Emory University psychology professor and political science author Drew Westen has made an academic career out of criticizing his fellow Democrats for shooting themselves in their two left feet with the rhetoric they choose to describe the causes they're promoting. They appropriated the enemy's label, "Obamacare." They mincingly propose "campaign finance reform" instead of demanding "fair elections." Instead of talking about pollution, liberals gas on about "CO2 emissions."

"Defund the police" is Westen's latest target, and he destroys it completely in a column today in The Washington Post.

At times like this, terms must be descriptive and socially useful, and however important the concept behind it, "defund the police" has been neither, beyond its initial contribution, of jarringly drawing attention. It's time to settle on a better term before it's too late. "Reimagine the police" works well enough for me.

Two other terms, I've wanted to erase from the public conversation of late. Again, both terms describe a thing that's real; but the terms are less descriptive and useful than they are unnecessarily and gratuitously insulting and alienating, on either side of the vicious political tetherball game that passes for national dialogue at the moment.

One is "virtue signaling." This is a term usually used by Republicans, who accuse liberals of taking easy stands in favor of politically correct causes in order to show how woke we are. Which is exactly what we are doing, of course. But in many cases our motive for wanting to appear woke is wanting to publicly declare ourselves allies to endangered or grieving or powerless fellow citizens in a time of trouble. "Virtue-signaling" implies that our motive for "liking" a gay wedding or a Black Lives Matter rally is preening vanity. That's an unfounded accusation to which we will not often cop, even private.

Another is "white privilege," which as far as I can tell is used most frequently by white people to shame other white people (sometimes with the motive of "virtue-signaling"). That white privilege exists is not refutable. But putting energy toward getting white people to make a long catalogue the endless social advantages they have over African Americans—I don't have to worry about getting shot at the Wendy's drive through even if I'm a little tipsy, I get to go through my day without making six hundred judgements about the racial and emotional motives of the people I'm doing business with, I can walk off the street into the Palmer House hotel and use the men's room without being questioned … I really could go on all day. But what good would that do?

At the end of the day—and I don't mean that as a cliché, I mean it literally at the end of the day—no one feels privileged, no matter how sincerely they say they realize how privileged they are, as I wrote here three years ago:

Why? Because no matter how privileged a person may be thanks to his or her class, race, gender, physique, nation of origin, region of origin, city of origin, neighborhood of origin or block of origin—no one ever feels privileged.

That's because even the most privileged person had an alcoholic mother, teenage acne, adult psoriasis, a permanent case of impostor syndrome, panic attacks, weight issues, relationship issues, gambling issues—or all of the above.

And everyone—even the most gifted of us—feels from day to day that he or she has fought like a dog to get to cocktail hour: Has climbed out of a warm bed in the cold dark, beaten traffic, tolerated crazy co-workers, sated bottomless customers, and slogged through more traffic home while on the phone with a narcissistic relative only to be told upon walking in the back door that the fucking dishwasher is leaking.

"Privilege" is real and must be acknowledged by intelligent people as a socially negotiable fact of life; but "privileged" is a term for the academy, not for useful political conversation.

Not too long ago, the idea was to do things to empower people who were known as the "underprivileged," and as old-fashioned as that word sounds, that's more the idea here, isn't it? To see that all American citizens have all the privileges that everyone ought to enjoy? If I'm walking down Wabash and I need to go, I'm not going to shit my pants in solidarity with you. How can we make it so that you can stroll blithely into the Palmer House, too?

It's very easy to overstate the importance of this argument relative to everything that's going on right now.

And maybe it's even too early in what I hope is a real profound social movement—and I've seen evidence of said profundity, in communications with others, and with myself—to be quibbling about the terms of the debate.

But I don't play guitar.

And I think if we're going to change the world we're going to have to change our words, too.

Yesterday we established that among all the wonderful things he was, Muhammad Ali was "an exaggerating, narcissistic racist bully who thinks with his tongue and navigates with his cock," not to put too fine a point on it.

