Democrat? Never heard of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
On Tuesday, the former presidential candidate issued his latest diatribe against “the Democratic Party,” endorsing a strange linguistic tradition of those who dislike the institution. “I call it the Democrat Party. Rhetorically, it sounds better,” Donald Trump said at a rally in 2018. By “good,” he of course meant “bad,” and the following year he explained that he prefers to say it that way because “the Democrat Party doesn’t sound good.”
By removing two letters from “Democratic,” the former president is employing an irony that has been in use since at least the 1940s. For some reason, his party’s opponents decided long ago that this brutal act of syllabic negation would humiliate their opponents. Democrats don’t seem particularly devastated by this attack, but Republicans and those who support them are fixated on it. We hear this regularly from party stalwarts like J.D. Vance, Mike Johnson, and Nikki Haley, pragmatic independents like RFK Jr., and a wide range of media voices from Fox News to Infowars. Even one-time Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard proudly wrote an op-ed last week saying she had left the Democratic Party and endorsed Trump.
But even if a misnomer doesn’t make liberals cry, it serves a purpose, says Nicole Holliday, an acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s a sign of affiliation, an indicator of the media a person consumes and the politicians they listen to. She recently heard a friend commenting on “Democrat” policies and asked him why he used the word, only to find out that his friend didn’t even realize he was doing it. “Language is contagious, especially emotive political jargon,” Holliday says. “Most of the time, we don’t have the cognitive capacity to really think about every word we’re using. We just use it because other people are.”
This lack of recognition “shows how normalized it has become,” said Larry Glickman, the Stephen and Evelyn Millman Professor of American Studies at Cornell University, who likened the term to “schoolyard taunts.” It suggests “this party is so outside the mainstream of American politics that we can’t even call them by the name they like. We refuse to give them that much respect.”
This is part of a common pattern, Holliday writes. “Intentionally calling certain people something other than their official and preferred title is a common tactic used by opponents to deliberately disrespect them.” If someone named Christopher doesn’t want to be called Chris, and you do, Holliday says, you’re clearly being disrespectful, regardless of your political stance. And Holliday and Glickman point out that a new version of the same unpleasant phenomenon is happening with the pronunciation of Kamala Harris’ first name. Nearly half of the speakers at the Republican National Convention mispronounced it, according to The Washington Post. At a July rally, Trump said he “didn’t care” if he mispronounced the word. Finally, Harris’ 6- and 8-year-old nieces and nephews felt they had to be taught a lesson at this month’s Democratic National Convention.
Such teasing may be Trump’s trademark, but its origins are a bit murky. According to Glickman, the term first gained traction in 1946, thanks to Rep. Carol Reese of B.C., who headed the Republican National Committee. Unlike Trump, Reese considered herself a liberal — at least according to the definition of the time. Still, she didn’t support the New Deal or other recent developments. He used the term to argue that what was once the Democratic Party no longer exists, having been taken over by “radicals.” In 1948, the “ic” in “Democrat” was dropped from the Republican platform, and in 1952 a newspaper columnist asked, “Who took the ‘ic’ from the party of our fathers?” Meanwhile, Sen. Joseph McCarthy also popularized the term.
Over the decades, the Democratic Party came to be associated with liberal policies, until “the slur ‘Democrat’ became an indictment on liberalism itself,” Glickman writes. The phrase was a big hit in the ’90s and 2000s, used repeatedly by Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush. By the next decade, Trump was obliging: “Democrats. Not Democrats. Democrats. We have to be.”
Dropping the “ic” seems to suggest the party doesn’t value democracy. But if that’s the goal, Glickman wonders, “Why not just call them the undemocratic party? As Trump once said, ‘Department of Justice.'” And as they’ve proven since 2020, democracy isn’t high on the list of Republican values. Rather, Glickman suggests, it’s about a “childish” tendency to call people by the wrong names. And, as Hendrik Herzberg wrote in The New Yorker in 2006, “it pretty much screams ‘rat.'”
So what should Democrats do? Is it time to start calling Republicans Republics, Licans, and Relics? President Harry Truman tried calling them “Publicans,” but that obviously didn’t work. It might be best to continue ignoring it, especially considering that many people don’t even know it’s an insult. Getting angry is like taking the bait. “This will be interpreted as Democrats being weak academics who don’t get a joke and are watching how heavy-handed our language is,” Holliday says.
So Democrats can allow the bullying attempts to continue. Trump and his allies clearly need to blow off steam, even if it means taking the world’s smallest, most bizarre insults.