The Problem With “Oligarchy” Is That It’s Annoying-Grad-Student Coded

Plus the narrative is bullshit, if that matters

Image generated by Dall-E 3.

Last week, Senator Elise Slotkin of Michigan got into a public spat with Bernie Sanders about the latter’s use of the word “oligarchy”. In an interview with Politico, Slotkin said that the party should say “kings” instead of “oligarchy”. Sanders — who, by the way, is on a tour called the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” — replied that Americans “are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are.”

As of press time, Senator Slotkin has not clarified exactly how dumb she thinks the American people are. Though I wish that she would — I’d like to see her give a press conference and say “Senator Sanders, with all due respect: Take a gander at these freaks. You ever go to a swap meet? Walk around one of those for a bit and then tell me that you don’t think that even words like ‘red’ and ‘the’ might be too much for these half-apes. This country is one big fucking Tard Farm, and we need to speak in the guttural burps that they understand.”

Senator Slotkin has not said that. As of press time.

The Sanders camp has tried to make the question about whether people know the word “oligarchy”. This MSNBC article — which takes Sanders’ side — points out that 54 percent of Democrats, 48 percent of Republicans, and 68 percent of independents correctly identified the definition of oligarchy in a multiple choice survey. Strangely, that’s cited as evidence that people do know the word. Personally, if you told me that almost half of the people hearing me¹ have no fucking clue what I’m talking about, I’d talk about something else. If you were at a party, and you said “Hey, are you guys watching Suits: LA?” and half the people — including the person you’re trying to sleep with — made it clear that they’re not watching Suits: LA (barbarians!), would you soldier on? Would you bend their ears with your detailed thoughts on Erica Rollins’ machinations to replace Ted Black as cock-of-the-walk at their hot shot Hollywood law firm? There’s a time and a place for lengthy discussions of Suits: LA, but none of those times are moments when half of the audience is tuning you out.

And, honestly, I’m less worried about people who don’t know the word “oligarchy” than people who do. Because many people who know the word know that it’s a word mostly used by lefty activists of the type that most people would like to see catapulted into the ocean. This is just the latest instance of populist Democrats trying to shift the conversation to economic issues, but doing it in a way that sends a cultural signal that repels the very voters they’re trying to win over.

Where I overlap with the Sanders wing of the part is in the belief that economic issues are more important than cultural issues. If I want to strike up a conversation with some Bernie Bros, and nobody is into Suits: LA, then I might say something like “Kinda weird that people are waging holy wars over Snow White while there are bigger fish to fry, right?” During the Great Awokening, I often found myself aligned with socialists and left-populists who were skeptical that a just society could be achieved through more diverse Pop Tart boxes. We agreed that the cringe-inducing virtue-signaling of the time — in which Democratic officials sometimes participated — was a sop to the Over-Educated White Weirdo wing of the party, and that it would repel voters like a turd on a subway car.

We were right about that. But left-wing economic crusaders seem unaware that they often give off similar vibes as the wokes. There’s a reason why “campus Marxist” is a phrase but “Burger King Marxist” is not; socialism tends to flourish on college campuses. And I doubt that many people draw a distinction between “economic leftists” and “cultural leftists” — to most people, there are just “leftists”, or “fucking leftists”, or “fucking hippie leftists”, if you want to accurately capture popular opinion of that group. Most people probably view the difference between cultural leftists and economic leftists like the difference between champagne and sparkling wine: They don’t see a difference, they don’t care, and they’ll get extremely annoyed if you try to explain it to them.

This is the second time that this has happened recently. After the election, Senator Chris Murphy said that Democrats need to reconnect with blue collar voters, and then denounced “neoliberalism”. But “neoliberalism” 1) Is a word mostly used by midwit leftists who are trying to sound smart, and 2) Doesn’t mean anything anyway. What the fuck is wrong with these clowns who try to connect with people using ten dollar words? Don’t they realize that they’re just highlighting cultural differences? You wouldn’t walk into a sports bar and say “Greetings, chums! How fares the roughhousing on the gridiron today? Verily does Patrick Mahomes propel yon pigskin like Minerva casting her spear towards the heavens, no?” You could leave that interaction thinking that you bonded with the common man over football, but I’m skeptical.

Also, I can’t let this go: Bernie Sanders’ patter about oligarchy is outdated bullshit. It might have been marginally true at one point, but it’s almost completely untrue right now. At the moment, large corporations — our supposed oligarchical rulers — are contorting themselves to try to minimize the bullying that they receive from the president. The business wing of the GOP is apoplectic about Trump’s tariffs, which even business-oriented Trump backers like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman can’t pretend to support. Trump is crosswise with both the Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, not to mention old school budget hawks like Jessica Riedel and Greg Mankiw. We are not ruled by oligarchs; we’re ruled by an ignorant madman, and many business interests made an alliance of convenience with him that they already deeply regret.

Also, the “hollowing out” of the American middle class did not happen:

“Oligarchy” is a word mostly used by people steeped in the culture that’s poison to the Democratic Party. I’ve always associated the word with ‘60s radicalism, and this word usage chart makes it look like I was half right:

I have often accused Bernie Sanders of being stuck in the 1960s. I apologize, Bernie: You are actually stuck in the 1860s. Your one-note leftist patter — though an artifact of boomer-era hippiedom — is actually a descendent of 19th century Marxist claptrap. Perhaps that explains why you keep spinning the same yarn even as real world events render it laughably inaccurate. I understand that, though I’ll never understand why you don’t see the drawbacks of using a word that is at home on the quad of an Ivy League university and out of place just about everywhere else.

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1. And, actually, it’s probably more than half, because the way the survey was structured, you’d expect 25 percent of people to identify the right definition just by guessing.