The Ancient Art of Political Labeling: How Names Shape (and Distort) Debate
Political labeling is one of the oldest tricks in the book. For thousands of years, those in power — or those seeking it — have understood that the right name can paint your opponent negatively, rally your own side, and sometimes replace actual argument entirely.
We like to think this is a modern social media disease. It isn’t. The game is ancient. What has changed is how efficiently and asymmetrically it’s played today.
The Power of a Name
A well-chosen label doesn’t just describe — it frames. It tells people how they’re supposed to feel before they even hear the argument. Call someone “far-right” today and many immediately stop listening. Call someone a “tyrant” or “demagogue” in ancient Rome and the same thing happened.
Ancient Rome: Optimates vs. Populares
In the late Roman Republic, politicians operated with loose tendencies rather than formal parties:
The Optimates (“the Best Men”) presented themselves as defenders of tradition, the Senate, and the old republican order.
The Populares (“Men of the People”) appealed directly to the common citizens, pushing land reform and debt relief. Their opponents often painted them as dangerous demagogues.
These weren’t clean ideological teams, but the labels shaped how people viewed the fight.
Byzantine Constantinople: Blues and Greens
The Eastern Romans (what we now call Byzantines) had four chariot-racing factions — Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites — that eventually consolidated into two powerful blocs: the Blues and the Greens. These were far more than sports clubs. They functioned as political and social organizations with real street power, capable of rioting and even nearly toppling emperors (as seen in the Nika Riots of 532).
England and the Birth of Enduring Labels
In 17th-century England, the word “Tory” began as a vicious insult. It came from the Irish tóraidhe, meaning outlaw or raider. Opponents used it to smear supporters of the future James II as lawless and disloyal. Over time, the targeted group embraced the name, and “Tory” became the proud label for Britain’s conservative, monarchist faction — the ancestors of today’s Conservative Party.
The French Revolution and the Capture of “Liberal”
The modern Left/Right divide we recognize today was literally born in the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly in 1789. Supporters of the king sat on the right, radicals and reformers on the left.
At that time, “Liberal” had a clear and honorable meaning. Derived from the Latin liber (“free man”), it referred to the qualities and rights fit for a free man: individual liberty, limited government, rule of law, and oversight by the electorate. The American Founding Fathers, drawing from John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment, proudly considered themselves liberals in this classical sense.
Over the course of the 20th century, the term “liberal” was gradually captured and redefined. What once meant limited government and personal freedom came to mean something closer to the relatively free application of government power to achieve social and economic goals. Many who still hold the original classical liberal views now find themselves labeled “conservative” or even “far-right.”
“Conservative” — From Insult to Badge of Honor
“Conservative” itself began as something of an insult — implying someone was backward, resistant to progress, or stuck in the past.
William F. Buckley Jr. did something clever: he grabbed the label, wrestled with it, and wore it proudly. He helped turn “conservative” into a coherent intellectual and political movement. Russell Kirk embraced it too, though in a quieter, more traditionalist way. What began as a slur became a banner.
America in the 1850s: A Festival of Strange Names
The years leading up to the Civil War produced some of the most colorful labels in American history:
Know Nothings — Started as a secret society. When asked about it, members replied “I know nothing.” The mocking name stuck and became their identity.
Locofocos — Radical Democrats who earned the name when opponents turned off the gaslights during a meeting. The reformers lit the hall with “locofoco” self-igniting matches and kept going.
Barnburners vs. Hunkers — Two warring factions inside New York’s Democratic Party. Barnburners were willing to “burn the barn down” to eliminate slavery. Hunkers were accused of “hunkering down” for patronage and Southern interests.
These names were often insults that groups eventually adopted anyway.
Why This Still Matters
When labels become weapons instead of descriptions, they undercut real debate. “Far-right” is now thrown so broadly that it often includes people whose views would have been considered normal conservatism or even classical liberalism just a few decades ago. Meanwhile, genuinely extreme historical figures on the left rarely receive the same reflexive treatment.
This is more than semantics. When one side dominates the naming game, it becomes easier to dismiss arguments without engaging them. That weakens truth-seeking and damages free speech.
The ancient Romans, the Byzantines, 17th-century England, the French revolutionaries, and 19th-century Americans all played the same game. The only real defense is to recognize it — and insist on clear, honest language instead of letting labels do the thinking for us.
Addendum: Newspeak – Not Just Fiction, But a Long-Practiced Reality
George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) introduced Newspeak as the ultimate tool of totalitarian control: a deliberately impoverished language designed to make certain thoughts literally unthinkable by shrinking vocabulary, narrowing meanings, and replacing precise words with vague, emotionally loaded compounds or slogans.