And of course a lot of people hated him for that stuff—(including his second wife Belinda, who caught him balling a prostitute hours before the first Frazier fight and rooted for him to lose it, according to Ali: A Life, by Jonathan Eig).

But a lot of people loved Ali for most of that stuff and in spite of the rest of it—even before decades of his Parkinson's-imposed silence and our historical perspective transformed Ali into a kind of American saint.

Understanding how some people loved Ali in his heyday provides a partial key to understanding how some people love Trump now. And they do love Trump. And they love one another when they're in Trump's presence. Watch them at his rallies. They're not only looking admiringly at him, they keep turning to each other and reveling in his words and laughing in happy astonishment. Covering Trump's speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, I sat in front of two guys who were gushing. "Look at them eyes!" one shouted to the other. "He looks like he's looking right at you, talking to you personally!" We were fifty rows up.

That's how I still feel about Muhammad Ali today, even at the remove of YouTube—like he's talking to me personally. When I tell people I'm an Ali nut, I tell them conspiratorially, as if I'm letting them in on a little secret—about one of the most famous people in the history of the world. Maybe, if you are very interested—and your heart is in the right place and you have a real sense of humor and just the subtle sense of morality we're looking for, I'll let you into David Murray's Official Muhammad Ali fan club.

The twinkle in those eyes shines straight at me. (And as Ali's shortest poem said, "Me, we.") 

I've shown that Ali press conference to audiences of speechwriters and other communication people all around the world, including at the United Nations, to show what it looks like when a speaker charms an audience, brings them into the joke that bonds them together.

I suppose that now, in the interest of fairness, I ought to pair it with this Trump rally clip, that demonstrates exactly the same rhetorical techniques and winking charm—to exactly the same effect.

Ali was also fun to listen to not just because of what he said, but because he spoke as rhythmically and musically as he danced. His words could be set to music.

Trump's, too.

But the real appeal of both these men is that they consistently defended people who felt downtrodden, insulted, looked down upon and ignored—in Ali's case, blacks and eventually countercultural whites; in Trump's case mostly rural and suburban whites. And they did so by scandalizing and shocking and scaring the living bejesus out of those perceived social oppressors.

And when the rebel is punished for rebuking the establishment, he becomes a martyr.

When Ali was stripped of his title for refusing indiction into the U.S. military, this is how he was portrayed.

And if you think Trump's followers don't see their man in exactly the same image, then you don't listen to those morning C-SPAN callers, each complaining more earnestly and bitterly than the last about how the Democrats and the media have hounded Trump mercilessly and not given the poor man a chance.

I am not equating Muhammad Ali with Trump; I'm relating to the feelings that I hear Trump followers expressing.

By now, my adoration of Ali is permanent and spiritual, and neither Jonathan Eig's biography nor my reflection for this essay has diminished it. I think Muhammad Ali was essentially a loving spirit with a dark side that his fans don't like to focus on. I think Trump is a dark spirit with a charming side that his enemies cannot bring ourselves to see.

Eig feels the same way, actually. This week I've been corresponding with him and he says he's enjoyed this series so far. He told me he too made the connection between Trump and Ali, especially as he was working on the book during the 2016 campaign. He forwarded to me a quote from a conversation recorded just last week by Washington University's magazine, in which Eig said: "The narcissism, the confidence that no matter what they say, it’s right, and even if it’s wrong it’ll become right because they said it. The love of attention, and yet the failure to treat the people closest to them well. But for Ali, what made it work is that he genuinely loved people. He had this warmth. You wanted to be in a room with Ali, and when you were, you felt like you were the most special person in the world."

Even putting that distinction aside, it wouldn't give the president permission to behave like a prize fighter—as Ali himself pointed out, in an interview in 1974. Asked whether he'd ever consider getting into politics, Ali said no. "If I'm sitting in a white man's office … a White House, or city hall, with the American flag over my head, then I can't say the things I'm saying now, you understand? Then, I have to represent the people."

Alas, our president doesn't have the skills to do that even if he had the interest.

