Words against Words

August 3, 1964

Barry Goldwater made a tactical blunder in his acceptance speech, but it is not difficult to see how he fell into it. His opponents, both in the Democratic and the Republican parties, have been calling him and his supporters “extremists,” and calling themselves—especially those that represented the extreme left wing of the Republican Party—“moderates.” Goldwater, in an unthinking moment, accepted these labels and tried to turn them against his opponents: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice . . . [and] moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” The storm broke; and Rockefeller revenged his defeat by instantly finding these words “dangerous, irresponsible, and frightening.”

Now “extremist” and “moderate” are both rhetorical labels, and Goldwater would have been justified in pointing out that the former is not necessarily synonymous with evil or the latter with good. Is it necessarily wrong to be extremely honest or extremely fair? Is it necessarily praiseworthy to be only a moderate liar or a moderate embezzler?

THE ART OF POLITICS

But linguistic analysis does not pay off politically. Politics is conducted with emotionally loaded catchwords. The trick is to apply the approbatory ones to your own side and the derogatory ones to your opponents. Thus the “liberals” are having a field day with “extremist” and “moderate.” A columnist on an outstanding newspaper, for example, solemnly praises Mr. Johnson’s $8.3 billion deficit for 1964 and his planned future deficits as “moderate” fiscal policy, and dismisses the advocates of balanced budgets as “extremists”!

Goldwater’s appropriate response would have been to repudiate the label of “extremist” as applied to his own position and “moderate” as conferred by his opponents on themselves, and insist that his position is the moderate one and theirs the extreme one.

The art of politics consists in large part in taking over for oneself any label that has acquired prestige and pinning disparaging labels on one’s opponents. This sometimes results in a reversal of traditional labels, and as words are the counters of thought, it has deeply confused and perverted political and economic thinking. In the United States today, for example, the word “liberal” has been torn from its original meaning and designates exactly the opposite of what it meant in nineteenth-century France and England and still means on the European continent.

TRUE LIBERALISM

The true liberal tradition is the tradition founded and developed by such figures as Hume, Adam Smith, Jefferson, de Tocqueville, Cobden, Mill, Macaulay, Gladstone, and Lord Acton. They stood for limited government, decentralization, checks and balances; freedom of trade, production, and markets; low taxes with low spending and balanced budgets; the integrity of the currency, and non-inflation. They were against excessive government intervention; against statism and paternalism; against the piling up of new laws, compulsions, prohibitions. In brief, they believed in personal liberty. Liberal and liberty come from the same root.

When the statists and paternalists appropriated the word “liberal” for themselves, the original liberals allowed them to do it, and so were forced to call themselves first “libertarians” and then “conservatives.”

Years earlier, they allowed Karl Marx to pull a similar trick on them. About six years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and his followers coined the smear word “capitalism” to convey the implication that the system of free markets, private property, and economic liberty was a system imposed on the world by the capitalists and for the capitalists. That implication still sticks to the word. It explains why defenses of “capitalism” under that name are infrequent and apologetic.

The battle of catchwords is unlikely to be abandoned in our time, let alone in the present campaign. But we are more likely to reach sensible solutions of our problems by using words in their traditional descriptive sense, rather than emotively as weapons. Is it too much to hope that at least the leaders in the coming debate will recognize this?