The title is a trick question, with apologies to Betteridge, because there is no problem.

Monday saw the release of yet another poll showing that the term “Latinx” is unpopular among Hispanic voters — only 2 percent preferred to use it, while 40 percent found it off-putting and 30 percent said they’d be less likely to vote for a politician who deployed it. Naturally, the rest of the week was spent arguing over how much this mattered.

My own anecdotal survey has not met with pleasant results. Every Hispanic client I asked responded with a profanity. They do not want to be told by a bunch of white nutjobs what their ethnicity should be called. They know who they are and they didn’t ask anyone to fix it for them. It’s not broken. So why is this worthy of mention?

The term has been growing in popularity lately, often used by White politicians or columnists like myself who want to politely defer to another group’s preferences. But it appears that Latinx is not, in fact, what that group wants to be called; a majority of them say they prefer the already gender-neutral “Hispanic.”

The term is popular among people who fear one of two things, offending anyone or being the target of a screeching mob on social media. The term has also become the litmus test of woke nonsense because its putative beneficiaries want nothing to do with it, despite being vehemently informed by their saviors that it’s for their benefit, even if they’re too stupid to grasp it.

So who are we to appease, the screeching mob or the people to unwoke to realize that the mob is saving them from?

This seems particularly relevant as Hispanics have begun deserting Democrats for the GOP (a Wall Street Journal poll out this week showed them evenly split between the parties). One potential culprit is the kind of progressivism that Latinx represents — hyperfocused on language policing and divisive identity issues rather than bread-and-butter policy. But one can also argue, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie did, that the critics are the ones displaying a professional wordsmith’s fixation on minor word choices, rather than the substantive issues that actually decide elections.

Bouie’s pitch makes a good point that the word, “Latinx,” despised as it may be by Hispanics, is trivial, hardly the cause of Hispanics fleeing the woke for the bourgeois values they hold and lifestyle they seek.

At the same time, it is important to remember that language does not actually structure politics. Yes, a political message can persuade voters or, on the other end, help them rationalize their choices. And yes, a political message can be effective or ineffective. But we should not mistake this for a causal relationship.

The problem with Bouie’s pitch is that he fails to grasp that the effort to ram this word down the throats of people who don’t want it is symptomatic of the failure to appreciate that they also don’t want the ideology that comes with it.

The forces that drive politics are material and ideological, and our focus — when trying to understand and explain shifts in the electorate — should be on the social and economic transformations that shape life for most Americans.

He’s right. The Democrats’ focus should be on the social and economic transformations that shape life for most Americans. He’s wrong to believe that most Americans, and most Hispanics, share the woke vision, his vision, of what the changes should be.

The point here is not to write an exhaustive explanation of what happened among Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election. The point is that our constant battles over language are more distracting than not. The whys of American politics have much more to do with the ever-changing currents of race, religion and economic production than they do with political messaging. And no message, no matter how strong on the surface, will land if it isn’t attentive to those forces and the other forces that structure the lives of ordinary people.

The media should heed Bouie and stop trying to shove the word “Latinx” down people’s throats. We should also heed Bouie and stop obsessing over things that accomplish nothing, like discovering new microaggressions and inventing new words to stem faux trauma. And we should heed Bouie by focusing on the real life concerns of ordinary people. And Bouie should heed himself and come to grips that what ordinary people do not want is to be “reimagined” by him.

While it may not matter what bespoke terms the left invents to please this or that constituency, it matters a great deal to whom they are talking — and to whom they listen before they start to speak.

You can’t hear people when you’re constantly screaming at them, whether to tell them who they are or to tell them how wrong and bad they are. That a small cohort of very self-righteous people demand that Hispanics adopt their word is trivial in the long run. That they believe they get to command others to use their word is less so. That they don’t care what the people they’re desperately seeking to save have to say about it is very important. Other than that, who cares if the media, fearful of becoming the next target of woke vitriol, calls Hispanics “Latinx,” even if it makes the 98% of inadequately woke Hispanics cringe?