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.
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.