Why is "Democrat" (instead of Democratic) an insult?

[Lesleymo]

This is probably a stupid question, and I'm not trying to stir anything up, but I'm not sure why it is insulting to say "Democrat Party." Is it just the sound of it that people object to? Or is there some bit of history there that I have missed out on?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

1. Two reasons:

1) To intentionally call someone something other than their actual and preferred name is insulting, and intensionally so.

2) The word "democratic" has favorable connotations which is why the RW makes of project of seeking to disassociate the Democratic Party from the benign concept of small-D democracy.

[HopeHoops]

31. I think we should call the GOP the "republic party" just to be pissy.

[Stinky The Clown]

41. I do that .... but omit the "l" to boot.

repubic party. I also never use a capital R.

[Name removed]

40. Deleted message

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[Name removed]

49. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Occulus]

54. No, it's how they *mean* it.

They mean it in the same sense. They intend it as that level of pejorative.

[Democrat_in_Houston]

52. "Democratic" is the proper adjective to "party"

We are democrats in the democratic party.

The other side are republicans in the republican party.

The English is a bit funny that way. :)

[boston bean]

2. How does ratpublic party sound. there is a history to it...

Republicans starting using it as a subliminal message to make Dems seem like rats.

I think Rove started it??? Anyone else know for sure??

[pscot]

7. Joe McCarthy

used it a lot. I don't know if he was the first, but it has a long and disreputable provenance.

[LiberalAndProud]

12. I thought it was Newt Gingrich who started it.

Rush Limbaugh propogated it. That I know for sure. Wherever it started, it has been an official RepubliCon talking point for a too long.

[ashling]

24. They've done this for years

so much so that even some Democrats will slip up and say it when they know better ... and, as the op suggests, they have used it so much that some even think it is ok

Ronald Reagan was good at it. Listen to his stuff from as far back as '64. Mcarthy used it.

[JHB]

27. No, it's decades older than Newt and Rush, although...

they both made a point of propagating it themselves, and encouraging others on "their team" to do likewise.

[ClassWarrior]

15. I like how Sam Sedar used to say "Rape-Publican" on his radio program.

How true. Though it's much more subtle when it's spoken than written.

NGU.

[TuxedoKat]

35. I thought that was Frank Luntz's suggestion

For me though, it never suggested "rat", just that the person was either ignorant or trying to be insulting.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

3. A member of the Democratic Party is a Democrat. But the official name of the party is Democratic.

The people who call it the Democrat Party know it is actually the Democratic Party but do so just to be tools. It's like intentionally calling someone by the wrong name after having been corrected time and time again.

It's as if I kept referring to you as Lesseymo.

[dem629]

4. Right-wingers think it is, but it isn't.

They're trying to convey a different meaning by leaving off the "ic" part of the word, but the root word remains, so while they're trying to diminish the idea of small-d "democrat" they really aren't.

They think they're being clever, but they aren't.

And I'm also not sure why liberals get so upset over this.

[gkhouston]

5. +1. I don't find it upsetting. To me, it makes the speaker sound ignorant and childish. n/t

[supernova]

16. +2 It just sounds ignorant to me

Makes me think less of the speaker than any supposed insult to me.

[pscot]

17. It is ignorant and childish

playground stuff. It's also deliberately disrespectful and demeaning. It's a form of labeling that challenges our identity. Every one has a right to be called by their own name.

[ellenfl]

44. imo, it's the intent. it is intended by users as a slur. eom

[JohnnyLib2]

25. +1 more. It can be used as a deflection, a baiting tactic.

Blip.

[lame54]

6. because Rove made it one

[11 Bravo]

8. It's our party and we get to fucking name it.

[northoftheborder]

9. "Democrat" Party

The name of the party is" The Democratic Party" and has been for over a hundred years. It is insulting because the "Republic" party knows this, and knows they are insulting and belittling members of the Democratic Party when they do this. I think we should call them the "Republic" party until they stop. The word "Democrat" is appropriate when referring to a single member, such as "He is a Democrat" or "they are Democrats"; but used as an adjective or adverb the appropriate word is "Democratic". If we were to apply the same rules to the word Republican, then I suppose we would say "He is a Republic".

