Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 8: The “Democrat Party”

This post is about an odd habit that started during the segregation era of Republicans calling the Democratic Party the “Democrat Party.” That isn’t understood as carrying a specific racial connotation. But it is connected with a political twist that was very much a part of the Jim Crow/segregation era.

This phrase is considered by those who use it as a form of “owning the libs.” But why should any Democrat be bothered by Republicans talking as though they can’t construct common adjectives when they’re talking?

Lawrence Glickman gives an interesting sketch of how the bad grammar of “Dem-u-crat Party” entered the Republican vocabulary.

Commentators have long sought to explain the infantile, but persistent and aggressive, Republican habit of labeling the Democratic Party as the “Democrat” party, among them s, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Ruth Marcus. The New York Times’ Russell Baker did so twice, first as a reporter in 1956 and then as a columnist 20 years later. These analyses have been illuminating, but for the most part, they have not tracked the origins of this strange “verbal tic,” as the “ic” is “hard to pin down with any precision,” as Hertzberg wrote. Some have (incorrectly) fingered Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator and anti-communist zealot from the 1950s, as the coiner of the phrase, or have associated it with “the right-wing extremists of the John Birch Society.” In 1984, Safire interviewed Harold Stassen, a Republican politician from Minnesota, who claimed to have coined it in 1940, but Stassen provided no evidence of this to Safire at the time, and I’ve found none in the record.¹

But he also talks about how there is an authoritarian element in this particular silly usage. “The phrase has always been about ‘othering’ the Democratic Party, but the meaning of the slur has shifted significantly in politically telling ways.”

Glickman identifies the “key popularizer” of the slogan as “the improbably named Brazilla Carroll Reece, a veteran Tennessee congressman, was selected as chair of the Republican National Committee” in 1946. But in those days, the chief defenders of the segregation system were Southern Democrats.

But there were plenty of rightwing Republicans, then, too. And even “progressive” Republicans weren’t yet an extinct species. So in the 1940s, this hodgepodge argument he used actually made some sense within the Republican Party:

Even though Reece represented the [conservative-isolationist] Taft wing of the GOP and was described as an “out-and-out conservative” when he took over the RNC, he saw himself and his party as representing “true liberalism.”

For Reece, advocating liberalism was a means of outflanking the Democratic Party from both the left and the right simultaneously. Reece argued that the Democratic Party was unworthy of the name because of what he called its “three discordant elements.” First were the “corrupt big city political machines.” Second was the segregationist South, which “rules by a racial dictatorship, a dictatorship which may aptly be described as ‘Bilboism’ ” (a reference to Theodore Bilbo, the notorious race-baiting Mississippi senator). Finally, Reece highlighted the labor movement and the left, which he believed had asserted ideological control of the party, especially CIO-PAC, the nation’s first political action committee, which was associated with the left-leaning and fast-growing Congress of Industrial Organizations. [my emphasis]

Joe McCarthy liked to use the “Dem-u-crat Party” label, too.

And we sometimes hear Republicans accuse Democrats of trying to keep African-Americans “on the Democrat plantation.”

That seems to be some weird historical leftover of when the Republicans attacked Southern Democrats for being segregationists. A weird (and obscure) attempt to gaslight Democrats.

1. Glickman, Lawrence B. (2024): The Real Origins of the “Democrat Party” Troll. Slate 01/21/2023. <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/01/democrat-party-republican-insult.html> (Accessed: 2024-29-03).