The Eloquence of Evasion
By Abe Greenwald for Commentary
Is there a discernible difference between the communication styles of successful Democrats and their Republican counterparts? Judging from the latest crop of rising Democrats, it certainly seems so.
MAGA Republicans, with a few exceptions, tend to speak in blunt declarations. Extremist Democrats, also with some exceptions, lean rhetorically in the opposite direction. That is, the more radical the Democratic candidate or elected official, the more slick, measured, or downright elusive he tries to sound in selling his ideas.
Take New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He claims currently to be weighing his options for arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the latter next comes to town for the UN General Assembly. On the podcast this morning, Seth Mandel referred to Mamdani’s handling of this subject in a recent interview with the New York Times’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
Mamdani begins plainspokenly enough. “I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague. He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” he says. But he soon adopts pure Kamalaese. “And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years. I’ve also said that I will follow the laws that we have here in New York City because I believe that there is an importance in following the law as a leader who presides over our city.”
That kind of rhetorical vagueness usually satisfies liberal journalists, who rarely respond with the brisk fact-checking to which they regularly subject conservatives. It partially doomed Kamala Harris because she was running for the highest office in the land and was forced to venture outside of liberal media precincts.
But as Seth pointed out, Garcia-Navarro refreshingly didn’t play along with Mamdani. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what that means,” she said. For once, he was caught.
Not so the equally radical Abdul El-Sayed, who’s running for U.S. Senate in Michigan. Yesterday on CNN, Jake Tapper rightly pressed him on his past accusations that AIPAC steals U.S. elections with “foreign” money. El-Sayed went the slick and measured route in response. “If you were to take all the outside spending in this race out, this would not be a close election,” he said. “But it speaks to the way that, unfortunately, money from DTE, our local utility, money from Blue Cross Blue Shield, money from AIPAC, has come in to try to tilt this election in favor of somebody who they know is going to do their business instead of the people’s.” Finally, he wrapped it up in a bow. “And I think that’s anti-democratic on its own terms. It’s why I’m running on getting money out of politics so that we can put money back in people’s pockets and pass Medicare for all.”
With no fact-check follow-up, El-Sayed was left sounding as reasonable as he possibly could. What’s important is that both Mamdani and El-Sayed are in a crop of the most staunchly anti-American major political figures this country has ever produced—and they seek to obscure their animus with cleverness.
Why is it that MAGA’s leading lights don’t, for the most part, do the same? For one thing, their policy proposals—even the distasteful ones—tend to hew far closer to our political traditions. They don’t need the extensive camouflage of those who seek an end to the American experiment as we know it.
But the more salient point is that MAGA has been, from the start, largely about the genuine appeal of coarseness. It was always more a revolution in style than substance. In 2016, Donald Trump offered up his worldview in such indecorous terms that Americans found it to be a relief from the usual political equivocation. Trump trolls his enemies by sounding like a troglodyte. Once Trump was elected, his party largely followed suit. At the start of Trump’s second term, simple language made a nice fit for what he deemed a “common sense revolution.”
The left’s revolution, however, comes straight out of academia, where mystifying language routinely stands in for substantive argument. They deal in the very opposite of common sense. Left-liberals nevertheless pride themselves on being the self-evidently smarter option. They appeal to their own by sounding thoughtful and troll the right by speaking down to them. Their coarseness, however, is to be found on full display in their actual agenda.
