[I haven´t posted anything on politics for some time. This is the first half of an observational two-part piece on the language of the populist right in the US.]

I must admit that I have a soft spot for Sarah Palin and Donald Trump and their new-fangled style of politics. Although I despise their right-wing agenda, I wish there were something equally feisty coming from the left.

Sarah’s recent speech endorsing Trump received so much flak in the press she would regard as prissy, hostile and ‘liberal’ that I felt sorry for her. Although I lean myself towards the far left, I found her speech quite touching and stirringly poetic. I call her Sarah, since we share almost exactly the same birth date and feel a sort of sibling fondness for her in this complicated global age.

Sarah has honed vulgarity and playing the victim to a high art. I wish I could etch my pain on the airwaves as effortlessly as she does. Macho poets in the past have been feted for far less.

Sarah is the Whitney Houston of political oratory: every choice of word, every clumsy yet somehow poetic turn of phrase and sharp change of key screeches out an inner pain born of pleasure that we all know all too well.

But what tends most to edge me into Sarah’s camp is the particularly annoying and supercilious way in which ‘liberal’ critics berate her on account of her grammar, rather than bothering to pick through the mixture of honey and bile that the semantics of her rhetoric actually represents.

No politicians nowadays deliver fully grammatical sentences in the keynote speeches they read off of their autocues. The difference lies not in the grammaticality of the discourse but in the passion. Hillary Clinton reels off bullet points from a pre-prepared and much pored over semi-automatic PowerPoint presentation. Sarah shoots from the hip.

There is much talk these days among pundits of the power of authenticity. But, if this is supposed to mean genuinely reflecting real people in the real world, a truly authentic politician would be fumbling and incompetent, as Jeremy Corbyn in the UK is—a strategy that may yet serve him better than pundits predict.

Trump and Palin are not authentic, but manage, through their rhetoric, to produce a far more convincing illusion of authenticity than anyone on the left. They are better rhetoricians and it is futile, infantile and desperate for critics on the left to hold them to account for bad grammar. This only reinforces the rhetorical illusion of their self-proclaimed authenticity.

They have tapped into a deeply-felt mal du siècle that merely sanctimonious politicians on the left have either failed to note or lack the rhetorical skills and emotional intelligence to express.

Rhetoric has never been about fine words, well-constructed sentences and logical arguments. It has never been grammatically or politically correct. Anyone who has struggled through the long Latin sentences of Cicero will have noted that they are as sprawling and emotive as Sarah Palin’s. Cicero throws around case endings and odd appositions the same way Palin employs interjections and anacolutha. These may well even have had a folksy feel at the time. Cicero, after all, was himself deeply conservative, opposed to big government and hand-outs to the poor and a stern defender of the entitlements of the traditional élites.

Furthermore, as anyone who has studied Greek and Roman rhetoric in any depth will know, these ancient orators were never averse to posing orphaned babies on their arm, presenting libelous ad hominem arguments and relying on torture as proof of the veracity of evidence.

Politics apart, Palin and Trump are accomplished masters of rhetoric, while Clinton and Sanders alike are clearly not. It is foolish and self-defeating for critics on the left to argue otherwise.

I would love to see Clinton or Sanders getting ‘down and dirty’ with the rhetoric of their Republican opponents. Someone needs to throw the b-word at Sarah Palin now and then. I am sure she is tough enough to take it. It would be much more effective and true to facts than calling her dumb. After all, Sarah herself is on record as proclaiming that the only ornament distinguishing her from a vicious attack dog is lipstick.