“Most college-educated Democrats do a lot of what I’ll call ‘textual analysis as lifestyle,” writes Matthew. “The actual words said by others tend to matter a lot to us.”
But this emphasis on words alone “is not how language gets used among working-class people — that is, among most Americans,” she writes.
Kamala Harris’s language was “too hollow, too impersonal, too simultaneously prim and punchy, and too devoid of warmth to connect with normal people.”
Normal people, she says, “garner as much from how something is said as from what is said.”
Donald Trump, in contrast, talks like the sports radio guys Matthew listened to as a child. “He deftly uses gesticulations, tone, epithets and facial expressions to convey meaning.”
The Democratic worldview is built on a foundation that is only “only language deep,” she says. “But for most Americans, reality does not conform to language. In fact, it’s the other way around.”
“Democrats need to rediscover sanity. This begins with a broad acknowledgment that — like it or not — there in fact are truths so primal that they cannot be gainsaid by words.”
Read the op-ed at TheHill.com.
