When Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate, it wasn’t just the mood and momentum of the 2024 election that changed. The language did too. Even before the Democratic National Convention got underway on Monday, the party’s fledgling presidential ticket had made some notable contributions to the political lexicon. The vice president’s supporters talked about being coconut-pilled; the candidate was declared brat by Charli XCX herself; Harris’s running mate pinned the word weird to their opponents like a “kick me” sign.
Everything old was new again. A little more than a month ago, the expected rematch between the president and his predecessor was shaping up into a rehash of time-tested, and perhaps also shopworn, idioms and catchphrases. In Milwaukee in July, the G.O.P. leaned into the vocabulary of national greatness, anti-elitism and Trump triumphalism, sharpening familiar MAGA themes for a battle of words with an incumbent they perceived as vulnerable.
We will never know what Biden’s nominating convention would have sounded like, though his own speech on Monday night offered some clues. It was detailed in policy and dignified in rhetoric, a list of accomplishments and a litany of warnings. The center of rhetorical gravity had already shifted. While the convention that unfolded had its share of echoes and callbacks to party tradition — Obamas and Clintons; hope and change — it also represented a substantial revision of the Democratic dictionary.
Thousands of words spilled forth at the United Center, with thousands more to follow in the coming weeks. Here are a handful that say something about how the Democratic Party perceives itself now — a partial and provisional glossary of the Kamala Harris era.
Back
This word contains the crux of the Democrats’ argument against Trump. He promises he will make America what it was again. They vow never to go back. The restoration of the glorious used-to-be he promises is reframed by his opponents as a regression to the bad old days.
Both views of history explicitly include Trump’s own administration — what was celebrated as a golden age in Milwaukee was conjured as a nightmare in Chicago — but they also reveal how modern political ideologies are rooted in divergent understandings of time itself. Do we experience its passage as progress or as loss? Do we long to reclaim the past, or to be liberated from it? Are we hopeful or regretful? Such questions are existential, metaphysical, more complicated than any slogan and deeper than any party platform. Politics is nonetheless one of the ways we try to find answers.
Crowd Size
Apparently, it matters to some people. A lot of words were thrown at Trump over four nights of speeches. He was repeatedly described as selfish, dangerous, incompetent, predatory and felonious. His patriotism was questioned, along with his honesty and his work ethic. But the line of attack that seemed most calculated to get under his skin was threaded through several speeches — including from Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia and former Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — and indicated by Barack Obama in a hand gesture. Trump, they agreed, is “a small man.”
Dad
When Gov. Tim Walz acknowledged his family from the United Center stage, his son, Gus, jumped to his feet and burst into tears. The television audience could read his lips: “That’s my dad!” Walz embodies that role almost to the point of caricature, but his quintessential dadness says a lot about gender and masculinity at an event intended to elevate a woman to the highest level of power. Walz was not the only dad to take the stage: Pete Buttigieg, Doug Emhoff and President Biden were among the other speakers who invoked their different experiences of fatherhood as a central aspect of their identities. They presented themselves as coaches, teachers, helpers and partners and embodied what you might call a non-patriarchal version of being a father. You might also call these dads feminists, a word that appears nowhere in the convention transcripts.
Freedom
In Milwaukee, the Republicans talked a lot about class, grabbing hold of the traditional language of the left to present themselves as the party of the underdog. Their conception of class consciousness was less a matter of economic struggle than of cultural conflict. The Democrats — with some help from Beyoncé — did something similar with freedom, a word that conservatism has anchored in anti-government, pro-market principles. At least since Ronald Reagan, freedom has meant religious liberty, lower taxes and the deregulation of business. Reaching back to the language of the abolitionist and civil rights movements and seeking to harness the post-Dobbs drive to protect abortion rights, the Harris campaign has rewritten the script, turning what conservatives often deride as the obsessions of identity politics into matters of personal autonomy.
Goldilocks
Michelle Obama’s speech, memorable for its blazing indictment of Trump and Trumpism, also contained a warning to her fellow Democrats, a critique of the liberal-left coalition’s self-defeating habits of perfectionism, purity-testing and pre-emptive disappointment. A fairy-tale fact check might reveal that Goldilocks was indeed satisfied with whatever belonged to Baby Bear, but in the context of a close election the message — eat your porridge; make your bed; stop whining — probably struck Obama as just right.
Joy
This is not a word that any consultant would have focus-grouped into existence, or that any commentator would have chosen as the dominant mood of the convention. The candidates themselves seem to have stumbled into it, but what started as a series of riffs, memes and bursts of laughter has become a central — and, it has to be said, a singularly improbable — part of the Democratic brand.
People
Everyone who has ever watched “Law and Order” knows that, in the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups, the police and the district attorneys. Harris started her career in the second of those groups, and adapted its courtroom boilerplate as a campaign motto. The phrase “Kamala Harris for the people” represents a three-pronged raid on Republican rhetorical territory. It claims the language of, well, law and order in a way that also disarms left-wing distrust of the system. At the same time it appropriates the language of populism, using words that echo the most famous Republican president’s most famous speech.
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