The ‘Vocabulary’ Is Only a Symptom of the ‘Problem’

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 27, 2026

 

Over a year after the self-consciously anti-partisan think tank Third Way warned Democrats against adopting the left-wing newspeak native to the American faculty lounge — “hiding behind unfamiliar phrases to mask extreme intent,” in its memo’s terms — Democrats are still doing it.

 

The list of words Third Way would banish from Democratic mouths was overbroad. Sure, “chest feeding,” “heteronormativity,” and “holding space” should meet the chopping block, but there’s nothing wrong with using “heuristic” as long as you’re describing a process of reasoning and not trying to verbally muscle your interlocutor into submission.

 

As Axios reported on Thursday, however, many of the phrases the think tank tried to anathematize are still with us. Its report chides Democratic lawmakers for still calling mothers “birthing individuals.” They’re still describing the homeless as “unhoused people.” They persist in their efforts to replace “felon” and “convict” with “criminal-justice impacted individual.” And they’re doing so even though they know they shouldn’t.

 

The reason Democrats resist this obvious imperative is contained within Axios’s report. They might know they have to change, but they resent it.

 

Axios reporter Mike Zapler admits that this language is “natural in liberal spaces.” The patois of the professorate was “created for the right reasons,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear sympathetically intoned. The whole enterprise was just an “effort to show more cultural sensitivity,” but it was “easily weaponized by Republicans.” Poor, Democrats.

 

So, the problem Third Way set out to identify endures. And it endures because the left’s linguistic signifiers are only a symptom of it. The real problem is that this language is designed to render their speakers “foreign,” as Axios put it, to most Americans. It marks its user as apart, distant, or even entirely removed from broader American culture, perhaps because that culture is irredeemable. These aren’t expressions of empathy for a select few but, rather, contempt for everyone else.

 

As I wrote a year ago, what Third Way tried to put its finger on was the distaste for American common culture conveyed within the subtext of the words they use in place of everyday vernacular. “The words they use to convey that animus are truly secondary.”