Dog-whistle moderation is not the way

Say what you mean!

If you are terminally online, you may have noticed recently the cavalcade of progressive-minded posters slagging Senator Elissa Slotkin for saying that the use of the term “oligarchy” by Bernie Sanders and AOC goes over the heads of too many voters.

Sanders clapped back, quipping, “I think the American people are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are.”

Narrowly, I think Slotkin is probably right about how dumb people are. There’s decent evidence that the average American reads at a sixth grade level, and while there is some reason to doubt that conclusion, it’s also not the case that I would expect the median eighth-grader to fully understand the meaning of oligarchy.

Persuadable swing voters, meanwhile, are less educated than the average person, while Democratic Party staffers are much more educated than average. So as general advice, I think “consider dumbing it down a little” is a pretty smart take for Democrats. Members should probably consider having their teams post all their drafts into an LLM to suggest a re-write to sixth-grade level. On the other hand, if you’re trying to build support for a 2028 Democratic Party presidential campaign, then Bernie invoking abstract political theory concepts is probably a good idea. It’s all about knowing your audience.

Back to Slotkin, though. All these progressives are clearly not mad at her because they have passionate feelings about this technical question of how widely understood the word oligarchy is.

They’re mad at her because the subtext of everything that she’s saying in her “war plan” rollout (Politico coverage, PBS coverage) is that Democrats should move to the center. This is not a case where the Bernie wing is lashing out irrationally. They understand the difference between an earnest effort to ask about a vocabulary word and what Slotkin is doing here, which is signaling a desire to take sides in a factional controversy. And Slotkin went beyond taking shots at the left-wing of the party, also talking about how Democrats need to stop being “weak and woke” and have “alpha energy,” which, if you consult your factional decoder ring, is a shot at the Harris/Walz mainstream establishment side of the party. And it has been heard as such. I’m told that on a recent call featuring many environmental groups, concern was raised about the need to make sure the 2026 frontliners stay in line on their issues, which included a specific worry that Jon Ossoff might start talking like Slotkin.

Conceptually, I’m on Slotkin’s side of this factional argument. She’s signaling to elites that she thinks Democrats need a better plan to win a Senate majority and that the plan should involve meaningful ideological repositioning. The people who agree with her and those who disagree with her all hear it loud and clear.

And yet, she is not actually staking out new, more centrist positions on anything.

I call this “dog whistle moderation,” and we’re seeing a lot of it going around. And it doesn’t really make sense.