The Defanging of a Radical Epithet

[MaverickX]

Take "leftist." As a pair with "rightist," it had a long history as a purely descriptive term before the McCarthyites adopted it as a label for Communist sympathizers and subversive organizations.

Just before the 1952 election, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy accused Adlai Stevenson of being unfit for the presidency because of his association with "leftists" like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who had defended the right of Communists to teach in universities. (Schlesinger had qualified his position by adding, "so long as they do not disqualify themselves by intellectual distortions in the classroom," a clause McCarthy ignored.)

That same year, Americans for Democratic Action indignantly denied charges that it was a leftist group, pointing out that it had worked at "purging the American liberal movement of individuals with loyalties to Communism."


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/weekinreview/17NUNB.html?pagewanted=1

[PATRICK]

1. Gingrich was not the first

nor Safire to wage the semantics war to install conservative thinkspeak.
In the Mccarthy era terms from World War Two that depicted collaborationists or fifth columnists were freely used to tar "leftists" with no turnaround back against the malignant sources of the terms. When googling trying to find out what happenend to American "Quislings" or "fifth columnists" I waded through endless streams of postwar invective against suspected Communists.

This is what you get for not going after traitorous industries, right wing elite fans of Hitler, and Nazi supporters and for importing useful fascists into America. Suddenly a complete twist makes them(as the Germans had desperately tried so hard to do during the war) part of the holy crusade against Communism. The bitter dying squeaks of rats in the bunker became the shrill reamplified mainstay of the GOP.

No one was able to accurately point out how part of Hitler's agenda was being carried out so enthusiastically by the West that history was dumped upsidedown by thuggery, intimidation, subversion(another swiftly appropriated word) and bullied over to the right- again.

So much for victory over fascism and totalitarianism and corporate coups. Thanks to Hitler's ideological opposite but pragmatic twin Joseph Stalin. Thanks to reasonable Democrats fearfully trying to hold onto their restive Southern base- and losing it.

And after all these past few years, stepping grinning out of its own rotten tar pit of malicious failure and destruction no one dares call the 'right" for what it is. The most deadly "wrong" that people never did and never will freely want, in real life more unpopular than ever.

[vixengrl]

2. The dreaded "L-word".

I think it was when Reagan referred to "liberal" as the "L-word" that the thing got hammered home to me. It was like, being a no-good "s-word" or a dumb "f-word". You don't have to use an initial unless the word you're invoking is Very Bad Indeed. It should mean something like "generous, open-minded, free-thinking" or perhaps any number of admirable things, and yet it has beome an epithet meaning "Commie" (a.k.a.--enemy) Pinko (not Red, wimpy-red, also, potentially effeminate), egghead intelligensia (please somebody tell me why it's wrong to be intellectual?) and so on.

It seems to have it's genesis when we switched from "Oh hot-damn we hate them Fascists" to "Oh them stinking Commies." We recruited fine German scientists and agents in Operation Paperclip and entered into the Cold War with the Soviets--our WW II allies. Ann Coulter right this minute tries to remind us of how pernicious the influence of the Communists were in our very Government...rife with card-carrying Commies...

Or maybe, the threat was over and done after the Depression, anyway. That the Commie influence had been a side effect of poverty, and that once things returned to normal in this country, all we wanted was to get to having houses in the suburbs, kids and the American dream and what-not. Liberals included. And maybe the majority wanted civil rights for everyone and fair wages and poor people to have a decent life, and that's why we signed on for Kennedy and Johnson. It seems to me that the ideals of Americans would naturally be liberal (pro-Constitution, pro-Everyman) if they weren't told they shouldn't be. The Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence is our rightful heritage, not the god-awful Patriot Act--which affects all Americans generally, terrorist-prone or no.

I suppose the way to play the "word game" is to go, "Well, we're Progressives...they way some Republicans used to be." And slowly reclaim the word "Liberal" for what it should be. A philosophy of well-considered political optimism in the ability of government to bring out the best in people. To solve problems. To bring people together in community. (What Democracy could and should be.) And not a dirty word.