"Wingnut",wing nut orwing-nut, is apejorativeAmerican political term referring to a person who holds extreme, and often irrational,political views. It is a reference to the extreme "wings" of a party, and shares a name with the hardware fastener also known as awingnut.
According toMerriam-Webster, a "wingnut" is "a mentally deranged person" or "one who advocates extreme measures or changes: radical".[1]Lexico, an online dictionary whose content comes fromOxford University Press, gives the political definition of "wing nut" as "A person with extreme, typically right-wing, views."[2]
WhenWilliam Safire – who was widely known as the "language maven"[3] and wrote the "On Language" column forThe New York Times Magazine from 1979 until 2009[4] – first wrote about "wing nut" in 2004, he said "In current political parlance ... the word is now beginning its bid to replace the tiringextremist. ... The true believers of each side consider those similarly inclined on the other to be nuts and kooks, a satisfying arrangement of derangement. ... The attack word catching on with political nonwingers and by mainstreaming media is wing nut. It is applied with supposed fine impartiality to both left-wing kooks and right-wing nuts",[5] but by 2006, Safire would say "The prevailing put-down of right-wing bloggers is wingnuts; this has recently been countered by the vilification of left-wing partisans who use the Web as moonbats..."[6] Later that year, Safire provided an example of the usage of "wingnut" in aTime magazine column byJoe Klein, in which Klein referred to "conservative wingnuts" (as opposed to "left-wing blognuts"), called Vice PresidentDick Cheney "the nation’s wingnut in chief", and said of the editorial page ofThe Wall Street Journal that it was "quasi-wingnut".[7]
Two years later, in his bookSafire's Political Dictionary, Safire was more definitive about the meaning and etymology of the word:
...[T]he politicalwingnut is an abbreviation of a longer term, in this caseright-wing nut wherenut, as slang for the head, has long been used to refer to a person who is silly, stupid, crazy, or simplynutty. ... The originalright-wing nut is of considerable antiquity, dating at least to the 1960s...Today, the long and the short forms co-exist amicably in print.[8]
David M. Herszenhorn ofThe New York Times has defined a "wing nut" as "a loud darling ofcable television andtalk radio whose remarks are outrageous but often serious enough not to be dismissed entirely," but he was careful to point out that the person he was so describing as a "wing nut" "...is the more notable because he hurls his nuts from the left in a winger world long associated with the right."[9]
In his bookWingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, author and columnistJohn Avlon defined a wingnut as "someone on the far-right wing or far-left wing of the political spectrum – the professional partisans, the unhinged activists and the paranoidconspiracy theorists. They're the people who always try to divide rather than unite us".[10] Avlon also writes "I believe that the far left and the far right can be equally insane – but there's no question that in the first years of the Obama administration, the far right has been a lot crazier."
The examples Avlon gives of this "craziness" include the actions, beliefs and behaviors of those involved in theOath Keepers,Posse Comitatus and other groups in theAmerican militia movement, theTea Party, "Obama derangement syndrome", the birth of "White-minority politics", the rise ofright-wing media and theRepublican echo chamber,Sarah Palin and the"Limbaugh brigades" ofright-wing talk radio hosts, theBirther andTruther movements, and the GOP's "hyperconservative kamikaze caucus" in Congress. The only extended sections about "wingnuts" on the left deal withKeith Olbermann's news broadcasts, and the search by both sides for "heretics" within their respective parties, i.eRepublicans in Name Only andDemocrats in Name Only (RINOs and DINOs).[11]
In 2015, economistPaul Krugman wrote about "wingnut welfare" in his column forThe New York Times. Krugman did not claim to have come up with the term, and did not know who did,[notes 1] but he explained it as describing "the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on [which] provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available." Krugman wrote that "anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak."[12] In 2021, Krugman reiterated his use of the phrase in another column, in which he wrote:
[F]or a long time conservative cohesiveness made life relatively easy for Republican politicians and officials. Professional Democrats had to negotiate their way among sometimes competing demands from various constituencies. All Republicans had to do was follow the party line. Loyalty would be rewarded with safe seats, and should a Republican in good standing somehow happen to lose an election, support from billionaires meant that there was a safety net — “wing nut welfare” — in the form of chairs at lavishly funded right-wing think tanks, gigs at Fox News and so on.[13]
The phrase has subsequently been used elsewhere, including in 2017 in theWashington Monthly by Martin Longman[14] and in an opinion column inThe Washington Post by political commentatorPaul Waldman in 2018.[15]
In 2021, writerCharles P. Pierce, the author ofIdiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free described the career of one Texas political lawyer by saying "His CV reads like a road map through the wingnut-welfare legal terrarium".[16] Pierce had also used the phrase in earlier columns in 2018[17] and 2020[18] in describing the actions and backgrounds of those on the political right.
In 2007, political commentatorJonathan Chait's recapitulation of the origin ofReaganomics, orsupply-side economics, was published inThe New Republic under the title "Feast of the Wingnuts". After describing some extreme applications of theLaffer curve made byJude Wanniski, an editorial page writer forThe Wall Street Journal in the 1970s, specifically in his bookThe Way the World Works (1978), Chait writes "Republicans did not find these obvious signs of wingnuttery troubling."[19]
Folk punk musicianPat the Bunny founded a band called Wingnut Dishwashes Union, active from 2007 to 2009.[citation needed]
Tessa Stuart, writing inRolling Stone magazine in 2016 referred to theRepublican National Convention that year as having embraced "just about every version of 'Hillary Clinton' dreamed up over the last quarter century by wing-nuts like[Alex] Jones and his rhetorical cousin,Roger Stone. Needless to say, none of these 'Hillary Clintons' bear much resemblance to the Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, nor would they be recognizable to people who don’t pay much attention to right-wing talk radio."[20]
In 2020, historian and columnistMax Boot referred to an incoming member of Congress as a "QAnon wing nut", providing an example of the combination of "wing nut" with other pejorative descriptive modifiers. Boot also warned against afalse equivalence, writing that "the media can give the impression, wittingly or not, that both major parties are in the grip of extremists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Democrats have the far left under control, while Republicans are being controlled by the far right." Such a view distorts the reality that the Republican Party under the leadership ofDonald Trump is dominated by far-right ideologues and extremists – that is, wingnuts – while there is no such equivalent in the Democratic Party. Boot continued, "Trump & Co. can bellow all day long that [Joe Biden andKamala Harris] are lackeys for[Senator Bernie] Sanders and "the Squad," [i.e. six progressive Democratic members of Congress, notably includingAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), aDemocratic socialist] but it’s simply not credible. The Republican Party, by contrast, isn’t just catering to extremists — it’s led by one."[21]
Informational notes
Citations
The dictionary definition ofwingnut at Wiktionary