[dflprincess]

10. It's a calculated "error"

http://languageandgrammar.com/2007/12/27/democrat-party-reference-for-a-reason/

A politician’s image is as finely crafted as a pink flamingo made of hand-blown glass, so when something is repeated by a politician or a political party, there can be no question that it’s being done for a reason. There are no oversights; how the politician or political party is perceived is too important.

That’s why it’s no accident that President Bush and his Republican counterparts occasionally refer to the Democratic party as the “Democrat party.” They have made the conscious decision to drop the -ic when referring to their political counterparts, so that leaves us to determine the reason.

I doubt that the answer will come from Karl Rove’s new blockbuster tell-all account of the current administration since indications are that the history is considered as malleable as play dough, so let me take a guess–from the perspective of language, of course. Our system is a democratic one, and as such, the word democratic has a very positive connotation in the eyes of Americans. The goal of changing the reference to his political opponents from Democratic Party to Democrat Party is to attempt separate their opponents from something positive.

It’s subtle, and this isn’t the most heinous abuse of language I’ve ever seen, especially since it makes it seem as if the speaker just made a verbal mistake since we all know that it’s the Democratic Party. It is, however, a good reminder that we need to listen closely to the subtlety of language.

[demmiblue]

11. Here is an interesting article on this topic:

<SNIP>

There’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. “Democrat Party” is a slur, or intended to be—a handy way to express contempt. Aesthetic judgments are subjective, of course, but “Democrat Party” is jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams “rat.” At a slightly higher level of sophistication, it’s an attempt to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation. During the Cold War, many people bridled at obvious misnomers like “German Democratic Republic,” and perhaps there are some members of the Republican Party (which, come to think of it, has been drifting toward monarchism of late) who genuinely regard the Democratic Party as undemocratic. Perhaps there are some who hope to induce it to go out of existence by refusing to call it by its name, à la terming Israel “the Zionist entity.” And no doubt there are plenty of others who say “Democrat Party” just to needle the other side while signalling solidarity with their own—the partisan equivalent of flashing a gang sign.

The history of “Democrat Party” is hard to pin down with any precision, though etymologists have traced its use to as far back as the Harding Administration. According to William Safire, it got a boost in 1940 from Harold Stassen, the Republican Convention keynoter that year, who used it to signify disapproval of such less than fully democratic Democratic machine bosses as Frank Hague of Jersey City and Tom Pendergast of Kansas City. Senator Joseph McCarthy made it a regular part of his arsenal of insults, which served to dampen its popularity for a while. There was another spike in 1976, when grumpy, growly Bob Dole denounced “Democrat wars” (those were the days!) in his Vice-Presidential debate with Walter Mondale. Growth has been steady for the last couple of decades, and today we find ourselves in a golden age of anti-“ic”-ism.

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.) The respectable conservative journals of opinion sprinkle the phrase around their Web sites but go light on it in their print editions. William F. Buckley, Jr., the Miss Manners cum Dr. Johnson of modern conservatism, dealt with the question in a 2000 column in National Review, the magazine he had founded forty-five years before. “I have an aversion to ‘Democrat’ as an adjective,” Buckley began.

<SNIP>

The job of politicians, however, is different, and among those of the Republican persuasion “Democrat Party” is now nearly universal. This is partly the work of Newt Gingrich, the nominal author of the notorious 1990 memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” and his Contract with America pollster, Frank Luntz, the Johnny Appleseed of such linguistic innovations as “death tax” for estate tax and “personal accounts” for Social Security privatization. Luntz, who road-tested the adjectival use of “Democrat” with a focus group in 2001, has concluded that the only people who really dislike it are highly partisan adherents of the—how you say?—Democratic Party. “Those two letters actually do matter,” Luntz said the other day. He added that he 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.


http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/07/060807ta_talk_hertzberg

[Lesleymo]

20. Fascinating.

I've noticed that John Boehner uses it a lot - though of course, everything he says irritates me. The official GOP website also has some misleading charts including one showing the debt incurred by the irresponsible "Democrat Majority."

[mochajava666]

22. Great post. I remember Dole saying "Democrat Wars" in

the Vice Presidential debate with Walter Mondale in 1979. I think Mondale replied my calling him a Hatchet Man. I also remember that bag of pus Frank Luntz pushing the label also.

