Political Names

Political names commonly reflect the status quo and its assumptions, labels being frequently given to extremists for or against the established order. Their emotive quality depends on the degree of perceived threat that the party constitutes. Thus communist was, and continues to be, a political swearword in the United States, just as capitalist previously had the same emotive function in communist rhetoric, together with bourgeois and proletariat . In European political discourse, by contrast, all these terms are less contentious. Furthermore, crises have the semantic effect of generating labels for the contestants. These are often inflamma- tory and commonly follow one of two semantic routes: that of weakening and loss of intensity, alternatively that of obsolescence.

At the time of the English Civil War (1641–1642), the Royalists were termed the Cavaliers, while those opposing the king were called Roundheads. Although cavalier had been in the language since about 1470 in the sense of a horseman, the application to the supporters of Charles I arose promptly at the beginning of the war in 1641. (The term was later charmingly defined by Dr. Johnson ¹⁷⁵⁵ as “a gay sprightly military man.”) Roundhead , on the other hand, was a new term, also coined in 1641, alluding ironically to the small and limited compass of their minds. This stereotype of attributing a lack of intelligence to supporters of “the other side” is typical. (Francis Grose suggested in his slang dictionary ¹⁷⁸⁵ that the name mocked the Puritan hairstyle, since they were said “the make use of a bowl as a guide to trim their hair,” whereas the Royalists typically wore long hair.) Both names are now historical and obsolete.

Similarly, Whig and Tory sprang into being as political labels during the constitutional crisis in 1679–1680 over whether James Duke of York, a Roman Catholic, should be allowed to ascend the throne of Protestant England. Both were denigrating nicknames, Tories (ca. 1646) originally referring to dispossessed Irish outlaws, robbers, or bandits, and Whigs (ca. 1646) to Scottish yokels. They remained the nicknames of the two major English political parties for centuries, the Tories being the party supporting the traditional balance of authority between Crown and the Church, the Whigs being more in favor of reforming the established order. Whig has now been obsolete for over a century, having been superseded by Labour in 1900; Tory is still in use, but as a stigmatic term meaning an ultra Conservative. ( Conservative itself was coined ca. 1835.) The political use of Right and Left derives from the disposition of the parties in the French National Assembly about 1789. Radical , now an acceptable term in most circles, was a highly emotive label, almost an insult two centuries ago, when the idea of a major change in the political dispensation was unpopular. Sir Walter Scott wrote in a letter of October 16, 1819: “Radical is a word in very bad odour here, being used to denote a set of blackguards.” The term became so inflammatory that it was euphemized to r-d-c-l .

With the political upheavals in Europe in the nineteenth century, the term revolutionary became a powerful political label, but the Reign of Terror in France (1789–1794) gave rise to a far more terrible coinage. Edmund Burke wrote memorably in 1795: “Thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists … are let loose on the people” ( Letters on Proposals for Peace with the Regicides of France iv, Works IX, 75). Since that time both terrorist and terrorism (coined in the same year) have become regrettably commonplace. The power of the terms is attested to by such euphemisms as freedom fighter (from 1942). More surprising is the stigmatic use of the same term from differing standpoints as the political status quo changes. Thus in apartheid South Africa liberal was used by the ruling conservatives to mean “radical” and “revolutionary”; in the more socialist ambiance since 1994, liberal has become equated with “conservative.”

Many political names are eponymous—that is, derived from individuals—usually of an extremist kind, and flagged by the suffixes – ist or – ite . Probably the earliest is found in the condemning phrase “pestilent Machiavellian policie,” used by Robert Greene in A Groatsworth of Wit (1592) to mean “cynical, agnostic and opportunist.” Although this is a travesty of Machiavelli’s philosophy, the derogatory associations have remained. ( Politician was itself originally a highly critical term, meaning an unprincipled schemer: in Shakespeare the two most common adjectives qualifying it are vile and scurvy .) Less well known is Chauvinist , from Nicolas Chauvin, whose idolatory of Napoleon and French military glory was caricatured in a play in 1831. Chauvinist is recorded ca. 1870 in the general sense of an extreme patriot, then fell into disuse before being revived in feminist rhetoric in the emotive slogan male chauvinist pig ca. 1970, which has driven out the original political sense. Most eponymous labels have simpler histories, such as Marxist (1889>), Trotskyite (1919>), Stalinist (1928>), McCarthyism (1950>), Maoist (1964>), and Thatcherite (1979>). Many are used in a highly emotive and imprecise fashion: anarchist is recorded from the seventeenth century before becoming a political catchword from the 1860s. A recent revival has been fascist , originally borrowed into English about 1921 in relation to Benito Mussolini’s movement in Italy, but increasingly used to mean rigid, authoritarian, or doctrinaire. Similar formations stigmatizing politically abhorrent attitudes are racist (from ca. 1932) and sexist (from ca. 1965). We tend to regard such labels as modern, but one writer known as “Hercalio Democritus” anticipated such uses with sophisticated irony in 1680, the year of the Exclusion Crisis in England: “He was the great Hieroglyphic of Jesuitism, Puritanism, Quaqersism [sic], and of the Isms from Schism” ( The Vision of Purgatory , 46).

While most swearing and foul language are spontaneous, in recent decades political pressure groups have realized the value of both modes as a highly effective method of expressing outrage and as a shock tactic to attract publicity. One consequence of the protests in the United States against the Vietnam War was the politicization of foul language, notably by radical students at Berkeley, California. What started out as the Free Speech Movement was stigmatized as the so-called Filthy Speech Movement as a consequence of mobilizing the use of obscenities in slogans as a form of protest. The two most favored were “FUCK THE DRAFT” and “KILL THE PIGS.” The first led to a significant trial, Cohen v. California (403 US. 15, 25, 1971), while the second was used against both the police and political opponents: the “alternative” newspaper The Black Panther of November 14, 1970, carried the galvanizing front-page headline: “DEATH TO THE FASCIST PIGS/SHOOT TO KILL.” Radical feminist groups similarly chose provocative acronyms such as SCUM (Society for Cutting up Men), founded 1967 by Valerie Solanis, and WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), which, according to its manifesto, “was born on Halloween 1968.” The founding documents of both groups are to be found in the collection Sisterhood is Powerful , edited by Robin Morgan (1970).

One of the unexpected provocations leading to the tragic shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, was the filth of the personal abuse inflicted on the National Guard by young women students. Even more radical is the poem “TCB” (1970) by Sonia Sanchez consisting of three-line verses using “incremental repetition”:

wite/motha/fucka
wite/motha/fucka
wite/motha/fucka
   whitey

The burden is repeated six times, the only significant variation being in the sequence of insults, whitey being replaced by other terms of demotic insult—namely ofay, devil, cracker , and honky . The catalogue of abuse ends with an apparent call for collaboration: “Now. That it’s all sed / let’s get to work.”

The loose emotive exploitation of political labels is sharply shown in a report in the Guardian (April 26, 2004) covering the visit of the right-wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the Front National, to a British sister organization, the British National Party (B.N.P.). Mr. Alex Jones of the Merseyside Coalition Against Racism and Fascism reportedly referred to the B.N.P. as “Nazi scum” and shouted “Fascist!” “Communist!” retorted the B.N.P. “In a flurry of ‘screw-you’ gestures, everyone fled to their cars.”