Democratic strategist James Carville is getting a little attention right now as a result of an interview just published in Vox. As is his wont, he uses some rather indelicate language to identify a number of problems plaguing Democratic efforts at messaging and getting elected. But I have to say, I largely agree with what Carville says. He's essentially right on his three main points. And other Democrats should take heed at what he's saying instead of complaining about it or denouncing it.

The biggest overarching point Carville makes is that the right way to craft a modern political message is to base your argument in emotion, not reason. More specifically, he derides what he calls "faculty lounge politics," or using the language from the ivory tower rather than speaking to people in the language they use. And finally, he makes what seems to me to be an almost-permanent complaint about Democrats -- they just don't fight as hard as Republicans, and that's why they lose a lot of messaging battles they really should win.

I strongly encourage everyone to read the full article, but allow me to summarize his main points with a few excerpts (and, as already warned, Carville uses some graphic language throughout the interview).

First, emotion versus reason. Carville is prompted by the interviewer pointing out that Democrats did win the White House and Congress in the past election cycle. This ends with: "It ain't perfect, but it ain't a disaster either." Carville takes exception to this overly-generous interpretation:

We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn't pick up state legislatures. So let's not have an argument about whether or not we're off-key in our messaging. We are. And we're off because there's too much jargon and there's too much esoterica and it turns people off.

Immediately thereafter, Carville makes his point plain:

Let me give you my favorite example of metropolitan, overeducated arrogance. Take the climate problem. Do you realize that climate is the only major social or political movement that I can think of that refuses to use emotion? Where's the identifiable song? Where's the bumper sticker? Where's the slogan? Where's the flag? Where's the logo?

We don't have it because with faculty politics what you do is appeal to reason. You don't need the sloganeering and sound bites. That's for simple people. All you need are those timetables and temperature charts, and from that, everyone will just get it.

That's not how the world works; that's not how people work. And Republicans are way more disciplined about taking a thing and branding it. Elites will roll their eyes at that, but I'd ask, "How's that working out for you?" Most people agree with us on health care and minimum wage and Roe v. Wade and even on the climate.

So why can't we leverage that?

He is absolutely right -- this is a longstanding problem for Democrats. Others have pointed it out previously, mostly to no avail. Most Democrats -- and I include everyone in that, not just nationally-known politicians but also a lot of rank-and-file voters -- are guilty of appealing purely to reason while ignoring the emotional appeal altogether. Democrats think if we just explain it well enough, they'll convince voters on the other side of the political spectrum of the errors of their ways, there will be a "light bulb" moment, and suddenly these people will enthusiastically start supporting the Democratic way of looking at things.

Compare that with just about anything on Fox News, at just about any hour of the day. That's the difference. Republicans are guilty of going way too far in the other direction -- so much so that they don't even really care anymore what actual reality is. If they start ranting and raving that "Joe Biden is going to force every American to only eat one hamburger per month and only four pounds of red meat a year!" then people viscerally react. "Dammit, no politician's going to take away my God-given right to eat as much beef and pork as I please!" is the knee-jerk reaction. Which is exactly what Republicans know and are counting on. By the time they actually get around to admitting that they just made the whole scare story up out of whole cloth, the damage has already been done. How many voters will pull a lever thinking "I've got to vote Republican or else the hamburger police will be coming for me"? The answer to that, sadly, is not automatically "zero," even if the next election is over a year away.

Carville, elsewhere in the interview, points out the fact that Democrats are more constrained by the truth than the other side: "if [Democrats lied like Republicans do], our voters wouldn't stand for it." And he's right. Most Democratic voters would not stand for it. But that doesn't mean Democrats can't come up with an emotional argument that is just as powerful as the Republican counterargument.

Second, Carville explains at length why using what used to (30 or 35 years ago) be called P.C." or "politically correct" language -- what is now called "woke" language -- is the wrong way to go about convincing most voters to vote for your side.

Carville begins by defining what he means by "faculty lounge politics" -- the use of terms such as "Latinx" (a term Carville says "no one else uses") or "communities of color" ("I don't know anyone who speaks like that"). He then gets to his real point:

There's nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you're talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it's not.

