In a memo addressed to “All Who Wish to Stop Donald Trump and MAGA,” the center-left think tank Third Way urged Democrats to end their fixation on work-shopped language and speak like normal people again.

These include some classic concepts and curious turns of phrase that have grown nauseating to any thinking person: privilege, triggering, microaggressions, systems of oppression, the unhoused, birthing person, heteronormative, Latinx and BIPOC, among many examples.

“The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness,” they advise. “To please the few, we have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.”

Third Way is certainly correct about this and is reflecting the honest views that many of the more moderate people in the Democratic Party have long felt but have been too intimidated to speak up about.

The Maoist enforcers of this sort of language, after all, have been ready to pounce on anyone who dared to question such terms with smears of “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe” and “transphobe” at anyone who thought “birthing person” was a frankly idiotic construction.

Indeed, as Third Way put it, “Recognize that much of the language above is a red flag for a sizable segment of the American public. It is not because they are bigots, but because they fear cancellation, doxing or trouble with HR if they make a mistake.”

The result of this is that, over time, radicals and their cartoonish language took an outsized role in the Democratic Party.

This put Democrats in the impossible position of trying to look like the party of normalcy while saying and defending self-evidently absurd things.

Is it really any surprise that Vice President Kamala Harris went down in defeat amid ads blasting her for supporting taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison?

The Democratic Party is still going through an identity crisis. It has two paths ahead: double down on appeasing the far left or grow up and move to the center. For the sake of the country, we hope it’s the latter.

— From Tribune News Service