An Associated Press report published on Saturday explored conservatives’ intentional misuse of the noun “Democrat” as a way of vilifying members of the Democratic Party.
The report: AP correspondent Julie Carr Smyth interviewed a raft of experts who dissected whether conservatives’ use of the term “Democrat Party” – as opposed to “Democratic Party” – signaled an intent “to define the opposition through demeaning language.”
Here’s what they had to say:
- Thomas Patterson, political communications professor at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy: “This is just another piece in a big bubbling kettle of animosities that are out there.”
- Vanessa Beasley, associate professor of communications at Vanderbilt University: “The idea is to strip it down to that noun and make it into this blur, so that you can say that these are bad people — and my party, the people who are using the term, are going to be the upholders of democracy.”
- Susan Benesch, executive director of the Dangerous Speech Project: “It’s just two little letters — i and c — added to the end of a word, right? But the small difference in the two terms, linguistically or grammatically, does not protect against a large difference in meaning and impact of the language.”
The reaction: Democratic Party supporters on social media expressed distaste with being referred to as members of the “Democrat Party.”
- “It’s an insult, plain and simple. A way of smearing the Democratic Party,” tweeted one user.
- Another said: “Many studies on language and how it was used by the Nazi to dehumanize Jewish people proved that that type of abuse of language is far from harmless.”
- “It’s a slur and they know it. They are all about getting a reaction, aka ‘owning the libs’. Everything they do is to generate outrage, they have no other goal or platform,” said one commenter.
Say what? The notion of conservatives using the term “Democrat” as an epithet isn’t a new one.
- In 1984, The New York Times reported on the use of the phrase “by some right-wing Republicans” who felt “Democratic Party” implied their political opponents were “the only true adherents of democracy.”
- Former President Donald Trump seemed to intuit the political expediency of the gesture, telling a Janesville, Wisconsin crowd in 2017 that he always says “Democrat” instead of “Democratic,” because “it sounds worse.”
