By Yaniv Regev
Comparing English with his native Hebrew, Yaniv Regev of Georgetown University argues that the people most alarmed by populism are feeding it, one prestigious word at a time. Hebrew leaves little room for a class dialect; English has a grander synonym for nearly everything, which America’s educated class wears as a badge of rank. Populists speak plainly on purpose and win the audience the elites talk past.
I recently returned home to Israel for a visit. Amid the election talk and the looming war with Iran, something else struck me: the language. I listened to my erudite sister, collector of degrees and legal jargon; to the pundits narrating the horse race on television; to my aunt, a kindergarten teacher with no formal education. Three different speakers, yet the distance between their sentences is nothing beside what separates their American counterparts. Next to English, Hebrew is a blunt instrument. There are fewer synonyms to choose from, fewer esoteric idioms, and fewer dead languages buried underneath. Hebrew still has its registers, of course. But English takes stratification, with its Latinate-Germanic divide, its endless synonyms, its centuries of borrowing from every language it brushed against. English is, by inheritance and by appetite, prone to linguistic hierarchy in ways few languages are. If Hebrew paints with broad brush strokes, English has the richest array of brushes in the world—and the different brush sets are driving Americans apart.
Where English had a thousand years to stratify, Hebrew had about forty. For most of two millennia it was a language of prayer, study, and correspondence. No child grew up speaking it at home. Then, beginning in the 1880s, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Zionist revivalists rebuilt it at speed into the daily tongue of a nation assembling itself from scratch. Its new speakers arrived speaking Yiddish, Russian, Arabic, and Ladino.
They were farmers, soldiers, and shopkeepers, and they needed to understand one another sooner rather than later. A language rebuilt at that pace, for that purpose, had no time to grow a class dialect. If English was layered, Hebrew was compressed.
An interesting observation, I thought, and nearly left it there. But I study democracy and populism, and observations like this don’t stop at “interesting.”
America is increasingly consumed by populism, and political scientists have spent the better part of a decade asking why. For a question this big there is rarely a single culprit, but one large chunk of the answer, according to the literature, is political distrust. Trust has its own literature too, and one thread in the American story stands out: distance, literal and figurative. As the federal government grew stronger, the people far from Washington came to resent being legislated at from far away. The political economist Jude Wanniski argued, in The Way the World Works, that “The world is divided not into Communists or Capitalists, Republicans or Democrats, or liberals and conservatives. It is divided into Populists and Elites, the ruled and rulers” (225). People everywhere, it appears, will not tolerate instruction from people they neither relate to nor sympathize with.
Distance is measured in miles, but more of it is measured in culture. It is not just that Washington sits hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles from the people it governs; it is that the governing class and the governed share so little: not the clothes, not the television, not the diplomas on the wall. And, perhaps most notably, not the language. Yes, I mean English. Both speak English, technically. But it is a different kind of English, a different tier of the language, drawn from a different set of brushes. One America interrogates claims; the other questions them. One finds a policy problematic; the other calls it wrong. One leverages, operationalizes, and circles back; the other uses, does, and gets back to you.
Populists around the world found this gap and moved in. The political scientists Daniel Bischof and Roman Senninger analyzed nearly seven decades of party manifestos in Austria and Germany and found, in a study titled “Simple Politics for the People?,” that right-wing populist parties employ significantly simpler language than their mainstream rivals; Austria’s Freedom Party grew measurably plainer the moment the Austrian far-right politician Jörg Haider took it populist. The political scientists Silvia Decadri and Constantine Boussalis found the same pattern among Italian parliamentarians, with a twist that gives the game away: when a lawmaker defects from a populist party to a mainstream one, his spoken language grows more complex, and vice versa. The diction changes with the jersey. And in the American case, the political scientists J. Eric Oliver and Wendy Rahn showed, in “Rise of the Trumpenvolk,” that Donald Trump used the simplest language of any candidate in the 2016 field.