When asked if that means Democrats should just not talk about racial injustice because a lot of voters don't want to hear about it, Carville clarifies further:

We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice. What I'm saying is, we need to do it without using jargon-y language that's unrecognizable to most people -- including most Black people, by the way -- because it signals that you're trying to talk around them. This "too cool for school" shit doesn't work, and we have to stop it.

There may be a group within the Democratic Party that likes this, but it ain't the majority. And beyond that, if Democrats want power, they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. That's a fact. That's not changing. That's what this whole damn thing is about.

A little later, he returns to this point again:

Right, but we can't say, "Republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what, so let's just run as out-and-out socialists." That's not the smartest thing to do. And maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn't the smartest thing to do because almost fucking no one wants to do that.

Here's the deal: No matter how you look at the map, the only way Democrats can hold power is to build on their coalition, and that will have to include more rural white voters from across the country. Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters. That's the reality. But the difference between getting beat 80 to 20 and 72 to 28 is all the difference in the world.

So they just have to lose by less -- that's all.

He goes on to give a very tangible example:

Look at Florida. You now have Democrats saying Florida is a lost cause. Really? In 2018 in Florida, giving felons the right to vote got 64 percent. In 2020, a $15 minimum wage, which we have no chance of passing [federally], got 67 percent. Has anyone in the Democratic Party said maybe there's nothing wrong with the state of Florida? Maybe the problem is the kind of campaigns we're running?

If you gave me an environment in which the majority of voters wanted to expand the franchise to felons and raise the minimum wage, I should be able to win that. It's certainly not a political environment I'm destined to lose in. But in Miami-Dade, all they talked about was defunding the police and Kamala Harris being the most liberal senator in the U.S. Senate. And if you look all across the Rio Grande Valley, we lost all kinds of solidly blue voters. And the faculty lounge bullshit is a big part of it.

Again, Carville is right. Republicans love to use this sort of thing against Democrats, because they know it works so well. They sneer at such "elitism" and it strikes a chord with millions of voters who resent being looked down upon by Democrats. Remember Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables"? They do. Because it worked so well for them. Republicans keep banging the drum of "Democrats are sneering at you because they think you're stupid!" because Democrats keep right on giving them fresh ammunition to make such attacks.

Meanwhile, Democrats do an absolutely lousy job of ever making Republicans pay any sort of similar price for the out-of-touch statements on their side of the aisle. Because Democrats just don't fight with the same ferocity as they do. Which brings us to the third point Carville makes.

First, he defines the difference in stark terms:

Take someone like Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She's obviously very bright. She knows how to draw a headline. In my opinion, some of her political aspirations are impractical and probably not going to happen. But that's probably the worst thing that you can say about her.

Now take someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia. She's absolutely loonier than a tune. We all know it. And yet, for some reason, the Democrats pay a bigger political price for A.O.C. than Republicans pay for Greene. That's the problem in a nutshell. And it's ridiculous because A.O.C. and Greene are not comparable in any way.

Democrats pay a bigger price mostly because Republicans are just so much better at this stuff than they ever are. They know how to sing from the same songbook, over and over and over again (as many times as it takes for it to sink in). Democrats just never seem to be able to adequately do that and are far too prone to falling into micro-disagreements with each other rather than keeping their eyes on the prize -- defining the other side by using their worst examples against them.

Carville then provides a proactive example of what he's talking about:

Tell me this: How is it we have all this talk about Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and we don't talk about Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House in Congress? If Hastert was a Democrat who we knew had a history of molesting kids and was actually sent to prison in 2016, he'd still be on Fox News every fucking night. The Republicans would never shut the hell up about it.

So when Jim Jordan was pulling all these stunts with Anthony Fauci [Fauci was speaking at a congressional hearing about ending coronavirus precautions], why didn't someone jump in and say, "Let me tell you something, Jim, if Fauci knew what you knew, if he knew that a doctor was molesting young people, he would've gone to the medical board yesterday. So you can go ahead and shut the fuck up." [Ed. note: Jordan denies knowing about the allegations of abuse when he was an assistant coach at Ohio State University.] I love that Congresswoman Maxine Waters told Jordan to "shut your mouth," but that's what I really wish a Democrat would say, and I wish they'd keep saying it over and over again.

