POLITICS AND THE NAME GAME

By Max Ways

WHEN I use a word," declared that famed semanticist, Humpty Dumpty, "it means just what I choose it to mean." He mitigated this tyrannical attitude by explaining that when he made a word do a lot of work, he always paid it extra. Spiro Agnew, who also has a highhanded way with words, owes a great deal of overtime pay to the phrase "radical liberal." As he employs the phrase, upon which he has turned his vigorous intervention in the current congressional campaign, radical liberal seems to be an elastic blanket covering a huge bed, strangely cohabited by "the northeastern Establishment," the more inflamed students and the militant blacks. The term radical liberal is bitterly resented by many as an effort to smear liberalism with the unpopular tar of radicalism. Other Agnew critics ridicule his concoction as a monstrous juncture of utterly incompatible political types. Both the resentment and the ridicule are essentially justified.

One must grant, of course, that the words radical and liberal have been joined before in history. In the first half of the 19th century, the word liberal entered the British political vocabulary, having originated--amazingly --in Spain. (One does not wish to appear a snob, effete or otherwise, in these matters, but Spain hardly seems a proper background for a word destined to play so large a role in the public life of the democracies.) This immigrant word, liberal, found the term radical already flourishing in British politics. For a couple of decades, liberal and radical were used interchangeably by members of a large Whig faction to describe themselves. Those radical/liberals of the 1840s, of course, have precious little to do with either the radicals or the liberals of 1970, and the old connection can hardly explain the Vice President's phrase.

In more recent times there has been commerce--some bad, some good--between radicals and liberals. A generation ago, some liberals allowed themselves to be used as fronts for Stalinists, who at the time were regarded (and regarded themselves) as radicals, a notion that seems quaint today, when the remaining Stalinists are usually referred to as "conservative Communists." It is also true that American liberals over the years have picked up many a successful idea from self-proclaimed radicals, notably from the Socialist Party platform of 1912.

But it would be unwise to push this fact too far. Except in France, where political philosophies tended to turn inward, most political movements of the past 150 years have been highly exogamous, often finding in partibus infidelium new ideas with which to mate. For many years, liberals have been in favor of expanding and improving social security; would it make sense to refer to them as "Junker liberals" merely because the first social security system was instituted in the regime of Otto von Bismarck?

Agnew's radical liberal has no better credentials. Whatever the historical mutations of the two terms and despite the present vagueness of each, in current usage they do signify two quite different positions. Liberals think they have saved this and other societies from radicals, a claim that is neither wholly provable nor wholly refutable. The typical radical regards the liberal as a fink--a delicate and obsolete epithet that has been replaced in the radical vocabulary by a popular twelve-letter word. Today's liberal thinks today's society is worth mending and uses constitutional means to that end. Today's radical thinks today's society should be junked and cares little about what means he uses. This difference, among others, is more important than what radicals and liberals have in common: a tendency, for instance, to deplore Spiro Agnew--an impulse that has incited people who are neither radicals nor liberals.

To be fair, Agnew did not invent the guilt-by-verbal-association form of terminological confusion. Some years ago, the phrase "radical conservative" was used in both liberal and radical circles. This horrid hybrid, radical conservative, every bit as monstrous as radical liberal, was supposed to describe activist conservatives, such as members of the John Birch society, who were inclined to ideologize their principles and who exhibited some stylistic similarities to leftist radicals. People have called themselves "radical conservatives," meaning that their conservatism was fundamental and thoroughgoing. Similarly, a man might --though few, if any, have done so in recent years--call himself a radical liberal. But when radical conservative issues from the mouth of an opponent, it may be suspected as an effort to associate a conservative with Fascists or Nazis, just as radical liberal, coming from an opponent, may be suspected as an effort to associate liberals with Communists.

Such nasty little games would not go on if we had any way of keeping our political lexicon up to date. Not merely the hybrids, but elemental political terms such as conservative, liberal, radical, progressive, are wildly misleading as descriptions of the actual positions, motivations and attitudes of most of the people to whom they refer.

A progressive, for instance, seems to suggest someone in favor of change; but most Americans called progressive have been distinguished by their opposition to the business system, which has introduced 90% of the enormous progress (or at least change) that has appeared in 20th century America. Obversely, a number of businessmen, while transforming the society by automobiles, advertising, computers and urbanization, refer to themselves as conservatives, a term suggesting opposition to change. Almost any so-called radical utterance these days will contain an explicit or implicit rejection of the mainstream of change during the past 150 years, together with a longing for a future society conceived as a static Elysium. As for the modern liberal position, it has been more noted for restraining (sometimes wisely, sometimes foolishly) the forces of change than for stimulating or liberating them.

They order these matters better in the natural sciences. Chemistry would not have improved much since Lavoisier's youth if chemists were still loosely calling all combustible materials phlogiston. The word oxygen means what it means, and neither Humpty Dumpty nor Spiro Agnew can alter that. New things--or newly discovered things --need new names. When a new microorganism swims into the biologist's ken, he does not reach back into folklore and call it a "small dragon"; he quarries the lexicon of a very dead language and concocts, say, "staphylococcus," a word never known before on land or sea, and therefore relatively free of confusing associations. (It is true that staphylo means "bunch of grapes," but since hardly anyone knows this, there is minimal danger that people will be misled into thinking an infection is caused by a bunch of grapes.) Many outsiders complain that scientists invent inaccessible jargons; but better a difficult language conveying precise meanings than "plain English" that misleads by using old names for new things.

The most inflexible institution of American life today is not the bureaucracy, not "the power structure," not "the Establishment," all of which are, in fact, powerhouses of change. The most inflexible institution is the dictionary. Particularly in politics we are caught between the very rapid movement of the objective world and the relatively slow evolution of words and ideas used to describe what is going on. In the anxious discussion of today's youth culture, we clobber one another with anachronistic adjectives like permissive and repressive, which have no important objective referents in today's U.S. political scene. Our broadest terms--left, right and center--derive from the seating arrangement of the French Assembly in 1789; the terms made sense then, but do they now, when an extreme leftist on one set of issues may be a rightist or a centrist on another set (as, for instance, in the conflict over big v. little government) and when the whole content of leftism and rightism shifts drastically from decade to decade? Much of the currency of our discussion (slavery, rebellion, treason) is Confederate money. We are, in short, victims of terminological conservatism.

What, then, are the right words? Easy to ask; impossible to answer. Should people who are against large organizations be called "minis"? They would not like that. Or should we try for neutral terms, like those of the Blue and Green factions that troubled Byzantium, or like Whig and Tory, whose original connotations have been lost to all but dedicated etymologists?

We have, as matters stand, no name at all for people who think that the accelerating mainstream of American change is both good and also desperately in need of discriminating improvements of a kind that does not flow readily from the liberal, radical or conservative positions. For all anybody can tell, such people might form a majority if they could break out of the enforced anonymity imposed by a political dictionary that provokes unfair, anarchic excrescences such as radical liberal and radical conservative.

The 20th verse of the second chapter of Genesis says that "Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field." Clearly, this indicates that inventing names was to be an important function of his race. Contemporary Adam, confronting the menagerie of his own political attitudes, says: "This one is a gryphon. That one is a unicorn." Or, like Spiro Agnew, he invents hybridized contradictions: "That one is a gryphon unicorn." Lexicographically speaking, this Eden is hell.

Max Ways

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