Many people of my generation have heard of Bill Safire, who worked as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew. When I was growing up, Safire had long departed the Nixon White House. He was now a columnist for the New York Times—perhaps the first in what is a by-now familiar sequence of the Times’ hiring voices who could speak for the “reasonable right” on its oped page.

Like William F. Buckley, Safire liked to style himself a man of words, and his columns were often peppered with painful pedantry and middlebrow mewling (I can do alliteration, too!) over the rules of proper usage, the etymology of words, and such.

So let’s do some here.

Despite his reputation for reasonableness, it was Safire who came up with the right-wing culture war phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism.” That’s the phrase that Agnew famously used to such devastating effect to describe opponents of the Nixon administration, particularly the press.¹

The word “nabob” derives from Hindi or Urdu, but it came into popular English usage during the eighteenth century. In Britain, nabob referred to an ambitious young Englishman, often a low- to mid-ranking employee of the East India Company, who had managed, while in India, to create a lucrative side hustle. Though he worked for the company, he would use his company connections to buy and sell commodities, often off the books. After amassing a fortune off the backs of exploited Indian labor and English imperial violence, he would return to Britain a very wealthy man. From there, he’d use his wealth and connections to buy his way to even more power.

That was the nabob. The word, in other words, referred to the ill-gotten gains of European primitive accumulation in the Global South—to the coercion, violence, and criminality that were laundered by the nouveaux riche into the capital and connections of an expanding British economy.

What did Safire do with that word?

Somehow he managed to change its meaning, in contemporary American usage, to refer to journalists working to expose the criminality, coercion, and violence of the Nixon administration, the very administration that was soon to embark upon another round of primitive accumulation—or primitive dis-accumulation, as it has sometimes been called; neoliberalism is another word—in the Global South, particularly in Latin America.

People often say that the purpose of the culture wars is to distract us from the more fundamental economic struggles of the class war. In this instance, the words of the culture war don’t distract from the class war. They take us right to it.

1. In my original post, I wrote that Agnew had included the press in his indictment of the nattering nabobs, which he made in 1970. But Jesse Walker, of Reason Magazine, pointed out to me that Agnew did not mention the press in that speech. Instead, though he never named them in the speech, he was focused on Nixon’s liberal detractors in the Democratic Party. It was only later, though not much later, that observers began folding Agnew’s 1970 speech on the nattering nabobs into his famous attacks on the press throughout 1969. For an excellent article on how the association between Agnew in 1969 and Agnew in 1970 came to be, see this article by Norman Lewis. ↩︎