Raskin would never call them Banana Republicans
Incivility is a reflex among MAGA Republicans, as are gun-toting implicit threats of violence and, as on January 6, the real deal.
The GOP’s sneering use of Democrat Party has such a long history that at this point I wince whenever Democrats occasionally refer the the Democrat Party.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) decided to school Republican colleague Lauren Boebert on her use of it.
The Associated Press reports that this old Republican shibboleth is “on the rise”:
Purposely mispronouncing the formal name of the Democratic Party and equating it with political ideas that are not democratic goes beyond mere incivility, said Vanessa Beasley, an associate professor of communications at Vanderbilt University who studies presidential rhetoric. She said creating short-hand descriptions of people or groups is a way to dehumanize them.
Nothing new about that, even if branding the left pedophiles to dehumanize them is.
For any young-uns reading this, Lawrence B. Clickman at Slate provides a little history on the origin of the smear often misattributed to Joe McCarthy or the John Birch Society:
So, what is the history of this strange locution? Tracking the origins of the missing “ic” provides an instructive window into the evolution of modern conservatism. For although “Democrat party” has been employed for at least seven decades, it has been a shifting signifier. Tracing the history of the phrase helps us understand how the Republican Party has defined itself by what it was not. The phrase has always been about “othering” the Democratic Party, but the meaning of the slur has shifted significantly in politically telling ways.
This “ic”-y history begins in 1946, when its key popularizer, the improbably named Brazilla Carroll Reece, a veteran Tennessee congressman, was selected as chair of the Republican National Committee. Reece did not coin the term; “Democrat party” had been used by headline writers and politicians of both parties since the 19th century. Before 1946, however, the phrase did not have a straightforward connotation; it was sometimes used neutrally, sometimes positively, and sometimes negatively.
Reece blazed the trail for the “Democrat party” or, equally frequently, the “so-called Democrat party” to become an insult. Journalists noted his characteristic use of the phrase. It was the “‘Democrat party,’ as he calls it,” wrote Ted Lewis in 1947.
Reece did not, however, offer this renaming out of thin air. He built on two key Republican claims of the previous decade, both arising in opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The first was that, under FDR, the Democratic Party had dangerously radicalized. Frank Knox, the 1936 Republican vice presidential candidate, in a typical version of the critique, said the party had been “seized by alien and un-American elements.” The second claim was that the Democratic Party had lost touch with small-government traditions. “This administration … has lost all relationship to the Democratic party,” Knox said, to the point where “it no longer uses the word ‘Democratic.’ ” (This doesn’t seem to be true—the 1940 and 1944 Democratic Party platforms use the “ic” multiple times.)
[…]
In the immediate post–World War II moment, Reece expanded the anti–New Deal argument that the Democratic Party “no longer is the historic Democratic party.” In the context of the nascent Cold War, he did so more systematically, using the phrase “Democrat party” to signal that the party was not just no longer itself, but outside of the American mainstream and potentially subversive. “The radicals who have stolen the Democrat party,” he charged, act as if they are “working for Moscow.”
Red-baiting was an early version of “owning the libs.” Glickman offers much more history, including that at the time Reece fancied the Republican Party the champion of liberalism from which he believed his opponents had strayed.
But if the goal is to suggest the left-leaning party is not really democratic, “why not say ‘un-Democratic’ or ‘anti-Democratic,’ in kinship with a technique that Trump, who has referred to the House ‘Unselect Committee‘ and the ‘Department of Injustice,’ has so often employed?” Glickman asks.
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that many critics of the New Deal were also critics of democracy. For example, in 1939, H. W. Prentis of the National Association of Manufacturers made the argument that “too much Democracy” was the “greatest ‘pitfall’ facing the American republic.” Later echoed by the John Birch Society, this argument continues to be an article of faith among the modern right: The United States, it is insisted, is a Republic, not a democracy. This may be why, while highlighting and critiquing the anti-democratic tendencies within the Democratic Party, Reece, the original pioneer of the “Democrat party” slur, chose to do so by celebrating liberalism, not democracy.
Today’s MAGA Republicans have no use for either.