Brian Schatz to Democrats: Talk Like Normal People

Brian Schatz a Democratic Senator from Hawaii, gave a very frank interview in which he presented how the institutional Democrats are approaching the incoming Trump administration. It doesn't read like a party preparing to lead an opposition.

I think there’s the question of left-wing infrastructure, which I think should not be confused with the liberal project of preserving journalism and democracy, which is super important. But the problem is, a lot of liberal donors believe if we just fund good journalism, that that’s a counterweight to the right-wing noise machine. And I think that we’ve now learned that we have to build our own infrastructure, and that’s going to take money and staffing and all of that. I will help with that, but obviously as a federal legislator, that’s not my primary function.

A Democratic senator stating that the independent press is not in the interest of his party, and that they need their own information distribution, but it needs to be controlled from outside the party so it’s not constrained.

This is what the MAGA movement organically developed.

The third part of that, is that it’s not just that we’re unable to reach people. It’s that people are unable to reach us. So, when inflation was pissing people off, you could scarcely find a person in mainstream, left-wing circles, who would even talk about it. Except to explain that the Biden economy was better than other countries. And that the Biden stewardship was better than other industrialized nations. And by the way, I continue to think that’s true and totally irrelevant — If you’re talking about the question of are people pissed about the price of eggs, the answer is flatly yes they are. Not, ‘Don’t you know people are paying more in Paris and shouldn’t you be happy about that.’

There are two ways of doing this though: the MAGA way is to pitch catchphrases to the crowd to find what resonates and is worthy of meme-ing. The other way is to take seriously the job of representing the people and not the donors.

But I think this question of language goes pretty deep. And it goes to not just being careful not to say things that are egregiously weird sounding, but it’s also the way we interact with advocacy groups. I remember saying I was for a cessation of hostilities in Israel and Palestine. And people said why don’t you say ceasefire? I’m thinking, that’s literally the same thing. I remember saying I was for a big, bold climate bill. And someone said why don’t you say Green New Deal? And this idea that there are magic words that we must be forced to say defines progressivism and political courage by essentially saying whatever a bunch of activists want us to say, as opposed to doing the thing. And I think that there are a bunch of people who see what we’re doing as performative, for that exact reason. But it’s also just alienating. This magic words thing has to go away.

This sounds like a problem of its own making. Outside the Beltway, no one is really paying attention to how things are talked about aside from feeling like politicians are constantly talking and not doing.

Look, the public voted for this. Now, we could tell the public they were wrong. But that’s a hell of a thing to say. I do think one of the things we can say over time is that hey listen, you voted for this guy because you thought you were going to get a certain type of government. That’s not what you’re ending up getting. You voted for this guy because you thought prices were too high but he’s raising your prices. You voted for this guy because you thought he was going to protect the little guy. He’s actually not doing that. That, I think, is a case we can make.

The unwillingness to say, “no you’re wrong” is how MAGA wins. The idea that you can win on issues is fighting the last war. Your chance to win on issues was 2024. Now you have to fight authoritarianism. Authoritarians don’t care about people’s issues—they only care about their own. The fight is now over forms of government. The only way to win is to say “you’re wrong” while reminding people about their own issues, not the state’s.

I think whomever we nominate has to talk like a normal person. That is to me the most important thing. Normal doesn’t mean that they have an affect that is identifiable midwestern or southern or some sort of regional — But this person is real. If you had them over for dinner, you could understand what the hell they were talking about. And so I think we are looking for someone who can plausibly fit in as a human being all across the country. I don’t know who that’s going to be. But the challenge is going to be, how do you maintain your progressive values and not sound like you just got your post-doctoral thesis in sociology.

This is both true and beside the point. It’s not about how a politician talks so much as their earnestness to improve people’s lives. Obama talks like an academic, but he is earnest. Bill Clinton is a master of deadpanning the camera in a way his wife—who knew more and cared more—never could. Trump talks like a maniac, but his reality TV charisma carries.

It’s the right symptom but the wrong diagnoses.

Contrast this Senator Chris Murphy's take:

The headlines were standard boilerplate headlines: House refers Liz Cheney for criminal prosecution. You had to dig really deep to find out that it’s literally made up. First of all, you cannot, under the Constitution, criminalize conduct done in your official duties—that’s the Speech and Debate Clause. But even if you wipe the Speech and Debate Clause out of the Constitution, they’re literally just making up things that they say that she did. They claim that she pressured one of the witnesses to lie, that she intimidated the witnesses to not tell the truth. That’s just not true. There’s no facts that allege that; it is just made up out of thin air.

I don’t think there are signs that the media is folding. They are folding. They are. We’re watching them fold. I don’t exactly know why Elon Musk decided to fold his entire operation into the White House, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that he got rich off of government policy, whether it be tax credits on electric vehicles or subsidies for his space business. He’s just much better off being integrated into power. I don’t know why Comcast decided to sell MSNBC, but maybe it has to do with the fact that they decided they don’t want to get crosswise with Donald Trump because they have lots of business interests that intersect with the government. I don’t know why Jeff Bezos, for the first time ever, told The Washington Post not to endorse, but maybe it’s because his bread is often buttered by government policy. I don’t know why ABC decided to settle a bogus lawsuit, but maybe ... Listen, they’re folding. They are. When the media decides to start hedging, or not telling the full story, combined with people being reluctant to engage in political opposition because they fear they will land in jail, that’s just not a democracy any longer. And it’s not like we’re six months away from that. It feels like we might be a month away from a world in which people start to retreat from politics for fear of criminal prosecution, and the media just uses kid gloves in dealing with the regime.

That’s what Democrats should be: government reformers. The system is not working. We need to fix it, not do away with it. And everything we do has to be for workers, has to be breaking up concentrated power, handing power back to local communities and on-the-line workers.