Elizabeth Warren’s cool-mom act fails on tone and policy

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted a message on Wednesday to the young women following her on Twitter: “You deserve better,” she told them. “Dump the guy who ghosted you, convince the roommate to let you adopt a dog, and I’ll take care of canceling your student loan debt!” Alongside the message, a bright-eyed image of the 2020 presidential hopeful in a baby-blue cardigan captured the earnestness for which her campaign has become known.

Such earnestness is precisely why the tone-deaf nature of Wednesday’s tweet should provoke pity rather than rage. Warren, as one young Twitter user phrased it, “is Like that Awkward cringy Mom who tries to be cool around her teenager son or daughters friends.”

Really? What gave it away?

Perhaps it was her misuse of the term “ghosting” — a term that’s about as new to the cultural lexicon as apps like Tinder and Bumble are to the Apple App Store. In other words, it’s not that new, but it’s also not that old (and we should give Warren a pass for misusing it). It’s a term that describes the phenomenon by which one member of a casual-dating relationship ends contact with the other member, without so much as an “it’s not you, it’s me” or even a goodbye. As if suddenly whisked into a witness protection program or plagued with a sudden tropical illness (as distraught scorned lovers have been known to speculate), a ghoster goes “Missing in Action” with no warning and no explanation.

So, in contrast to the idea suggested in Warren’s tweet, someone who’s been ghosted is woefully precluded from the ability to dump the ghosting guy in question. The decision’s already been made for her.

But was it that semantic error that caused the proverbial “OK Boomer” response that Warren’s tweet received? Or was it the broader philosophies and policy ideas behind the language?

The vision Warren unfolds is one of puppies, roommates, and you-go-girl idealism. But it sails breezily and without commentary over some of the darker elements such a world entails.

Birth rates across the country are in free fall and have been for decades. People of reproductive age are opting for furry friends and shared rental housing over spouses, babies, and permanent homeownership — and not everyone sees that as a good thing, as Warren apparently does.

Young female voters, presumably the demographic Warren hoped to reach with the tweet, don’t even want it! Despite what social media might lead you to believe, as Lyman Stone of the American Enterprise Institute reports, “Americans want to have more children than they are actually having, even among young women.”

One of the main barriers stopping people from achieving their own self-reported goal of birthing more children is the decline of marriage. In the same study, aptly titled “Declining Fertility in America,” Stone finds that fertility in the U.S. is actually roughly stable for the past decade and a half—but only when controlling for marital status.

“In other words,” he writes, “declining fertility is really about delayed marriage.”

Given these findings, the young woman reading Warren’s tweet, who presumably wants to get married and have children before her declining fertility precludes the possibility, isn’t likely to dump the guy she’s dating. She’s more likely to be distressed that he dumped (well, ghosted) her.

So, if marriage is the barrier to birth, then what are the barriers to marriage? Here’s where Warren accurately taps into a problem that voters face, for Stone points out that increased debt due to student loans is one of the primary reasons young people don’t get married.

But canceling debt isn’t as easy as her tweet makes it seem. For her to “take care” of a young person’s student debt would entail raising taxes, which in turn lowers overall take-home pay across the board — a condition which will exacerbate the inability of young families to raise children. A better solution would be to ask broader questions about the value of college, and whether or not it’s something that everyone in our economy actually needs (especially with jobs in the manufacturing sector, for which a college degree is not required, failing to attract workers despite relatively high pay).

Americans want to rid themselves of debt not so that they can continue living in rental spaces with anonymous roommates, with only a puppy to comfort them from strings of meaningless dating encounters warranting not so much as a “goodbye” when they end. They want to rid themselves of debt so they can buy homes, get married, and build families.

Until Warren comes to terms with this brave old world, a world in which what’s old is new again, she’ll fail to reach the voter bases she needs in order to win the election.

Nora Kenney (@norakenney_) is a press officer for a think tank in Manhattan.