Populism as performative dumbassery

Here’s presidential hopeful Andy Beshear, imploring Democratic politicians to talk in language that the common clay of the west can understand: Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a possible presidential candidate in 2028, delivered a speech Saturday in Detroit urging Michigan Democrats to “talk like a normal human” to win voters. Appearing at the Michigan Democratic […] The post Populism as pe

He was re-elected to a second term in 2023. In a speech streamed live by Fox News, he spoke of the importance of talking to the people, not down to them with fancy-speak that’s not decipherable. He said Democrats can’t say, “more kids aren’t going to be able to concentrate at school because they’re food insecure.

We’re gonna win by saying those kids can’t concentrate because they’re hungry.” “We’re not going to win by saying seniors can’t sleep at night because they’re food insecure. We’re going to win by leveling with people and saying those seniors are hungry. I’ll give you the newest one that I’m told we’re supposed to use.

It’s called ‘justice involved population.’ Anybody know what I’m talking about? Those are our inmates.” He said people haven’t lost lives to “substance use disorder,” they lost them to addiction. He went on to talk about everyday people.

I suppose it could just be a coincidence that this speech was streamed live by Fox News but I have my doubts. As to the substance here, there are a couple of big problems with this sort of populist preening. First, I’ve never heard a Democratic politician use the phrase “justice-involved population” when speaking to a general audience, while I’ve heard Democratic politicians talk about people going hungry many, many times.

The claim that Democrats regularly talk like policy wonks when addressing the general public is pretty much something Beshear is just making up. More annoyingly, the reason phrases like “justice-involved population” and “food insecurity” and “substance abuse disorder” exist is that there are good reasons for having technical terms that have technical definitions, when experts talk about these things to each other, and even to general audiences that read at above a sixth-grade level, which admittedly is not a majority of the public. For example, justice-involved population is not actually a synonym for “inmates” (which by the way our newest hillbilly whisperer might note is actually a fancier more technical term than “prisoners”).

It’s a term used by people who study these things to describe everybody who is currently under judicial supervision after a criminal conviction, which is a far bigger population than those who are in prison or jail at the moment. Similarly, “food insecure” is a technical term that’s been used for decades by the federal government, whose experts study the complexity of the effects of food scarcity among the poor, which go well beyond someone happens to be hungry at a particular moment. 93%* of the eating-disordered upper class white women in America are actually hungry at any moment, but none of them are food insecure.

And so forth. The point here being that performatively mimicking Donald Trump’s thoroughgoing stupidity and contempt for every form of expertise is something that would be best left to his various fascist epigoni. *Estimate. . . . Two things are getting mixed up in this situation.

One is the claim that you shouldn’t talk in expert jargon when addressing non-expert audiences. This is completely non-controversial and no competent politician does this, despite Beshear’s claims. The other is that the left activist class on social media takes extreme political positions, which it often expresses in jargon-ridden obscurantist ways.

The problem here isn’t the jargon, which again no mainstream politician ever uses to a mainstream audience, but the positions . . . which no mainstream politician takes, either. So what we have here is the typical made-up right wing bullshit about extremist out of touch Democrats.