty smart, on a definition of smart that doesn’t include knowing a lot of references to the various books that constitute “a well-read person.” I’m not going to discuss the categorial imperative with any of my wife’s relatives, but they know a hell of a lot more about cars and carpentry that I do.

So if they have an honest question about politics, I try to answer them as plainly as I can. This is not condescension. When I have a question for them about carpentry, cars, or agriculture, they try to answer me as plainly as they can, too. That’s because we respect each other’s intelligence, and each of us knows that the other can understand what we’re saying if we explain it without jargon, and if we supply context that’s necessary to understand the point being made.

If that’s what’s missing from the way Democrats talk to their voters, then we should get better at it. But, frankly, any competent politician is already at least decent at meeting voters where they are. The critiques of Democrats’ language are mostly cherry-picked from the statements of non-candidate pundits. So why don’t we just stop making those ill-informed critiques.