First Draft #32: a newsletter on public language
Fake populism; "big asks"; Kamala echoes Keir; Jenrick clichés
The perils of not being yourself (and why populism is hard to fake)
The biggest cringe of 2024 comes courtesy of Donald Trump running mate JD Vance. “Democrats think it’s racist to do anything,” said the senator to a crowd of MAGA-hatted supporters shortly after his selection. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and one today... they probably think that’s racist too.” Nobody laughs.
As bad jokes go, it’s a triple threat: dreadfully conceived, worded and delivered. But the intense awkwardness stems less from poor gag-craft than from witnessing someone contort themselves into a rhetorical mode that their character cannot support. Vance, a one-time literary star, is an intellectual posing as a populist. And it’s this hopeless pretence that makes the clip so painful.
It’s always uncomfortable watching someone pretend to be something they’re not. A visible gap between who a speaker is and who they’re trying to be is an advertisement of insecurity. And insecurity is a burden for all who are attuned to it. As an audience, we feel co-opted into complying with the pretence, lest the speaker’s fragile ego be hurt or their true identity be exposed. It’s a horrible position to be put in and an effect no politician can afford to have.
Populism is a particularly hard thing to fake because its very appeal is grounded in a rejection of political artifice. That’s not to say populists are always honest; rather that they tend to be unwaveringly themselves. For all his mendacity, Trump’s true character comes at us unfiltered and unvarnished. Boris Johnson cynically backed Brexit to advance his career. But that decision was consistent with a life spent in shameless pursuit of the zeitgeist.
Populists tend to have sharply defined political characters (their “ethos” in Aristotelian terms). By staying rigidly within the perimeters of a cartoonish persona, they pitch themselves as more authentic than mealy-mouthed mainstream politicians. Vance’s character, however, lacks definition. He was a celebrated memoirist, lauded by the New York Times for his account of white working class despair (back then he criticised Trump as “America’s Hitler”). Then he was a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. And only after that, when plotting a move into politics, did he transform into the self-anointed king of the Trump sycophants.
But whereas Trump’s brazen defiance of political decorum exudes dominance, Vance’s tribute act—transparently a performance born of political calculation—gives the precise opposite impression: not strength, weakness. See also Marco Rubio’s ill-fated attempt to go insult-for-insult with Trump during the 2016 Republican primary.
Having a well-defined political character doesn’t mean you can’t contain multitudes. When Kamala Harris introduced her running mate Tim Walz she listed the many titles people have known him by: husband, dad, sergeant major, teacher, coach, congressman, governor. That’s a lot of things for one person to be. But they clarify rather than confuse Walz’s character because they are all connected by a singular defining trait: service.
Vance’s life lacks that defining trait. Indeed, he confesses as much in the memoir that made his name. In Hillbilly Elegy he describes transforming his character to impress a succession of father figures who drifted through his chaotic childhood. The void, it seems, has stayed with him. Perhaps this is what Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was getting at when, responding to criticism from Vance, he said: “It’s real hard being honest with the American people when you’re not being honest with yourself.” @AlexDymoke
Jargon buster: big ask
In Sir Keir’s recent Rose Garden speech he reminded us of all the ‘big asks’ he’d recently made of the country, and warned of many more to come. Fine. But would it be such a big ask to stop saying ‘big ask’? There’s a whiff of emotional manipulation: because I’m being direct about the largeness of the ask, you have no choice but to accede to it. But there’s also something imploring and needy about the phrase that feels antithetical to leadership. To simply “ask” skips the persuasion and inspiration one ought to expect from a political leader. In the JFK line “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” the citizen is the one asking, not the government. The more ‘big asks' a leader makes, the smaller their vision appears. @camjohnharris
Is Kamala copying Keir?
Maybe there is a finite number of rhetorical locutions. Maybe political candidates of an essentially social democratic stamp are bound to echo one another. Their arguments are likely to be similar and their responses perhaps equally so. Yet there are times when the resonance sounds less like an echo and more like a cover version. The rhetorical connection between Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer is a case in point.
In her CNN interview with Dana Bash, Harris said that it was time for America to “turn the page” on Donald Trump. Keir Starmer used this common metaphor so often I wanted to scream. Starmer was at least the leader of the Opposition. Harris is Vice-President so it makes turning the page an odd thing to say. Turn the page on Trump, I suppose, but that makes it sound that Trump is writing the script.
This follows the big character pitch that Harris has made as the candidate: The Prosecutor. It works because Harris was for two-terms the Attorney-General in California and her opponent is a convicted felon. To become the Prosecutor reminded voters, in a single moment, of her own professional credentials and the obvious flaw of her opponent.
It’s a good gambit and it worked well for her but it’s not a novelty. In his Labour party conference speech in 2022 – I confess to a hand in the drafting – Starmer leant heavily on his time as the Director of Public Prosecutions. Though his opponent was only in receipt of a fixed penalty notice, rather than a conviction in court, it was remarkable that the mere claim to uphold the law should prove to be such a clear dividing line between Starmer and Boris Johnson. American politics is always bigger than British politics. Even its felons are more serious. @PhilipJCollins1
Jargon buster: Robert Jenrick’s entire campaign
You may question Robert Jenrick’s political acumen, but there’s one area in which he excels: packing an extraordinary number of clichés into very short videos. “Mountain to climb”, “plain sailing”, “hard truths”, “tackle challenges”, “unite around the solutions to the challenges we face”, “safety net”, “broad church”. All appear in the same brief clip announcing his candidacy in the Tory leadership race. Jenrick urges a return to the traditions that make Britain great. He should take his own advice, starting with George Orwell. Orwell’s first rule of good writing? “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” @AlexDymoke
LANGUAGE AND BEYOND
Where sex is “seggs”, Nazis are “yahtzees” and porn is “corn” – how intense yet inscrutable censorship rules on TikTok have given rise to a strange new language which is bleeding into real life.
Using Aristotle’s theory of persuasion to explain the success of the Democratic National Convention.
A post on the misconception that slogans have to be short and catchy.
In a recent interview Donald Trump reflected on generative AI and what it could mean for our beloved industry: “He goes click, click, click, and like 15 seconds later he shows me my speech, written so beautifully. I said, ‘I’m gonna use this.’ I’ve never seen anything like it, and so quickly. A manner of literally minutes, it’s done. It’s a little bit scary. So one industry I think that will be gone are these wonderful speechwriters.” Gulp.
Lucy Schiller on a peculiar affectation that infects much writing on the internet: “Last year, a formal tone that sounded nothing like my speaking voice started to sputter out from my cursor and onto the page: ‘I cannot think about it now,’ ‘I journeyed back to my abode.’ Words elongated, and phrasings—strange ones—appeared.”
A metonymic synecdoche is when part of something is used to refer to the whole. Today Programme listeners were this morning treated to a classic of the genre: “It's a great time for bus” said a travel industry executive, using “bus” to refer to the “bus industry”.
Channel 4's in-house ad agency moved on from paralympians as ‘superheroes’. Their latest campaign personifies gravity and friction as everyone’s opponents who don’t ‘give a flying toss who you are’.
Ahead of the Trump Harris debate, election forecaster extraordinaire Nate Silver explains why, despite all the Harris momentum and excitement, the race is still firmly in “toss up” territory.
On the subject of JD Vance, this parody of Hillbilly Elegy from a few years ago is funny.
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