Shortly after Rep. Paul Ryan closed his vice-presidential acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, the BBC rendered its judgment: “Radical Republican Paul Ryan seeks to extend appeal.”
In assigning Ryan the “r” word, the British broadcaster aligned itself with Chad Stone of U.S. News, who’d written that the congressman envisions “a radical transformation” of popular government programs; Michael Shank on Huffington Post, whose piece warned of “Ryan’s radical economic regime”; and many another pundit.
All of them clashed with Mike Rosen in The Denver Post, who argued, under the headline “Paul Ryan Is No Radical"—that applying such a term to the 42-year-old Wisconsin congressman was “preposterous.” Echoes in that corner of the labeling issue included Jeffrey Brown in Forbes, who saw Ryan’s views as “far less radical than the current policy status quo,” and historian Nick Ottens, whose post on Atlantic Sentinel was headlined, “Paul Ryan’s Budget Plan Is Far From Radical.”
Excuse me, then, but does anyone these days have the faintest idea what it means to be radical, or “a radical,” in American thought and politics?
If we roam back to how earlier Americans thought of “radical,” it becomes clear that the word is freighted with multiple associations, positive and negative, that seem adventitious rather than crucial to its meaning.
FDR made a contribution to the taxonomy of “radical” that many have cited over the years. In a radio address in 1939, he remarked: “A Radical is a man with both feet planted—in the air. A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest—at the command—of his head.”
Knowing what we know now about Roosevelt’s physical condition, those images of feet and legs are poignant. But his foray into definition highlights one key aspect of radicalism that clings to it for some: its lack of practical judgment, its fancifulness, its ineffectiveness in the real world, its inferiority to a more sensible kind of liberal progressivism. Anyone who doubts that this sense remains a part of radicalism, particularly for political activists who work within the American system, can turn to the August 16 issue of The New York Review of Books, in which the excellent Princeton historian Sean Wilentz takes on Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers for complimenting American radicals too much, and American liberals too little.
In a pithier act of classification, another American president emphasized an aspect of radicalism that seems to cut against the charge of ineffectiveness. “By ‘radical,’” declared Woodrow Wilson in a speech in 1911, “I understand one who goes too far; by ‘conservative,’ one who does not go far enough; by ‘reactionary,’ one who won’t go at all.”
In that snippet, we hear the hint of radicalism’s danger, its extremism, its threat to how we want things to be. You don’t have to be president, of course, to reason that if radicalism is extremism, and extremism is bad because it violates Aristotle’s notion that moderation is a virtue, then radicalism is bad. “I never dared be radical when young,” Robert Frost wrote in 1936, “For fear it would make me conservative when old.”
In politics, the extremism that’s most feared, and that most sullies radicalism’s image, is violence—violence as a tool to achieve political ends. The connection has a long lineage; Napoleon famously asserted that “a revolution is an opinion backed by bayonets,” and Mao that revolution “is not a dinner party.” In contrast, resistance to the endless injustices that come with violence in politics has been part of American presidential thinking over time, voiced in JFK’s warning to Latin American diplomats in 1962 that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable"—a thought whose incisiveness chills when we look at another region of the world—the Mideast—today.
In the American context, antipathy to radicalism’s acceptance of violence has been fueled by antipathy to the unattractive bragging about it that sometimes comes as an add-on. To this part of the conceptual universe of American radicalism belongs such famous one-liners as H. Rap Brown’s “Violence is as American as cherry pie,” and Malcolm X’s warning that “a revolution is like a forest fire—it burns everything in its path.” Political radicalism’s overconfident vaunting of violence also accounts for the lasting sting of Tom Wolfe’s epithet “radical chic,” the phrase with which he took down Leonard Bernstein and others in 1970—fairly or not—for supposedly cheerleading the Black Panthers and other so-called radical groups from the safety of their Park Avenue soirees.
Finally, one can perceive one last debilitating feature attached to radicalism by many thinkers over the years, linked to the idea of ineffectiveness, but not identical with it: an odor of mediocrity, of the radical as a loser who has failed to succeed within the system, or, most charitably, the radical as no better than his or her opponents, while possibly quite dangerous. “By gnawing through a dike,” Edmund Burke memorably wrote, “even a rat may drown a nation.”
Negative and even oxymoronic characteristics thus burden radicalism in a political sense: impracticality, ineffectiveness, mediocrity, inclination to violence. And yet its positive associations loom large as well.
One upbeat feature of radicalism has been its ability to get mankind off its duff and on the road to making a better world. “All change in history,” wrote the British historian A.J.P. Taylor, “all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no troublemakers, no dissenters, we should still be living in caves.” From that standpoint, the eternal friction between radicals and, take your pick—reformers, progressives, liberals, meliorists—emerges. Bertolt Brecht sneered that “Little changes are the enemies of big changes.” George Bernard Shaw expressed a kindred thought with a typically sardonic tinge. “Reformers,” he wrote, “have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.”
If change sometimes requires radicalism, it turns out that radicalism often requires another virtue—courage. Frederick Douglass, in My Bondage and My Freedom, gave us an example of courage’s importance in a context that now seems uncontroversial. “He is whipped oftenest,” Douglass wrote in 1855, “who is whipped easiest, and that slave who has the courage to stand up for himself against the overseer, although he may have many hard stripes at the first, becomes, in the end, a freeman, even though he sustain the formal relation of a slave.”