Every time I hear Democrat Party, I think of the arrogant, rich, evil, John Huston as Noah Cross in the movie Chinatown repeatedly mispronouncing Jack Nicholson's name as Gitts, not as Gittes (with a long E, not silent). That really chafed Jack. He should have smashed John Huston's windshield with a golf club.

[kickysnana]

13. It IS the Democratic Party.

It is deliberately mispronouncing a name and it is blatantly disrespectful and meant to be demeaning but the Republicans have done this for years for anyone they consider enemies ie "Sahdamn" for Saddam and "ayrabbs" for Arabs.

It would be like someone continuing to saying "Lislie" after being corrected.

[MUAD_DIB]

14. It is really more of a childish way of addressing one another.

You already have enough feedback from other posters here, but by using the term it represents a level of disdain by Republicans of Democrats.

It's like the childish way that the annoying right wing teabaggers call Obaba not of American birth, that he is a Muslim, that he is a socialist commie...and on and on.

[Igel]

39. Well, isn't it no different from what you do?

"Teabagger"?

Yes, it expresses disdain. However, I also agree with your choice of adjective.

[MUAD_DIB]

46. That's what they called themselves. No?

Now that they know better they are trying to call themselves something different.

[elocs]

18. To let freepers know it bugs you is giving them what they want. They win.

I know it's childish, but that's the way it is. Anyone who has kids knows when one lets another know that something they say bugs them, that's all they will hear. It's just like when DUers whine about a thread getting UnRecs--they're feeding the trolls.

If freepers want to say "Democrat" instead of "Democratic" then let them be the ones to look ignorant and don't play their game because that's what they want, they want to piss you off and for you to act pissed. Too many of us are such an easy mark for it too.

Don't feed the trolls!

[T Wolf]

19. It is derogatory in a manner that defines the totality of a person as that characteristic that the

(mis)user wants to denigrate.

Substitute a religious affiliation....

My Jewish colleague

carries a totally different meaning from

my Jew colleague.

The first is a descriptive adjective. The second is a bigoted slur.

It is that obvious.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

21. My Ukrainian mother gets angry whenever she hears her native country referred to as...

"the Ukraine." Why? Because the insinuation that the country is simply a region as opposed to an autonomous sovereign entity. Same concept.

[frazzled]

23. Meant to remind you of "bureaucrat," "technocrat" -- any "crat" you want

Honest, it has nothing to do with rats. It's "crats" -- it has that vaguely robotic, quasi-Soviet ring to it. It was devised in writing and handed out to Republicans during the Gingrich years as a talking point. It was a premeditated assault on the party.

[slackmaster]

26. Democrat is a noun, Democratic is an adjective

Anyone who uses Democrat as an adjective is simply yanking your chain.

[rucky]

28. It's just immature.

They know the proper termiology, but refuse to use it.

And it's bad grammar, to boot.

I think this is something that Luntz coached 'em on: "Democratic" has positive connotations used in a wider scope, while "democrat" is specifically referring to a member of the Democratic Party.

[DevonRex]

29. It certainly shows how uneducated the republicans are since Democrat is a noun

and Democratic is an adjective. I rather enjoy it when they show how stupid they are.

[Subdivisions]

30. I was discussing this with two fux snooze watchers and

they were adamant that I, despite being a life-long Democrat, was wrong in asserting that the proper name is "The Democratic Party", as shown here on our website: http://www.democrats.org. I explained that it has been so for more that 150 years. I showed them the website and the page about the Party's history here: http://www.democrats.org/a/party/history.html. And, still, those brainwashed dupes still were skeptical, unreasonable even in the face of proof.

[damntexdem]

32. Because it is meant as an insult by shortening the true name.

What if we called you 'Lesmo'?

It has become a common verbal trick of politicians in the Republic Party. (See?)

[Orsino]

33. Because assigning nicknames is a kindergarten playground tactic...

...and beneath what our discourse should be.

[BurtWorm]

34. Democratic is the adjectival form. Democrat is a noun.

That's for starters. To say Democrat Party is to intentionally sound stupid. This is one of the motivations for using this term, I believe. To rile Democrats by sounding like idiots. But the main motivation, of course, is to make the equally moronic and juvenile "-rat" insinuation.

