Month: March 2023

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.

Raskin to Boebert: Democrat is the noun. When you use it as an adjective, you say Democratic.. As if every time we mentioned the other party it just came out with a kind of political speech impediment like, oh, the Banana Republican Party. pic.twitter.com/eSVfqzeZqN

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 28, 2023

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 19^th 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.

It’s a silent COVID spring

Fewer people at my grocery stores are wearing masks of any kind these days. The widely debated Cochrane review on masks made its brief ripple and faded. Except for the Chinese lab theory, the right largely has moved on to another set of culture war rants.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene would rather blather about fentanyl. And the 2020 election? Greene should be on a license plate.

Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke has moved on to … you know.

But COVID has not moved on, writes Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic. It has just gotten quieter. It’s still adapting:

Three years later, the coronavirus is still silently spreading—but the fear of its covertness again seems gone. Enthusiasm for masking and testing has plummeted; isolation recommendations have been pared down, and may soon entirely disappear. “We’re just not communicating about asymptomatic transmission anymore,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. “People think, What’s the point? I feel fine.”

Although the concern over asymptomatic spread has dissipated, the threat itself has not. And even as our worries over the virus continue to shrink and be shunted aside, the virus—and the way it moves between us—is continuing to change. Which means that our best ideas for stopping its spread aren’t just getting forgotten; they’re going obsolete.

Meagan Fitzpatrick, an infectious-disease transmission modeler at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, tells Wu that symptomless spread likely accounted for 50 percent of transmission. But after rounds of vaccinations, symptomless spread may be less prevalent, Wu explains:

One possible reason is that symptoms are now igniting sooner in people’s bodies, just three or so days, on average, after infection—a shift that roughly coincided with the rise of the first Omicron variant and could be a quirk of the virus itself. But Aubree Gordon, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that faster-arriving sicknesses are probably being driven in part by speedier immune responses, primed by past exposures. That means that illness might now coincide with or even precede the peak of contagiousness, shortening the average period in which people spread the virus before they feel sick.

So, good news. And the bad?

That said, a lot of people are still undoubtedly catching the coronavirus from people who aren’t feeling sick. Infection per infection, the risk of superspreading events might now be lower, but at the same time people have gotten chiller about socializing without masks and testing before gathering in groups—a behavioral change that’s bound to counteract at least some of the forward shift in symptoms. Presymptomatic spread might be less likely nowadays, but it’s nowhere near gone. Multiply a small amount of presymptomatic spread by a large number of cases, and that can still seed … another large number of cases.

Plus, people are much less cautious, if supermarket and public event observations are any indicator. People not testing themselves before gathering in groups and fewer wearing masks provides an opening for more asymptomatic spreading the virus at the same time that it’s less likely to spread asymptomatically. So perhaps a wash, says Fitzpatrick.

Meanwhile, people are just straight-up testing less, and rarely reporting any of the results they get at home. For many months now, even some people who are testing have been seeing strings of negative results days into bona-fide cases of COVID—sometimes a week or more past when their symptoms start. That’s troubling on two counts: First, some legit COVID cases are probably getting missed, and keeping people from accessing test-dependent treatments such as Paxlovid. Second, the disparity muddles the start and end of isolation. Per CDC guidelines, people who don’t test positive until a few days into their illness should still count their first day of symptoms as Day 0 of isolation. But if symptoms might sometimes outpace contagiousness, “I think those positive tests should restart the isolation clock,” Popescu told me, or risk releasing people back into society too soon.

A friend who avoided a family reunion in Wisconsin last year told me Tuesday that it turned into a super-spreader event; one fully vaccinated relation got seriously ill but recovered. At an aunt’s funeral in Chicago last summer, too many maskless people stood way too close for comfort. I nevertheless dodged the virus until Jan.1, eight days beyond the family Christmas gathering where no one else got sick.

Hundreds of Americans per day are still dying from this beastie and tens of thousands infected. Just because it’s not front-page news doesn’t mean it’s still not out there. You may have forgotten COVID. It hasn’t forgotten you.