Trump's billionaires aren't 'oligarchs' — they're something else

Hakeem Jeffries posted an example of what I think is a problem in Democratic communications. Call it “the magic-word thing.”

The House minority leader said: “House Republicans pretended not to know about Project 2025 last year. Now they are implementing it. We will hold them accountable for lying to the American people.”

Now, given that the last election was decided by people who don’t know anything about politics, don’t want to know anything about politics, indeed revel in their ignorance of how politics works, you might think a Democratic leader would choose words more wisely.

“Project 2025” is clearly meant for liberals and Democrats, more precisely, very online liberals and Democrats, who understand that it’s shorthand for the horribles coming out of the Trump White House, including efforts to redefine “citizenship” according to whiteness.

There’s something to be said for preaching to the choir, especially now that the Democrats are out of power. But there’s also something to be said for shaping public perception of the party in power. While very online liberals and Democrats respond to the incantation of the magic words, I can’t help thinking that, for everyone else, it falls on deaf ears.

Consider what Jeffries is trying to do – suggest the House Republicans are hypocrites and that the House Democrats, with the support of the American people, will hold them accountable for their hypocrisy.

Sounds good, except the whole thing depends on knowing what the hell “Project 2025” means. I pay attention to politics, but I must admit. I only sortakinda know what it means. If you were to ask me for a detailed explanation, I couldn’t do it. In any case, it seems that if the magic words need an NPR explainer, they can’t be that magical.

Moreover, they must compete for attention with Trump’s rhetoric, which is designed for consumption by society’s troglodytes, low-lifes and bottom-feeders, which is to say, “Project 2025” is at a disadvantage when compared to “they’re eating the dogs; they’re eating the cats.”

My friend Stephen Robinson put it this way: “There are no reasonable people. I think we just flatter ourselves with that argument. We see this a lot, like when [Democrats] talk about Project 2025, which always sounded cool to me. It was like a sci-fi series. They would say things like, ‘Oh, Trump’s going to dismantle the administrative state.’ Well, OK, but the other side is saying that you’re going to send your kid to school and [liberals] are going to change their gender” (my bold).

So the magic-word thing is really a question of reasonable magic words, which is to say that words are magical if you already know what they mean. They require insider information that comes with a level of intelligence, education and cultivation that goes with being, if not a very online liberal and Democrat, then definitely a liberal and Democrat. In that case, the magic-word thing is for club members, not those on the outside looking in, if they even bother to look in.

Does it have political value?

You would think it does, given the enormous energy that goes into forcing Democrats in Washington and the states to use magic words as signals of fidelity to specific advocacy groups that, along with others, constitute much of the base of the Democratic Party. While there’s value in being precise about words, because words matter, we should reconsider the wisdom of imbuing the magic-word thing with so much energy, because we risk talking to ourselves – or worse, sounding like words are more important than the things words represent, thus giving credence to the allegation that liberal politics is all talk.

US Senator Brian Schatz, of Hawaii, pointed out another problem with the magic-word thing. It becomes symbolic of politics but isn’t really political. “This idea that there are magic words that we must be forced to say defines progressivism and political courage by essentially saying whatever a bunch of activists want us to say, as opposed to doing the thing,” he toldPolitico. “And I think that there are a bunch of people who see what we’re doing as performative for that exact reason. But it’s also just alienating. This magic-words thing has to go away.”

The magic-word thing isn’t going away, as we can see in the way some leading liberals and Democrats are trying to define the second Trump administration as the time of “oligarchs.” President Joe Biden said in his farewell address that “today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America.”

Google searches for “oligarchy” spiked afterward, giving hope to some that the word was sticking. I don’t think it will, any more than “Project 2025” stuck, because “oligarchy,” like “Project 2025,” is too abstract and can’t compete with the rhetoric of the lowest-common denominator.

More important, I think, is that “oligarchy” and “Project 2025” are not gestures of power. It’s one thing to say, as Joe Biden did, that oligarchs threaten “our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone.” It’s another to say that oligarchs are scamming scammers trying to scam you out of your money, which is a more accurate representation of what they are going to try to do.

There was a moment, before he became the vice presidential candidate, when Minnesota Governor Tim Walz dominated the news by calling the Republicans “just weird.” It was a lightning strike, random, organic and authentic. It seemed to capture everything that was right about the Democrats and wrong about the Republicans.

Then it was gone. I don’t know where it went. But at some point, deeper into Kamala Harris’s brief campaign, someone somewhere decided to back off the weird and ramp up talk of “Project 2025.”

It was probably due to pressure that Harris felt to explain her policy positions in minute detail in comparison to Trump’s. By the end, though, voters heard more about something that sounded like “a sci-fi series” than about a demented old man who was “just weird.”