“Democrat” is not an adjective

First, a quick lesson in correct usage.

In the United States of America, we have two main political parties: the Republican and the Democratic parties. We have associated adjectives to refer to members of the parties: a Republican member of Congress, a Democratic mayor, etc. Note the capitalization.

We also have nouns for these creatures: The congressperson is a Republican; the mayor is a Democrat.

That’s all there is to it. The awkward lack of symmetry is a consequence of our history; like everything to do with language, we’re stuck with it, but usage evolves, and the names for parties and their members are likely to be different in another hundred years, if we have managed to keep our republic.

But something has changed recently on a much faster timescale: we now sometimes hear people say, and even see people write, such things as “the Democrat senator”. What’s that about?

It is no coincidence that this nonstandard usage is without exception committed by those who align themselves with factions hostile to the Democrats. It is, in fact, a kind of crude, semi-literate, partisan jibe. I believe it’s motivated, in most cases subconsciously, by the desire to avoid sounding as if one is praising the Democrat under discussion. For saying “the Democratic senator” sounds just like saying “the democratic senator”, which has a distinct meaning in writing, but is pronounced the same aloud.

The problem is that “democratic” (lower case) is a compliment in the context of U.S. political culture. We admire democratic principles, the democratic process, and so on. The hack writing “the Democrat senator” wants us to think of the senator as a demagogue, not as democratic.

I noticed web pioneer Philip Greenspun using “Democrat economists” in the title of a recent entry. Curious to know how he would explain himself, I prodded him in the comments. His reply invokes the uppercase-lowercase problem mentioned above, and seems to plead that he merely desires to resolve a linguistic ambiguity.

Is he being sincere or disingenuous? He amuses himself almost daily on his website with teasing the woke using a kind of facile mock-disingenuousness, and this would be comfortably in line with that strain of tiresome political humor.

In other words, he all but admits to being a massive troll on his site and on Facebook. In this instance I’m happy to take the bait in order to point out that it’s a fatal blunder for any writer to use “Democrat” as an adjective either in a misguided attempt at linguistic regularization or in the mistaken belief that this is some form of stylish political discourse.

Greenspun doesn’t have to care what anyone thinks of him, as he long ago used his talent to become independently wealthy (and I do in fact enjoy some of what appears on his site—and, for the record, I think most of Greenspun’s targets deserve his scorn, and I have thorough contempt for both political parties). But if you, scribbling from a less lofty position, fall into this usage, you have forgotten that your choice of language, however it may be motivated, says something about you. In this case it marks you as a sneering, useless, partisan hack who should be ignored.