Rescuing the Word "Radical"

I thought today I’d say a few things about the word radical – a word that is habitually abused in our US political culture. Abused in ways that I sometimes find hard not to take personally since I myself identify as a radical as in a radical Marxist, radical and revolutionary socialist, even dare I say communist, which I guess marks me as someone Donald Trump and his friends say they want to deport from the United States.

The word is abused by false application, like when Trump and DeSantis and FOX News and OAN and the rest of the Republi-fascist mental industrial mindfuck complex habitually refer to the dismal neoliberal Democrats as “radical Left.”  The word radical is also abused by deceptive omission, as when the mainstream media and politics culture habitually refer to the now radical and neofascist Trump DeSantis Republicans as “conservative.”  

Let’s dig into the literal meaning of the word...