The Obsession Over Woke Language Misses the Point

The focus on certain words is a way to avoid much tougher questions.

Last week, Third Way, a centrist think tank, publicly released a memo to Democratic officials listing 45 words and phrases Democrats should stop using. Among them:

• Privilege

• Cultural appropriation

• Housing insecurity

• Birthing person

• Radical transparency

• Holding space

The goal, in their words, was to put a:

Spotlight on the language we use that puts a wall between us and everyday people of all races, religions, and ethnicities. These are words that people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats. Over the years we’ve conducted, read, and analyzed hours upon hours of focus groups, and we’ve yet to hear a voter volunteer any of the phrases below except as a form of derision or parody of Democrats.

I want to stipulate up front: I very much agree that Democrats should avoid most of these words. Democrats need to get back in the business of talking like normal human beings. Too often, elected Democrats sound like elite college professors—or AI chatbots trained on focus groups and all seven seasons of The West Wing.

Our language needs to improve. Our message needs to get sharper. Third Way is right that our rhetoric often validates the Right’s caricature of Democrats. But I worry we are once again falling into a familiar trap: the Magic Words Fallacy.

The Magic Words Fallacy is the belief that politics is a locked door, and all Democrats need is the right words. If we can just find the perfect phrase—or eliminate the offending ones—the door will swing open and voters will flood back. It’s an appealing idea because it makes losing feel like a simple marketing problem rather than a deep structural one.

Democrats have been chasing these “magic words” for decades. After Republicans took the House in 1994, Democrats went looking for their own Frank Luntz, convinced that we were losing because the GOP had better packaging. “Death tax” and “pro-life” sounded stronger than “estate tax” and “abortion rights,” so we told ourselves the problem was diction, not politics.

After George W. Bush’s reelection, Democrats flocked to the linguist George Lakoff, who promised to give us the words that would win back the voters who had abandoned us.

Since 2016, Democrats have built a massive, highly sophisticated message-testing machine that churns out the “most persuasive” language—language that our politicians then use relentlessly and robotically. This system was supposed to halt the country’s rightward drift.

But better language is just a band-aid on a gaping wound. The obsession with magic words—and the fantasy that banning or discovering a handful of phrases can change our fortunes—lets Democrats avoid the much harder work of fixing our policies, our leadership, and our ability to connect with voters in a fractured media ecosystem.

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Language Was Not the Problem

Much of the post-election analysis has centered on the idea that Democrats lost because we were “too woke.” Rahm Emanuel has been making the rounds arguing that Democrats focused too much on abstract cultural issues like trans athletes and bathrooms. The Third Way memo fits neatly into that narrative.

But this is a massive oversimplification. It’s true voters saw Democrats as culturally out of touch. And yes, a devastating ad featuring Kamala Harris’s 2019 comments on taxpayer-funded surgeries for undocumented immigrants in prison played a role.

Still, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were the most prominent Democrats in the country over the last four years. How many times did you hear either of them say “chest feeding,” “intersectionality,” or “microaggression”? I’d venture the answer is never.

Biden is an old white Catholic man visibly uncomfortable with cultural issues. The White House staff needed an electric cattle prod just to get him to say the word “abortion” after Roe was overturned. As the nominee, Harris didn’t run an identity-based campaign. She almost never leaned into the history-making nature of her candidacy. She also didn’t campaign on trans issues or other cultural debates.

Did some Democrats use the language in the memo? Yes, but not nearly as often as conventional wisdom suggests. Do some pundits, writers, and podcasters use these phrases? Absolutely. (I overuse “Overton Window” and “existential threat” myself—both are on the list.)

You could argue that some Biden administration policies contributed to the image of being “too woke.” But do we really think swing voters who barely follow politics are familiar with executive orders on cultural issues? And even if they were, that’s a policy problem, not a language problem.

The real question Democrats must confront is how Republicans successfully branded the party in ways divorced from reality.

Republicans dominate the information space. They amplify the worst offenses of random Democrats—backbenchers, school board members, social media personalities—and use them to define the entire party. Meanwhile, the words our leaders actually use rarely reach voters. Either our leaders aren’t strong enough communicators, or they haven’t figured out how to break through in this media environment.

We will never tackle those bigger challenges if we’re obsessing over words most Democrats don’t even say. By all means, let’s use better language. But let’s not kid ourselves: 45 bad phrases aren’t the reason we’re in this mess.