This is really the same old "Democrats bring a knife to a gun fight" problem, in a nutshell. They just aren't that good at the art of demonization. They are far too polite, when they need to be down in the gutter flinging mud at their opponents. There's even a telling bit of editing in that excerpt -- the editor's note was necessary because many readers -- even staunch Democrats -- won't already know what Carville is talking about. This proves Carville right in a crystal-clear way. Democrats haven't exploited this issue, even with someone as odious and offensive as Jim Jordan -- one of the most odious and offensive Republicans around today. If Democrats can't even fight back against Jordan, then what hope do we ever have of fighting back against someone like Donald Trump (or any of his imitators)?

Carville ends by hammering this point home with a much more contemporary example than Dennis Hastert:

First of all, the Democratic Party can't be more liberal than Sen. Joe Manchin. That's the fact. We don't have the votes. But I'll say this, two of the most consequential political events in recent memory happened on the same day in January: the insurrection at the US Capitol and the Democrats winning those two seats in Georgia. Can't overstate that.

But the Democrats can't fuck it up. They have to make the Republicans own that insurrection every day. They have to pound it. They have to call bookers on cable news shows. They have to get people to write op-eds. There will be all kinds of investigations and stories dripping out for god knows how long, and the Democrats should spend every day tying all of it to the Republican Party. They can't sit back and wait for it to happen.

Hell, just imagine if it was a bunch of nonwhite people who stormed the Capitol. Imagine how Republicans would exploit that and make every news cycle about how the Dems are responsible for it. Every political debate would be about that. The Republicans would bludgeon the Democrats with it forever.

So whatever you think Republicans would do to us in that scenario, that's exactly what the hell we need to do them.

Once again, Carville is right.

I will end this with one point Carville makes in the middle of the interview. He is asked directly what solution he has for this problem Democrats seem to always have had. And he admits that he just doesn't have any easy answers:

That's why I'm doing this interview. Lots of smart people are going to read it, and hopefully they can figure out that which I can't. But if you're asking me, I think it's because large parts of the country view us as an urban, coastal, arrogant party, and a lot gets passed through that filter. That's a real thing. I don't give a damn what anyone thinks about it -- it's a real phenomenon, and it's damaging to the party brand.

James Carville has always been a blunt and plain-spoken guy in Democratic politics. In fact, he's famous for his folksy Louisiana sayings ("It's better to be married to someone who hates your politics than someone who hates your momma"). Sometimes this gets him into trouble. But often, Carville communicates in a very visceral way what a whole lot of other Democrats really should be saying, which is why it's still worthwhile to pay attention to him.

And, on the three main points he is making, he is absolutely right. Democrats have to stop trying to win over voters by just rationally explaining everything to them. It's demeaning to the voters, and refusing to attach any emotional content to it is a losing game as well. Democrats have to tailor their message to individual groups instead of always deferring to whichever one is currently seen as the most "woke." And Democrats have to learn how to fight back against Republican demonization by using the same tactic against them. In fact, they have actually been trying to do so (with the January 6 insurrection), but they just aren't as effective as (for instance): "Joe Biden is coming for your hamburgers."

Politics is now totally tribal in nature. In the last election cycle, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump because there was a wave of disgust against him personally. Voters were motivated to go to the polls and pull the Democratic lever because they were so dead-set against suffering through another four years of Trump. It was emotional. Democrats have to learn to leverage this and channel the same sorts of feelings against other Republicans who are equally as dangerous and odious as Trump. And at the present, there are plenty to choose from.

Joe Biden is changing this dynamic somewhat, because he does speak plainly and emotionally. He's a lot better at speaking to "average Americans" than a lot of Democrats. We're about to see that, in his first joint congressional address, tomorrow night. But he can't do it alone. Democrats should spend a lot less time squabbling among themselves and instead devote their energies to doing better on all three of the points James Carville makes. Because on each of them, Carville is right.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant