Weaponizing Words: The GOP’s Plot To Undermine Democrats & Democracy
Have you noticed how elected Republicans and hate-radio and -TV hosts are so committed to mispronouncing Vice President Kamala Harris’ name? Or how incapable they are of saying “Democratic Party”?
These are symptoms of a political party that’s devolved into a pathetic (but deadly) mobocracy, lacking any moral or policy core, devoted instead to pursuing the singular goal of obtaining, holding, and wielding great wealth and ultimate, unchecked power.
Way back in the spring of 1956, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke to a group of Republican women about the need for the GOP to remain “soundly based” in “moral” values.
Eisenhower was the last Republican president who didn’t either commit or knowingly benefit from treason to attain the White House; as the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in World War II, he was both a warrior and a deeply moral and spiritual man, at least in the context of his time.
Without realizing he was describing the future Republican Party that his own vice president, Richard Nixon, would create starting with Nixon’s criminally sabotaging LBJ’s Vietnam peace efforts in 1968, Eisenhower was blunt:
“[I]f a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.”
Which is where the GOP is today: it’s all about money and power, and to hell with democracy, average working people, and America’s children. Instead of discussing ways to improve our country, they’ve devolved into a bizarre cult of sloganeering and name-calling, openly embracing a violent, racist form of American fascism, while outsourcing policy to a think tank funded by the morbidly rich.
South Carolina’s notoriously racist Republican Representative Nancy Mace, for example, was repeatedly corrected on CNN when she insisted on intentionally mispronouncing the Vice President’s name; Mace finally snapped back, “I will say Kamala's name any way that I want to!”
This is not an anomaly: there’s an amazing history here that’s worth knowing.
Thomas Jefferson named America’s second (after the Federalists) political party the “Democratic Republicans” back in the day; the “Republicans” part was dropped in the 1820s and it became simply the Democratic Party. Today it’s the oldest continuous political party in the history of the world.
And yet its hard to find a Republican politician, commentator, or spokesperson who doesn’t call it the “Democrat Party.”
This is an intentional slur, just like mispronouncing Vice President Harris’ name. And America’s media should stop routinely tolerating or even ignoring either.
While it predates him, the “Democrat Party” scurrility became common usage under Wisconsin Republican Senator Joe McCarthy.
The senator was a drunk, a political opportunist, and was generally regarded by his peers as a pompous ass. He and his right-hand man, Roy Cohn (lawyer to the Mafia and the Trump family), were both sadistic sociopaths who delighted in cruelly slandering and destroying the lives and careers of their political enemies — as well as totally innocent people who simply got in the way of their ambitions.
And he sure knew how to use and manipulate the media to advance his bigoted and hateful views. During the mid-1950s, McCarthy led a nationwide witch-hunt, looking for communists and gay men under every bed, in every company, and in every government agency in America.
He warned us that the Army and the State Department were filled with communists and gays, claiming to carry with him a list of “205 communists” who had infiltrated the government. (He had no such list; it was a blank piece of paper, but the prop more than served its purpose.)
His attacks on gay men were even more virulent than his attacks on suspected communists, which is particularly ironic given that his partner in crime, Roy Cohn, was himself gay and would die of AIDS.
It was eventually help from members of his own party that brought McCarthy down with a 67-22 censure vote on December 2, 1954, for “conduct contrary to Senate traditions”; he died of his alcoholism shortly thereafter.
But while he held the nation’s spotlight, reveling in destroying the lives and careers of people just to increase his own fame and power, the country was torn apart by his crusades.
McCarthy went after gay men as aggressively as he did suspected communists. When Wyoming’s Democratic Senator Lester Hunt’s son, Lester Jr., was arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover policeman, two Republican senators blackmailed Senator Hunt, threatening to reveal the arrest if he didn’t drop out of the upcoming 1954 election so their Republican candidate could replace him (the GOP controlled the senate by 2 votes that year).
McCarthy eagerly inserted himself into the blackmail scheme, only this time taking it public, falsely telling the press that an “unnamed senator” was trying to bribe a police officer to not name his own homosexuality.
Senator Hunt got the message and carried a .22 rifle into his Senate office chambers that week, shooting himself in the head. (This was the event that led to McCarthy’s censure.)
Nonetheless, McCarthy persisted and even amped up his crusade against gay men in all fields. Over 5,000 government employees were fired for suspected homosexuality, as violence against gay men exploded across the nation during the 1950s.
Throughout this time, McCarthy — in an eerie prescience suggesting today’s conspiracy theories about Democrats drinking children’s blood or Haitian immigrants eating pets — argued that the central nexus of the “homosexual agenda” and the “communist sympathizers” was the “Democrat Party.”
Throughout his hearings, carried on live television every day for almost two months, McCarthy refused to use the actual name of the party and its members he was slandering.
Instead, he argued, “Democratic” sounded too nice, too, well, democratic. McCarthy is sometimes quoted (it may be apocryphal) as saying, in Newt Gingrich Word List fashion, that Republicans should instead always say, “Democrat Party, with the emphasis on the ‘rat’!”
Every day, on national TV, radio, and quoted in the newspapers, McCarthy, Cohn, and their colleagues delighted in slandering the “Democrat Party” and its “pinko, sicko sympathizers” and members. It became so common that The New York Times even occasionally referred to the nonexistent “Democrat Party.”
As language scholar Ignace Feuerlicht wrote in 1957 in the Journal of the American Dialect Society:
“It will be interesting to see whether ‘Democrat Party’ will stay with us or go out of existence again or be revived and revitalized at intervals just before successive national elections.”
In fact, the slur has persisted. Mitch McConnell refers to the “Democrat Party” from the well of the Senate. Random Republicans repeat the slur on television more frequently than they use the actual name of the party. Conservative media use it almost exclusively to describe the Democratic Party.
While outrage over the distortion and slander of the name of one of the world’s great political parties and its presidential nominee is justified, a larger issue should concern us all.
When a political party has so departed from normal political dialogue that its senior-most members casually insult, misname, and defame their opposition, that party has lost its claim to political legitimacy.
This is no small matter, and every time a TV host or reporter lets either of these slurs slide it digs the knife deeper into the back of our nation’s body politic.
There was a time when our media would ignore or even quote politicians casually using the N-word to describe Black people, the B-word to describe women, and various racial slang to describe Hispanics, Japanese, Italians, and Poles. That time, thankfully, is now past.
Hopefully this “Democrat Party” slur — and the intentional mispronunciation of Vice President Harris’ name — will soon follow the same path to oblivion, and our media will lead the way in calling Republicans out when they persist.
Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author 34 books in 17 languages & nation's #1 progressive radio host. Psychotherapist, international relief worker. Politics, history, spirituality, psychology, science, anthropology, pre-history, culture, and the natural world.