By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | No such thing as the “Democrat Party” exists, except perhaps in the minds and spin machines of the Grand Old Party. Therefore in this column on the proper use of an English adjective, we’ll refer to GOP as the “Republic Party” to test how it likes the feel of a forced name change.
Republic Party leaders long have held that their political opposites — “Democrats” — are just not the kind of people you’d want to sit down with at Sunday dinner. Those Democrats, so the logic goes, are bad folks who only want to grow government, raise taxes and help the poor. Bad Democrats. Bad Democrats.
But there’s a problem the Republics have — they like the adjective “democratic.” It’s a good, governing word that reflects the values of America. So what to do, what to do?
How about just changing people’s perception of the whole Democratic Party by calling it something it isn’t — using the bad noun “Democrat.” Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Don’t reward the opposition with a good word — “democratic.” That sounds as good, solid and American as apple pie. Instead, call them something different. The heck with the fact that it’s just plain wrong, ungrammatical and not proper American English.
Folks, this is the Contract with America logic of the 1990s. Conservative pollsters and Newt Gingrich decided to whack two targets with one continuing volley — to demonize the Democratic Party and get Americans to start linking the party’s name with the “bad values” of Democrats instead of the “good word” of “democratic. So for the Republic Party, the Democratic Party became the Democrat Party.
Twenty years later, the Republics have been pretty successful. Gingrich hawked videos that flew off the shelves. They got Republic Party members to change the way they talked about government, not only changing the name of the opposition’s party in speeches, but by picking from a list of specific words — good, governing words versus negative, contrasting words — anytime they were talking about policy and politics.
Conservative talking heads now speak all of the time about the Democrat Party. A lot of Republic candidates, scripted to the core, talk about their Democrat Party opponents. Fox TV bobbleheads don’t even seem know what the Democratic Party is. Recent examples:
- Rush Limbaugh, radio personality, Feb. 26: “And overturning the culture of this country as established in our founding has been the objective of the Democrat Party for the past… Since the sixties.”
- Peter Johnson Jr., Fox and Friends, Feb. 24: “Did the Democrat Party do the right thing here with regard to this Senate nomination, because the president will be a sending a name?”
This nonsense and bad English has even filtered into the traditional print media, once a harbinger of objectivity. It’s not rare to see a headline in a paper that blares about a “Democrat candidate” or the “Democrat Party.” From last week:
- Nathaniel Cary, education reporter, Greenville News, Feb. 26: “The national spotlight remains on South Carolina politics for one more day as Democrat voters head to the polls …”
- Headline, The Post and Courier, Feb. 28: “Really feeling the Bern: Democrat candidate gets Bernie Sanders tattoo.”
Media Matters for America, a nonprofit group dedicated to correcting conservative information, noted that the ungrammatical use of “Democrat” was infecting politics in a 2006 analysis:
“The ungrammatical conversion of the noun ‘Democrat’ to an adjective was the brainchild of Republican partisans, presumably an attempt to deny the opposing party the claim to being ‘democratic’ — or in the words of New Yorker magazine senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg, ‘to deny the enemy the positive connotations of its chosen appellation.’ In the early 1990s, apparently due largely to the urging of then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the use of the word ‘Democrat’ as an adjective became near-universal among Republicans.”
Love note to Republics: Practice what you preach about speaking proper American English. Otherwise, you risk sounding like a … foreigner.
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