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Before sexual assault allegations ended his California gubernatorial bid, representative Eric Swalwell had carved out a niche as one of the Democrats most enthusiastically willing to swear on the record. On 9 April, the New York Times ranked him fourth among lawmakers by frequency of online F-word use. Later, Swalwell responded to their article on Twitter/X: “Here, add two more to my name. Fuck Donald Trump and fuck Ice.”
The Democratic party has many problems. One of them is that Swalwell will likely lose the distinction of being its fourth-most prolific swearer within months. His colleagues, unburdened by scandal, will carry on cursing their way toward relevance. Since 2020, Democrats have outsworn Republicans on social media by nearly four to one – they’ve used 197 F-words to Republicans’ 49, by the Times’s accounting.
In blue states, at least, profanity works. At the California Democratic party’s convention last February, gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter led her audience in a “fuck Trump” chant, giving her floundering campaign a much-needed jolt of media attention. That month, Illinois lieutenant governor and Senate hopeful Julianna Stratton cut a 30-second ad featuring six uses of the phrase “fuck Trump.” Then, in March, she pulled off an upset victory against her better-funded opponent in the Democratic primary.
The Democratic base is rightly frustrated by cautious, poll-tested messaging. It wants fighters, and cursing at Trump is an easy way to look like one. But there’s a middle ground between focus-grouped, hyper-optimized pablum and rhetoric that actively corrodes the party’s long-term chances, and Democrats should be able to find it.
The Democratic party is widely perceived as lacking an animating purpose beyond its opposition to the man currently occupying the White House, and swearing at the president for its own sake only confirms that impression. Yes, the Democrats cursing most prolifically tend not to be those competing for swing voters – Porter, Stratton and Swalwell are (or were) running in Democratic primaries – but the Democratic brand is national. Voters accumulate impressions of both parties over time, and, during elections, they evaluate not just the candidate on the ballot but the party they belong to. In the Rust belt, for instance, merely running with a D next to one’s name carries a “Democratic penalty” of about eight points.
In a polity as large and diverse as this one, it’s inevitable that politicians within the same party will have different communicative styles. But parties aren’t loose confederacies of solo acts: to win power, Democrats need to contest seats in places that don’t share California or Illinois’s passions.
The Democratic party has an authenticity problem, and those in the pro-swearing camp have long held that more vulgarity might be part of the solution. Coarse language, this argument holds, is simply how common people talk. As the political commentator Jeet Heer observed in the New Republic in 2017, the word “vulgarity” itself derives from the Latin for “the multitude”. But Bernie Sanders – per YouGov, currently the second-most popular Democrat after Barack Obama – has only once publicly uttered a word stronger than “damn”. Zohran Mamdani hasn’t even ventured language that strong.
These are the Democrats likeliest to lead the party out of its present listlessness, and they’re also those least likely to swear. That suggests, I think, that vulgarity may actually be a sign of inauthenticity. It’s no coincidence, in fact, that the Democrats now reaching for profanity are doing so with visible awkwardness. Last year, for instance, representative Maxine Dexter of Oregon told her audience at a rally that “we have to fuck Donald Trump.” To some ears, it sounded like a call to action of a rather different kind.
Decorum is worthless for its own sake, and Democrats should say and do whatever it takes to defeat the Maga movement. Michelle Obama’s dictum that “when they go low, we go high” is, rightly, a punchline now. Even so, vulgarity happens to be one of the few dimensions on which Republicans, by and large, haven’t gone low. And if Republicans tend to swear less than Democrats, that begs the question of what, exactly, more profanity on our side of the aisle is meant to accomplish.
In any case, “fuck Donald Trump” is the least interesting sentence the form permits – it expresses disdain for a person and nothing else. If Democrats must use the F-word, they should, at minimum, use it to express outrage toward particular Trump policies. When Marco Rubio’s appeared to suggest that Israel had forced the US into war with Iran, Arizona senator Ruben Gallego tweeted: “What the fuck happened to America First?” And when a journalist asked Maine Democrat Graham Platner what he made of the Trump administration’s denial that it was at war with Iran, he responded: “Fuck this. War is war.”
Outrage is a legitimate political emotion. It is not, by itself, a politics. That’s been the great political lesson of the past decade, and as the midterms approach, it’s an open question whether Democrats have learned it.
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