It's as if we called those dumb fucks Repubdickans.

[Nye Bevan]

36. Best not to rise to the bait

If they know that saying "Democrat Party" will make us scream and cry then they will keep doing it. If we ignore it they will stop.

[handmade34]

37. it is immature when the Republicans use it

I don't like hearing them call the Democratic Party, the Democrat Party, but what I dislike even more is that no one ever corrects them. We don't normally, in the public realm, correct bad grammer, but I think it would be a positive handling of the matter if everytime someone used the word improperly, they could be gently reminded of the proper use. When Jeb Hensarling was on Hardball yesterday, I noticed that he used both Democrat and Democratic during the conversation and it appeared as if it were a concentrated effort when using the word democrat.

[lib2DaBone]

38. It's another one of Rush Limbaugh's cute little demonizing ploys...

Like "Femi-Nazi" or "Libruhl" or the other milllion cutsie things he says...

I think they call it NLP? (neuro Linguistic Programming)? If you demonize the word "Liberal" enough times and link it up to un-pleasant emotions... whenever people hear that word... they will feel negative.

Limbaugh does it a lot. I also noticed Mitch McConnel using a a lot of "dog-whistle words".

[moondust]

42. DemocRAT.

It think it got started on the intertubes when some wingnuts began spelling it that way. Without the suffix "ic" it is a noun, not an adjective. Using it as an adjective is pejorative and it should therefore be banned from the floors of the House and Senate.

[Touchdown]

51. It can be traced back as far as Warren Harding.

McCarthy used it regularly in the 50s. Gingrich made it mandatory in 1994.

...Which is also telling. The GOP: still void of any new ideas, even insults.

[Peacetrain]

43. Because it makes as much sense as calling the republicans.. republics..

makes no sense

[crazylikafox]

48. I think we should just start calling them the Oligarch Party, which they are.

[freeplessinseattle]

45. I think it's not so much that it sounds negative

just that they know "Democratic party" sounds too positive, since democratic is commonly used in a positive way for other non-political things.

On the other hand, "Republic" or "Republican" doesn't carry many other positive connotations, and ironically enough it is often Repugs themselves who lend the air of negativity by saying stupid stuff such as "The People's Republic of Seattle" (yes, some R's actually say that around here, and I've read it said about San Fransisco and other liberal places).

[KonaKane]

47. It's an intentional diss. Here is a great article on it...

from THE IC FACTOR (New Yorker Magazine, 2007)

"...There’s no great mystery about the motives behind this deliberate misnaming. “Democrat Party” is a slur, or intended to be—a handy way to express contempt. Aesthetic judgments are subjective, of course, but “Democrat Party” is jarring verging on ugly. It fairly screams “rat.” At a slightly higher level of sophistication, it’s an attempt to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation. During the Cold War, many people bridled at obvious misnomers like “German Democratic Republic,” and perhaps there are some members of the Republican Party (which, come to think of it, has been drifting toward monarchism of late) who genuinely regard the Democratic Party as undemocratic. Perhaps there are some who hope to induce it to go out of existence by refusing to call it by its name, à la terming Israel “the Zionist entity.” And no doubt there are plenty of others who say “Democrat Party” just to needle the other side while signalling solidarity with their own—the partisan equivalent of flashing a gang sign.

The history of “Democrat Party” is hard to pin down with any precision, though etymologists have traced its use to as far back as the Harding Administration. According to William Safire, it got a boost in 1940 from Harold Stassen, the Republican Convention keynoter that year, who used it to signify disapproval of such less than fully democratic Democratic machine bosses as Frank Hague of Jersey City and Tom Pendergast of Kansas City. Senator Joseph McCarthy made it a regular part of his arsenal of insults, which served to dampen its popularity for a while. There was another spike in 1976, when grumpy, growly Bob Dole denounced “Democrat wars” (those were the days!) in his Vice-Presidential debate with Walter Mondale. Growth has been steady for the last couple of decades, and today we find ourselves in a golden age of anti-“ic”-ism."



Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/07/060807ta_talk_hertzberg

[Lesleymo]

50. I had no idea it went back so far

It does sound like a slam to me - but I wasn't sure exactly why!

[demmiblue]

53. You already saw that article above.