Finally, radicalism often glows because of the company it keeps—its role models, its heroes, its icons. “In the best sense of the word,” wrote the American religious leader Phillips Brooks in his 1883 Sermons Preached in English Churches, “Jesus was a radical. ... His religion has so long been identified with conservatism ... that it is almost startling to remember that all the conservatives of his own time were against him: that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him.”
So we find ourselves with a bold and necessary radicalism, frequently connected to courage and the chosen path of Jesus Christ, that is also sometimes violent, excessive, and ineffective. Is it ultimately so confused a concept that it can be anything to anyone? Is there any unifying element that makes sense of all the criteria of radicalism?
Here, etymology points us forward as it also points us back.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, radicalism derives from the late Latin radicalis, relating to the root, basis, or foundation of something. We still recognize that core sense in how we use “radical” in mathematics to refer to the root of a number or quantity, and the radical sign to indicate the root of the number to which it is prefixed. The same semantics comes through in botany, where something “radical” is of or belonging to the root of a plant (especially a leaf), or in music, where it can relate to the root of a chord.
As “radicalism” metaphorized over the centuries away from a physical “root,” the 17th-century notion of “farreaching” or “thorough” accorded with the idea of looking at something from top to bottom, from back to front, from premises, you might say, to conclusions. Similarly, radicalism’s early 19th-century sense—"characterized by departure from tradition, progressive, unorthodox"—calls for examination of that tradition whole, from root to growth, before rejecting it. It’s no surprise that Karl Marx, in 1844, said that “to be radical is to grasp the root of the matter.”
Just as Emerson observed in his essay, “History,” that “every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind,” every radicalism is best understood as a thoroughgoing willingness to reflect on a matter—from top to bottom, from initial assumptions to final conclusions—in a synoptic, comprehensive, holistic way. It does not require a total rejection of the status quo, of how things are. But it does require a wholesale, all-things-considered assessment of whatever’s under discussion—whether a form of government, a scientific theory, an artistic routine—and a readiness to throw over the whole thing if, according to one’s purposes, it is best to do so. Radicalism is not ultimately what one does as a result of pondering a question, but how one ponders it. It is by reflecting on the roots of something in the broadest way possible that we become radical.
With that insight, “radicalism” across an array of cultural areas becomes less murky. The true radical in politics must be someone who confronts things as they are, reflects upon them comprehensively, and is prepared to go in a wholly different direction. The true radical in science must, like Einstein moving beyond Newton, be able to assess the big picture and imagine one’s way to a better one. The true radical in art, such as Duchamp, or in literature, such as Joyce, or in architecture, such as Loos, or in sexuality, such as Sade, or even Hugh Hefner, does just the same.
If we think about radicalism and the radical that way, a few strange things happen. To be “radical” begins to sound suspiciously like “to be philosophical” in the largest sense—to not take “yes” for an answer until one has thoroughly examined a belief, an ideology, an institution, a policy. That seems no bad thing.
A second upshot is that “radicalism” loses its pejorative sense and becomes descriptive—it’s what people do when they’re totally open-minded, determined to get to the bottom of things. Such usage is much better than employing “radical” in politics as a flat sort of synonym at times for “anarchist” or “terrorist” or “left- or right-wing extremist” on one issue or another. It makes “radical” less of an epithet, and more of an invitation—to see a thinker so dubbed as one as forcing you to pay close attention to his or her whole spectrum of thought.
We have a choice, then, in regard to “radical” and “radicalism.” We can allow its most trench-level, politically tinged concrete meaning to hold sway, thinking of radicals as political activists on the extremes who resist compromises, seek wholesale change, and may endorse violence as an acceptable tool. Or we can nudge radical back toward its root in roots, and appreciate how it metaphorically suggests a big-picture, zero-sum approach to issues that we might call philosophical.
If I had to pick the thinker in America who most deservedly stands as a radical, it would be Peter Singer, the Australian ethicist at Princeton. Whether it is his arguments for why affluent people have a moral duty to donate the majority of their income to help the poor in underdeveloped countries, or why people should boycott factory farming, or why infanticide of newborns with severe birth defects is sometimes acceptable, or why the suffering of animals should be reduced by “liberating” them, to use his term, Singer, more than any thinker who comes to mind, challenges status-quo moral reasoning in a manner reminiscent of the great 19th-century radicals who battled slavery and unequal treatment of women.
To say that is not to predict or recommend that Singer’s positions will win the day, or ought to. It’s simply to recognize that in coming to the unusual moral positions he holds, fueled by both a compassionate wish to reduce suffering and a respect for personal autonomy, Singer gives regular evidence of having reflected on the whole architecture of morality, and chosen to oppose it where he believes it makes no sense for shared human ends. By the understanding of radicalism we’ve evolved, there can be no higher entitlement to the word.
In this heated political-campaign season, it’s predictable that the word “radical” gets thrown around in regard to smaller game, philosophically speaking. And there is a certain wry fun in asking whether Ryan is a radical simply because he thinks the budget can’t be balanced for 28 years.
My response to all the charges of radicalism is, I hope, John Stuart Millean: “Oh how wonderful! We can’t have too many radicals—they make us think, reassess our positions, consider new ones, and maybe even stick with strengthened versions of our old ones. Thinking radically is just so much fun!”