Democrats Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Words Longer Than 2 Syllables
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have spoken to over 250,000 voters across the country during their Fighting Oligarchy tour. Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, meanwhile, is debating verbiage with Politico.
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I’m hardly one to extol the virtues of the same U.S. electorate that’s given us not one but two Donald Trump presidencies. And yet, as elected Democrats struggle to fight “coastal elitist” stereotypes, they’re hardly helping themselves when they claim the average voter doesn’t understand words with more than two syllables.
Speaking to Politico last week, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), whom centrist Democrats are hailing as a rising star in the party, said Democrats should stop using the word “oligarchy,” in a thinly veiled swipe at Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have attracted hundreds of thousands to rallies for their nationwide Fighting Oligarchy tour in the last two months. Slotkin claimed the word doesn’t resonate with voters outside coastal liberal institutions—even as the Fighting Oligarchy tour has drawn some of its largest crowds in rural counties in Idaho and Arizona, and counties Trump swept at the ballot box. In the same interview, Slotkin argued Democrats should instead oppose “kings.” But…there aren’t “kings” in the U.S. right now—so, I have to wonder whether invoking a metaphor would really come off as more urgent to the average voter than warning of billionaire oligarchs, who very much exist and are very much running our government.
Slotkin also said Democrats should stop being “weak and woke,” or at least challenge perceptions of them as such. The obvious subtext is that Democrats should fight for marginalized people less—at a time when the current president is trying to write trans people out of existence and disappear American residents to a foreign torture camp without due process.
Ocasio-Cortez appeared to respond with an email to supporters sent shortly after Slotkin’s interview was published; the email featured a banner that spelled out and defined the word oligarchy. “Plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle feel threatened by rising class consciousness,” she posted to social media hours after Slotkin’s interview was published.