Contra Axios: Dems Don't *Just* Have a 'Vocabulary Problem'Democrats have lots of problems at the moment. And while vocabulary may be one of them, it's hardly their biggest issue in this midterm cycle.
Axios highlights their "vocabulary problem" this morning, but that is far from the actual issue plaguing Democrats. James Carville has spoken out for at least five years about the party's habit of speaking what he calls "faculty lounge bull***t," but the problem isn't the vocabulary. It's why they need the "faculty lounge bull***t" at all:
Unhoused people. Criminal justice-impacted individuals. Substance use disorder. Birthing people.
Several Democrats eyeing 2028 runs for president say the party has a vocabulary problem as much as a messaging one. The left's embrace of "woke" buzzwords alienated working-class voters and drove many of them to Donald Trump, they say.
Why it matters: To get them back, they want more Democrats to start speaking more like ordinary people — and less like progressive politicos or liberal arts professors.
The big picture: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has been the most vocal about the need for Democrats to "talk like a normal human being," as he's put it in speeches and interviews.
Axios thinks vocabulary is the key to Donald Trump's success:
The bottom line: Trump's speaking style may be rambling and disjointed, but no one needs a glossary to understand him. It's helped him win the presidency twice.
This misses the point entirely. Axios never asks the question of why Democrats and the Left developed this vocabulary in the first place. The answer: These euphemisms deconstruct reality and allow Democrats to live in unreality instead. As soon as these euphemisms (and worse) start to get stuck in firm meaning, the euphemisms get changed to newer and more ambiguous terms. George Orwell wrote 1984 on the basis of this phenomenon on the Left, in which an authoritarian socialist government continuously changed the language as well as history in order to create the most convenient fantasy for the masses that distracted them from actual reality, history, and truth.
Trump didn't succeed because he used blunt language. He succeeded because he addressed reality. He called criminals "criminals," not "justice-impacted individuals." He called women "mothers," not "birthing people." Voters responded to Trump because he spoke to their actual lived experience, not just because he used small words.
Democrats don't have a vocabulary problem – they have a reality problem. The Left has created a new and ever-shifting vocabulary to both hide their reality problem and deal with its contradictions. Much of this comes from the Queer Movement, which demands the deconstruction of objective truth and reality. Thus we get pronoun enforcement with new entries like "xe," "chestfeeders," "birthing people," and so on, because biological reality is the most dangerous objective truth to their entire mission.
But even the Left's reality problem is secondary to their main issue: arrested development. Their candidates in this cycle especially all share the same failure-to-launch qualities. They mooch off their parents, prompting me to write a month ago, "Scratch a Commie, find a mommy." That group includes AOC, James Talarico, Zohran Mamdani, Graham Platner before he finally flamed out, and pretty much the entire cohort of DSA leadership. They are functionally children.
https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2026/08/27/contra-axios-dems-dont-just-have-a-vocabulary-problem-n3818417https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2026/08/27/contra-axios-dems-dont-just-have-a-vocabulary-problem-n3818417
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