Know your terms

Why are authors obsessed with "right-wing extremists" and "radical leftists," but not vice-versa?

David Rozado is the leading Big Data scholar on 21st Century political vocabulary. It’s become practical to count how many times major media institutions use some terms but not others, such as “right-wing extremism” vs. “left-wing extremism.”

You can do it yourself using Google’s Ngram interface for looking up terms used in countless books. It now runs up through 2022:

One methodological issue is that it’s not obvious (to me, at least) what’s more common: “right-wing” or “rightwing”? You just have to try Ngram both ways. (The former, with a hyphen, it turns out.)

But there are also synonyms whose popular varies by ideology. While there are practically no “left-wing extremists” in English-language books, there have been far more “radical leftists” than “radical rightists” since the later 1960s.

And for who know what reasons, there are far fewer “leftist radicals” than “radical leftists,” and while “right-wing extremists” abound in our books, “extreme right-wingers” are also scarce.

So in Rozado’s latest Substack post, “Mentions of Political Extremism in English Wikipedia,” his summary graph tries to include all the synonyms:

And he comes up with Wikipedia devoting well over twice as many mentions to right-wing extremism as left-wing extremism.

Maybe there is twice as much interesting and important things to say about right-wing extremism?

Or maybe not?