{"id":6935,"date":"2006-03-23T12:32:23","date_gmt":"2006-03-23T17:32:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6935"},"modified":"2006-03-23T12:32:23","modified_gmt":"2006-03-23T17:32:23","slug":"the-democrat-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-democrat-party\/","title":{"rendered":"The ‘Democrat Party’"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d always just assumed that Republicans call their rivals the “Democrat Party” as some kind of childish insult. They realize it’s grammatically wrong, but they think it annoys Dems, so, like a child who enjoys teasing others a little too much, they stick to it.<\/p>\n

I’ve falsely assumed, however, that this is a fairly modern taunt. Kevin did some digging<\/a> and found that it goes back quite a ways. For example, Geoffrey Nunberg explained:<\/p>\n

The bleaching of democracy made small-d democrat irrelevant as a political label….That’s what allowed the Republicans of Hoover’s era to start referring to their opponents as the Democrat Party….By mid-century, “Democrat Party” had become the routine tic that it is for modern Republicans, though nowadays it probably has less to do with undermining the Democrats than simply irritating them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For that matter, William Safire noted:<\/p>\n

Acting on a tip, I wrote to the man who was campaign director of Wendell Willkie’s race against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “In the Willkie campaign of 1940,” responded Harold Stassen, “I emphasized that the party controlled in large measure at that time by Hague in New Jersey, Pendergast in Missouri and Kelly Nash in Chicago should not be called a ‘Democratic Party.’ It should be called the ‘Democrat party.’ . . .”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a Republican alternative for Dems to (mis)use. Andrew Sabl noted<\/a> that Air America’s Sam Seder likes to pronounce Republican “RAYpublican,” but that doesn’t quite seem to work.<\/p>\n

Andrew is right when he says Dems are neither “disciplined enough nor consistently petty enough to make anything like this stick,” even if they did come up with a sneering name for their rivals. But just out of curiosity, do readers have any ideas?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d always just assumed that Republicans call their rivals the “Democrat Party” as some kind of childish insult. They realize it’s grammatically wrong, but they think it annoys Dems, so, like a child who enjoys teasing others a little too much, they stick to it. I’ve falsely assumed, however, that this is a fairly modern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}