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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Political Lexicon: We're all just folks now
Politics is a folksy business. We know politicians are real folks who care about real folks because they are always using the word “folks”: city folks, country folks, hardworking folks, younger folks, older folks, black folks, white folks; even “very kind folks in the media” (says Ted Cruz), “folks who are here undocumented” (Chris Christie) and “folks” who don’t “have a full regard for the right to privacy” (Rand Paul).
We are drowning in folks, and not just because we’re getting into a campaign season during which candidates are traveling around meeting folks and trying to destroy the folks they’re running against. “There are some folks, particularly those in Washington, who are really good fighters,” Scott Walker said of his potential opponents last month. Walker, who has boasted of his fealty to Kohl’s department store and long-ago job at McDonald’s, added that “there’s some other folks out there that have done a really effective job of winning elections.”
Being one of these folks who win elections involves projecting a sense that you identify with “real” people while expending great time, soul and sycophancy on the millionaires and billionaires who tantalize your campaign dreams. In attempting this two-step, “folks” serves as a softener of rhetorical edges. It suggests a mode of kinship and self-conscious informality that politicians increasingly default to, perhaps as an overcorrective to the inflated wealth of those same politicians. The last thing a politician wants to be seen as is an “elite,” someone “out of touch” with the tastes and routines of the voters they need to consider him or her to be “one of us.” As codependents in this pantomime game, the media reinforce the playacting impulse by, for instance, making the requisite big deal of Walker’s riding a Harley-Davidson in Iowa or, conversely, John Kerry’s windsurfing in Nantucket.
As a word and concept, “folks” becomes a subliminal proxy for kinship. President Obama has been most friendly in this regard. According to an analysis of his news conferences undertaken last year by Buzzfeed, Obama has used “folks” 7.3 times per 10,000 words, compared with George W. Bush’s 2.2 per 10,000 words. Bill Clinton averaged a mere one use per 10,000 words. Obama even extended the word to truly horrendous actors. “We tortured some folks,” he conceded last year, referring to the kinds of “folks (who) mess with Americans” he spoke of in a debate with Mitt Romney in 2012. They might be terrorists, but there’s no reason a president has to talk down to these folks (even when torturing them).
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/magazine/folkwisdom.html?_r=0
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HassleCat
(6,409 posts)If you say "some people" or "those people" or something like that, it could be interpreted as a dog whistle for "them," the people who don't look like us, or believe in our god, or whatever. Politicians have taken to using "folks" because it sounds a little blurrier, a little fuzzier, a little harder to pin down. You really have to pay attention to context, since "black folks" is a pretty common term black Americans use to describe themselves as a group. Of course, because of that, the term is sometimes used in dog whistle fashion, to describe "some folks" who smoke crack and live on welfare and wear hoodies. "Thugs" is another nice one that has gained popularity in recent years. Well, at least we have made enough "progress" so it's unacceptable for all but the nuttiest of nut jobs to come right and say the old words. I suppose that's something. Maybe in another 50 years, we'll be able to stop with the code words and dog whistles.
