radicalism as the essence of evil

it's funny but i hear 'radical' as a positive term. i remember my mom in the 60s/70s insisting that she was not a liberal, she was a radical. so if democrats are going to constantly call republicans 'radical,' they're gonna up my tendency to listen to what the republicans are saying. i'm teaching a course on american radicalisms, left and right, and it's been an incredibly rich and often extremely courageous and inspiring history. so 'calling radicalism by its name' - the headline of the times editorial linked above - rings strangely (and i must say, dangerously) to me. it's like calling communism by its name or something: it sounds like something you say just before you launch on your program to marginalize or repress someone's position. i'll just say that the average person out here in rural pa is to the right of mitt romney by a ways, and that you'll be repressing, or at least dismissing as bizarre, a significant proportion of the population. it's like insulting someone by calling them 'out of the mainstream': well, the mainstream is an extraordinarily banal, unreflective, and easy place to be. but it's a good place to be if you're satisfied with our current conditions and our current political discourse. or if you think peer pressure might be wrong with drugs or crime, but is the only reasonable way to come to believe anything. admittedly the american educational system is completely dedicated to these twinned approaches.