Word: whig
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...that are blowing up the campuses, as Mr. Nixon described them." On other issues, his approval is reluctant. "We wish Carswell towered, and he doesn't," he sighed. "But he is the President's choice, and if I were a Republican on the floor instead of a Whig in the gallery, I would, a little sadly, vote 'Aye.' " Kilpatrick calls himself a Whig instead of a Republican because "no newsman should be identified with a party so I'm a Whig. It provides an escape from embarrassing situations...
...proper background for a word destined to play so large a role in the public life of the democracies.) This immigrant word, liberal, found the term radical already flourishing in British politics. For a couple of decades, liberal and radical were used interchangeably by members of a large Whig faction to describe themselves. Those radical/liberals of the 1840s, of course, have precious little to do with either the radicals or the liberals of 1970, and the old connection can hardly explain the Vice President's phrase...
What, then, are the right words? Easy to ask; impossible to answer. Should people who are against large organizations be called "minis"? They would not like that. Or should we try for neutral terms, like those of the Blue and Green factions that troubled Byzantium, or like Whig and Tory, whose original connotations have been lost to all but dedicated etymologists...
...Whig," John Kennedy once said disdainfully. What he meant was that unlike his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, and the 19th century Whigs William Henry Harrison and Millard Fillmore, he intended to be an activist President. Richard Nixon is something of a Whig, by choice as well as by circumstance. In his Inaugural, he celebrated "small, splendid efforts" of individual men. There are conflicting pulls on him, within his own party and in the country that gave him less than a majority last November and still reflects deep division in such splits as the Senate ABM vote...
Whiggery has its virtues. Passage of the tax bill is a good indication that a hyperactive President is not always necessary to useful legislative progress. Ultimately, the question is whether a Whig's approach can deal with the great internal problems of the U.S. today. Federal authority expanded from the New Deal onward largely because a vacuum existed at lower levels of government and in the private sector. Crises existed that only Washington seemed willing to attack. Today the problems may be different, but they are no less urgent. One test of Nixon's philosophy will come when state...