My first hate email

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I have finally received my very first hate mail from some undereducated conservative who declared that "Your a socialist idiot. Your site sucks." I'm positively tickled that one of the more erudite and articulate took the time to send me the very best, especially on a day when I really needed a good giggle. So here's a shout out to Benboul@aol.com. May it bring him all the offers for viagra and nude teen girls he can handle in a glorious shower of inbox capitalism. Also, I might point out for the Americans who don't seem to understand the definition of socialism that Finland isn't a socialist country nor is wanting a good education and affordable healthcare for all citizens socialist, not to mention it would be a better long-term investment than all the oil in Iraq. Well, at least if you aren't in the oil industry.

It does amuse me that somehow being a real moderate interested in what used to be traditional family values of educating children and proper medical care earns me the label of 'socialist'. It reminds me of a brilliant essay in the book, Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversial Times, which I read recently that explores the new usage of labels from the McCarthy era. Since it's such a timely topic and the essay is so interesting, I'll quote heavily from it as it's a tightly written piece and encourage anyone who is interested in how words shape the news and views of readers everywhere to purchase a copy.

"Where the Left Commences."

[...]

Leftist was not a word to be used lightly, even by the right. In a 1954 editorial, the Wall Street Journal worried that McCarthy's "slam-bang denunciations of ... 'leftist' influence" were making him a "depreciating asset" to the Republican Party, with the quotation marks around "leftist" hold the word at arm's length.

By all linguistic rights, the leftist label should have disappeared from the lexicon as McCarthyism faded, and as labels like communistic, fellow traveler and Communist sympathizer (or comsymp for short) were going the way of the poodle skirt. But leftist lingered, shifting its reference to antiwar demonstrators. Only after the Vietnam War did the word begin to decline as an epithet, though it was still routinely used in foreign news reports.

Then, in the late 1990s, leftist underwent a sudden revival. The word is 50 percent more frequent in major newspapers and magazines now than it was five years ago, with almost all the increase a result of its use as a label for domestic groups and individuals. Apart from the odd reference to Angela Davis or the Spartacist League, leftist nowadays is almost never used for old-style radicals or Marxists. In fact it was the eclipse of the movement left and the fall of Communism that freed the word to serve as a phantom finger that the right could wave in the culture wars.

[...]

It's getting hard to tell leftists and liberals apart without an agenda. Hence the increasing popularity of liberal-leftist, which merges categories on the model of compounds like toaster-oven and owner-occupier. (Linguists call those compounds "dvandvas," a term invented by the Sanskrit grammarians.) Peggy Noonan has use the double-l word to describe abortion-rights groups, and during Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate race, the conservative commentator John Podhoretz described her as "running as an unapologetic liberal-leftist."

But liberal Democrats never describe themselves as leftists, not even apologetically. (For that matter, there are many who are willing to describe themselves as liberals, either.) That's the fundamental asymmetry of the left-right distinction in American politics. Historically, the left commences where liberalism ends. But conservatives have never demurred from placing themselves on the right, letting qualifiers like mainstream and extremist do the work of sorting out the bow-tied Alsopians from the fatigues-wearing abolish-the-I.R.S. crowd. True, many conservatives are uneasy about the label right wing, and though a few call themselves rightists, the world sounds too exotic for most to put it on their business cards. But no one feels the need for a compound like conservative-rightist - there's no distinction to blur in the first place.

The new uses of leftist exploit that asymmetry. They're aimed at nudging the political center to the right, by portraying social liberals as radicals outside the mainstream. That's a risky semantic maneuver. In any tug of war between a label and the things it's attached to, the label ultimately loses. Sometimes it's simply diluted to the point of meaninglessness. That happened with the fascist label after the American left began to throw it around indiscriminately in the 1970s, and it may very well be the fate of imperialist now. But the leftist label is less likely to be superannuated than drawn back into the center. Describing the Girl Scouts or Arlen Specter as leftist doesn't demonize them so much as make the epithet itself sound less alarming.

[...]

It is very curious how leftist and socialist have experienced a renaissance in the past five years which would suggest it began around the time of Dumbya's presidential campaign. It really is as though we've entered a new age of McCarthyism. The use of compounds to try and fill a gap in the lexicon is also rather pernicious since you'd normaly expect such bunching of words from children taunting each other on the playground, not political commentators who can't decide if someone is one thing or another so they just shove two words together with a hyphen thinking they're accurate but wind up making both meaningless and less insulting. Yow! Have I strayed from the flock, the mainstream, and joined such radicals as the Girl Scouts and their communist cookie campaigns?! If you aren't a bible thumping fundy freak who agrees with everything the president says you must be some sort of extremist freak who hates freedom and America!

It's hard to say what label actually describes my political leanings as I don't know that leftist, liberal, socialist or democrat are very accurate or meaningful. Perhaps this year there needs to be a new label just for the folks like me who tend to vote on the issues rather than the personalities and war records of the candidates, and who feel like something is terribly wrong that Dumbya and the entire cabinet haven't been impeached for lying and even admitting that they lied to get the US to go to war. How about right-left-moderate-cynics?