Via the blog Crooked Timber and an old New Yorker item by Hendrik Hertzberg, I now have an explanation for the irritation provoked by the term “Democrat party.” It’s a name used exclusively by conservatives as a way to marginalize the opposition, but I’ve always wondered exactly what about the slur gets under my skin. Do Republicans deliberately mangle the party’s name in order to avoid associating “Democratic” with broader “democratic” patriotism? Rick Yeselson of Crooked Timber, in summarizing Mitt Romney’s swing from moderate Massachusetts governor to base-appealing presidential hopeful, points out a switch in the candidate’s rhetoric. By 2012, what Romney had once referred to as the “Democratic party” had been replaced by the truncated version. Yeselson explains the appeal of the subtle insult:
It’s awkward and ugly to say (try it), and it removes from Democrats the right to have their party called by the name they have designated for it—like when white commentators used to insist on calling Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay . . . . It would suddenly sound very jarring and disrespectful if Democrats and liberals regularly referenced something called the “Republic Party”, but contemptuous conservatives have been doing the equivalent for decades.
Yeselson also steers us to Hertzberg’s 2006 analysis, which was prompted by a fundraising e-mail from George W. Bush that warned, “Nothing threatens our hard-won reforms and economic prosperity more than a Democrat victory this November.” Hertzberg has the dictionary — in which “Democrat” is listed as a noun but not an adjective — on his side, as well as Google, which at the time produced 20 times more hits for the “Democratic Party” than “Democrat Party.” Six years later, the gap has narrowed, perhaps reflecting the fact that name-calling on the Internet only increases. “Democratic” garners some 46 million hits, while “Democrat” gets around 17 million. Interestingly, however, the top three results — various pages of the official democrats.org site — are identical for both searches. With the “ic” or without, the party obviously understands SEO.
Hertzberg’s most on-point observation about this “handy way to express contempt” is that it is “jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams “rat.” Fairly may be an understatement; wade into the weeds of the comment threads on any political website and you’ll find caps-lock rants about DemoRATS and ReTHUGlicans (or RePUGlicans, which I can only assume is a play on “repugnant”). Subtle these folks are not; they display the same level of maturity that produces oh-so-clever monickers like “Obummer” or “Obambi.” And that doesn’t even include the technically accurate yet passive-agressively hostile “Barack Hussein Obama.”
Hertzberg also relates two particularly telling anecdotes. Whereas conservative intellectuals once eschewed the term, with William F. Buckley, Jr., declaring that “I have an aversion to ‘Democrat’ as an adjective,” the proliferation of the “ic”-less version has tracked the rightward lurch of the Republican party itself. Still, Hertzberg writes:
In the conservative media, the phenomenon feeds more voraciously the closer you get to the mucky, sludgy bottom. “Democrat Party” is standard jargon on right-wing talk radio and common on winger Web sites like NewsMax.com, which blue-pencils Associated Press dispatches to de-“ic” references to the Party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. (The resulting impression that “Democrat Party” is O.K. with the A.P. is as phony as a North Korean travel brochure.)
That NewsMax, always classy.
It comes as no surprise that two of the drivers of “Democrat Party” were Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz, who famously circulated a memo in the 1990s urging fellow Republicans to describe the opposition with loaded words like “sick” and “pathetic.” Luntz now makes self-parodying appearances on The Colbert Report, holding focus groups to hone Colbert’s “corporations are people” message, but in 2006 he told Hertzberg that “those two letters actually do matter.” Hertzberg adds that Luntz had “recently finished writing a book—it’s entitled ‘Words That Work’—and has been diligently going through the galley proofs taking out the hundreds of ‘ic’s that his copy editor, one of those partisan Dems, had stuck in.”
Ultimately, getting under liberal skin is exactly what “Democrat Party” is designed to do — and complaining about semantics only makes Democrats look petty. I realize that letting it bother me only plays into the hands of the GOP, but I can’t help wanting, whenever I see Mitch McConnell on TV droning on about the evils of the Democrat agenda, to reach out and give his nose a good, strong tweak.
. . . So Well Read. . . 