Essay: POLITICS AND THE NAME GAME

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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?