Orwell did not invent the concept from thin air. He observed it already happening in the real world — in the propaganda of Nazi Germany, Soviet Communism, and the political language shifts of his own time. He warned about it earlier in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", where he argued that sloppy, vague, or ideologically corrupted language corrupts thought itself: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
The redefinition of “liberal” in the early-to-mid 20th century stands as one of the most successful examples. What was once classical liberalism — limited government, individual rights, free markets, and skepticism of centralized power (the tradition the American Founders embraced) — was gradually repurposed during the Progressive Era and New Deal years into something closer to its opposite in practice: expanded state intervention, collective solutions, and regulatory government. Other terms followed a similar path: “progressive,” “equality,” and “rights” were stretched or redirected. These shifts did not require a Ministry of Truth; they advanced through intellectuals, journalists, and political operators who understood that controlling the dictionary helps control the debate.
This linguistic maneuvering predated serious academic study of how vocabulary shapes cognition. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity) — the idea that the structure and vocabulary of a language influence how speakers perceive and think about reality — only gained formal attention in the early-to-mid 20th century through anthropologists and linguists like Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Empirical research came even later.
Yet practitioners of politics had already discovered its power intuitively. A striking real-world demonstration comes from a Vietnamese-born researcher who recalled his family’s silence about a deceased uncle. In their language and cultural framing, there was effectively no easy way to speak of “pastness” or someone who “was but is no longer.” Without the linguistic tools to reference the past clearly, the family struggled to communicate about the uncle at all. The person simply “is not.” This gap did not make memory impossible, but it channeled and limited how loss and history could be discussed or even held in everyday thought.
Today we see softer versions of the same mechanism in compound labels like “far-right.” Attach “far-” to any position slightly to the right of the currently defined center (strong borders, enforcement of immigration law, recognition of biological sex as binary and real — ideas long supported across the political spectrum, including by Democrats for much of the 20th century), and the mind leaps to extremism before the substance is weighed. As the cultural “center” drifts leftward, yesterday’s mainstream view becomes today’s “far-right,” narrowing the range of acceptable ideas without needing to win the argument on merits.
Newspeak is not (yet) the fully engineered language of Oceania, but its core principle — control the words and you steer the thoughts — has been in active use for over a century. It works because language does not merely describe reality; it filters what we can easily conceive and debate. Recognizing the tactic is the first defense: insist on clear definitions, reject glued-together emotional labels, and demand substance over slogans.
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Sources & Further Reading
On Ancient Political Labeling and Factions:
- Charles W. C. Oman, The Byzantine Empire (1892, various reprints). Covers the Blues and Greens factions in Constantinople and how sports rivalries turned into violent political and religious blocs, culminating in the Nika Riots. [Available on Project Gutenberg and Heritage History].
- Oman also discusses Roman politics in works such as Seven Roman Statesmen of the Later Republic, which touches on the Optimates vs. Populares divide.
On the Redefinition of “Liberal” and Progressive-Era Language Shifts:
- Eric Alterman, “How Classical Liberalism Morphed Into New Deal Liberalism” (Center for American Progress, 2012).
- William A. Schambra, “The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics” (Heritage Foundation).
- David Foster & Joseph Warren, “From classical to progressive liberalism: ideological development and the origins of the administrative state” (2024 academic paper).
These trace how the term “liberal” shifted from its classical roots (limited government, individual rights) to a more interventionist meaning during the Progressive Era and New Deal period.
On Newspeak, Language, and Thought:
- George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946) — his essay that directly prefigures the ideas in 1984.
- George Orwell, 1984 (1949) — the full depiction of Newspeak as a tool to limit thought.
On Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) and How Language Shapes Cognition:
- General overviews: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Relativism > The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis”; Simply Psychology summary of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
- The specific Vietnamese family example you recalled (difficulty discussing a deceased relative due to limited past-tense framing or cultural/linguistic habits of “is / is not”) appears to be a personal anecdote shared by a Vietnamese-born researcher or scholar. Similar themes of silence, memory gaps, and linguistic/cultural filtering in Vietnamese immigrant families are explored in works such as:
- E. Tinh Trinh, “Photovoice in a Vietnamese Immigrant Family” (2020).
- Discussions in Vietnamese diaspora oral histories and trauma studies (e.g., works touching on generational silence around loss and migration).
For current examples of compound labels such as ‘far-right’ and the shifting Overton window, see ongoing media and polling analysis on immigration enforcement, border security, and biological sex — positions once broadly bipartisan or culturally normative
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