So we who don't feel represented by this president are left to better represent ourselves. And one way to do that is to stop signaling our own virtue by feigning total inability to fathom the minds and hearts of least a third of our fellow Americans.

We know exactly how they feel.

By acknowledging that, we'll communicate better with them—and contend better with their leader. 

Before we discuss how Muhammad Ali might have inspired Donald Trump, let's remember who first inspired Cassius Clay.

A teenage Clay famously fashioned his act after a white professional wrestler named Gorgeous George, who taunted the crowd about how "pretty" he was, and dared his opponent to muss his precious blond curls. Later, Muhammad Ali would say he noticed how much attention Gorgeous George got from being a loudmouth villain—and how much money it made him.

Ali went darker, drumming up interest in seeing him get his block knocked off, by first describing his opponents as bums and later giving many of them more specific nicknames. Sonny Liston was the "Big Ugly Bear," Floyd Patterson was the "The Rabbit," Ernie Terrell was "Uncle Tom," George Chuvalo was "The Washerwoman," George Foreman was "The Mummy," and when it came to Joe Frazier, it was "gonna be a thrilla and a chilla when I get that gorilla in Manilla."

People who love Ali dismiss most of that as creative fight promotion, and forgive the clear excesses on account of, how do you know where the line is if you don't cross it every once in awhile? 

Ali was also a ridiculous womanizer who actually manipulated his second wife into arranging dates for him, telling her that doing so would make her greater than all other wives. She was 19 at the time. 

Ali was a narcissist who could not get enough attention. He was great to everyone he ever met on the street, after once meeting Sugar Ray Robinson in New York and being snubbed. "I was so hurt," he later said. "If Sugar Ray only knew how much I'd loved him and how long I'd followed him maybe he wouldn't have done that. I said to myself right then, 'If I ever get great and famous and people want my autograph and wait all day to see me, I'm sure goin' to treat 'em different.'"

His problem turned out to be, he could never enough of 'em. Once during Ali's exile from boxing, he showed up two hours early for a speaking appearance in Chicago. "To pass the time," writes Jonathan Eig in Ali: A Life, "he wandered along the sidewalk, trying to attract attention. 'I'm looking for a fight!' he barked to anyone in earshot. 'Who's the baddest man around here?'" An Esquire writer who was with Ali that day was saddened: "Ali seemed at a loss. A national magazine writer was accompanying him, recording his every word and every action, and it was not enough to sate his ego. With two hours to kill before his next audience could be assembled, he was incapable of enjoying a quiet moment of introspection, incapable of trying to get to know the man who'd been accompanying him around town all day."

As a talker, Ali was constant. As a thinker, he was contradictory. His stated reasons for refusing induction into the military for Vietnam were mostly admirable, but they were ever-changing. In general, Ali's arguments were more ethos and pathos than logos. And the few ideas he stuck with were understandable as a revelation of 1960s black pride, but borderline monstrous to the modern ear. For instance, he argued against racial integration in general, and interracial marriage specifically. "Every intelligent person wants his child to look like him," he said. "Listen, no woman on this whole earth, not even a black woman in Muslim countries, can please me and cook for me and socialize and talked to me like my American black woman. No woman, and last is a white woman, can really identify with my feelings and the way I act and the way I talk."

And lest you think Ali was a perfectly righteous defender of African Americans: When he moved to Philadelphia in 1970, he lived in a white neighborhood, and when he was challenged about it by some college students at a lecture, he said, "Do you want me to buy a home in the ghetto? Why do I want to live in a rat bin and have a rat bite my child?"

Though I learned some of these specifics from Eig's book, I've known these things about Ali all along. I compile this litany of shabbiness not to convince you not to admire Ali, or to explain to myself how I still do.

But rather to answer the question that so many of us find ourselves asking one another these days: What kind of person could admire an exaggerating, narcissistic racist bully who thinks with his tongue and navigates with his cock?

Let's sit with these similarities between Muhammad Ali and Donald Trump, and between us and them.

And in tomorrow's conclusion, I'll explore the hate these men have both inspired—and the also the love.