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…