Does U.S. democracy need our tired old Democratic and Republican parties? Part three.

This post is about what more formal writers call "contestation of language" and what most of us call the labels we use to name ourselves and our friends.

Anyone who is paying any attention over time in this hyper-changeable society knows that people coming into their power -- into self-affirmation and social recognition -- shed old labels and evolve new ones. My own kind have, in my lifetime, gone from "pervert" to "dyke" to "woman identified woman" to "lesbian" to "gender queer" to ??? And compared to even more stigmatized racial and sexual identities, that evolution, though hard fought, has been relatively peaceful for many of us. 

The words -- the labels -- matter. They have power. They change with changing power relations.

And so it seems worth highlighting an observation from the thoughtful journalist Josh Marshall about how this works in and through the Democratic Party.

... the contestation of language, efforts to politicize and transform it in order to embed new assumptions within it is recurring dynamic in our culture and society. The effects of it often seem commonsensical, obvious, unobjectionable … at the remove of a few decades. In other words, once it’s succeeded. But it doesn’t look that way at the leading edge of it, when we are in the midst of it. 

... It is a real challenge for the political party which is inevitably the political vehicle for progressive social change in this country, the Democratic party. There is a strong in-group dynamic, often amplified through social media, which excludes many people who struggle to keep up with it. It is at its worst when it is not a path to embody and communicate values but a stumbling block – sometimes an intentional one – for those who may embrace or at least be open to those values but are not versed on a code devised for them by others.

The evolving Democratic Party will always come with some grumps complaining that the latest verbal innovations are going to alienate someone, like the smart but curmudgeonly John Judis:

Anything that suggests that there is no such thing as men and women, e.g. that a woman who has a baby is a "birthing person." All that kind of stuff that is comprehensible in a few zip codes, but seems totally nuts and offensive to most Americans, including most people who vote for Democrats.

The cautious linguist John McWhorter (not, I think, a Democrat) lends his expertise to fighting back to against what he considers absurd inventions.

Latinx may solve a problem, but it’s not a problem that people who are not academics or activists seem to find as urgent as they do. Now as always, imposing change on language is wickedly difficult from above, even change with wisdom in it.

But along with society, the changes keep coming. And it is through the broad coalition that is the Democratic Party that these verbal changes push from the margins to the center. "Arena of linguist change" may seem a strange role for a messy, grubby political party, but that's how we roll.

Political parties:

Professonalism meets passions. Part one.

The challenges of changes. Part two.