By Request: Convention in Spanish

Longtime troll TLB wants me to write about the announcement that the Democratic Convention will be simulcast in Spanish. Unlike anti-immigrant obsessives, I don't necessarily regard this kind of thing as a huge deal, but I actually do think there's something lamentable about the trend toward a greater volume of Spanish-language political communication.

It's just common sense that many jurisdictions provide services in Spanish or whatever other languages may be commonly spoken in any given area. But to me it makes a lot of sense to say that we should work to maintain a monolingual political conversation that expects citizens to be able to deliberate with their fellow citizens in English. Many countries have no realistic alternative other than to try to make bilingualism (or more) work but it's really difficult in practice (Will Kymlicka says some smart things about this in Politics in the Vernacular as I recall) and we shouldn't move in that direction.