The elites have made the opposite bet. I have seen this up close, as a person whose English is not his first language. My story in America started in Ashland, a small town in Virginia, where I attended college. I then made my way to Georgetown University in Washington for graduate school.
I noticed, along the way, that the further north I was, the more I kept having to stop people mid-sentence to ask “what does that mean?” What does “solipsistic” mean? “quixotic”? “gratuitous”? “contrapositive”? “milieu”? The list goes on.
Part of me is grateful. These words have since joined my verbal arsenal. But I can’t help but think that most of the time, they were deployed not to transmit an idea more faithfully but to serve as social markers. A kind of “look at me and my fancy words” declaration. The Canadian psycholinguist Steven Pinker offers a kinder diagnosis in The Sense of Style, calling it the “curse of knowledge,” whereby writers simply forget what it was like not to know what they know. Some jargon surely comes from this kind of forgetting. But forgetting cannot explain the writer who knows the plain synonym perfectly well and reaches past it for the peacock word anyway. I am certainly not above this myself. Verbal intelligence is the most legible intelligence a person can display; it advertises your education, your reading, and your sophistication with the least possible friction.
Unfortunately, many of this country’s elites, in academia, industry, and politics, have fallen for the temptation. Often the very same elites who then complain, in the loftiest available diction, about the rise of populism. Call them the linguistic elite.
The complaint never reaches the people who need to hear it most. Americans have never been hungrier for explanation. Supply chains, out-of-control rent, foreign wars, and whatever the machines are doing now have unleashed a flood of questions. Curiosity does not lie dormant. It goes looking. And what it finds is whoever was willing to answer in words the reader already owns: the podcasters, the rally circuit, the comment sections, men who arrive with a bottle in one hand and a simple story about who did this to you in the other. They have never once worried about sounding provincial. We worry about little else. So diction filters who gets heard, and it filters out precisely those whose claims could survive scrutiny.
We do not just sound out of touch at a moment when sounding out of touch is populism’s pretext. We hand over the explaining, and then marvel at how well the snake oil sells.
To be clear, the answer is neither to keep the jargon nor to torch it. There is a time and a place. If you are writing for an academic journal in a highly specialized field, where your work will be read by fellow academics, accessibility buys you little. And no one should dumb things down, settling for the accessible word when a more fitting, if arcane, one exists. Words are, after all, tools for describing and explaining the world, and like all tools they fall short of the material. We have all felt things no sentence could quite hold; the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein built half a philosophy on that frustration, warning in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Finer brushes, then, are not vanity. They let us paint closer to reality.
The question is only whether the added precision is worth the price of admission. Choosing between “sanguine” and “hopeful”? “Sanguine” carries a shade more, a note of cheer against bad odds, but every reader alive knows “hopeful,” and the shade is faint. Take “hopeful.” Need “schadenfreude”? There is no plain substitute; the nearest translation is a full sentence. Spend your reader’s patience there.
If you are writing for a large, diverse audience about the questions that actually matter now, do not make people open a dictionary every fifth word. Some will stick around and diligently look everything up. Some will be impressed by your verbal prowess. Many will simply leave. If your goal is another byline and a pat on the back from fellow elites, you need not worry. That prize is always available, and it costs nothing but the audience.
In 1946, George Orwell distilled good writing into six rules, the second of which reads: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” Every writer in America has seen this rule. Most of us cite it in the same paragraph we break it. It can sound trivial, the stuff of freshman composition. It is not, and today least of all. Distrust grows in the distance between the rulers and the ruled; the distance that matters is more cultural, less geographic; and no part of culture is more audible than language. Populism festers in distrust, and what populism breaks, in time, is democracy. Whatever you decline to say plainly, someone else will say plainly and wrong. So the next time you reach for “utilize” or “leverage,” consider “use.” It may be the most democratic word you write all week.
Yaniv Regev is an M.A. candidate in Democracy and Governance at Georgetown University, where he studies populism and democratic erosion, and a research assistant at the University of Pikeville. He writes on the institutions, pathologies, and ideas that hold liberal democracy together—or don’t.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
