Everyone's been talking about John Ponte's recent essay on the global ideological battle in which we are engaged with what he calls "transnational progressivists." It's a very interesting thesis, and one that resonates with me, but I do have a nit to pick.

I'm not sure why he chose "trans"national as his descriptor, other than that they describe themselves that way. If so, then we shouldn't allow them to get away with it, any more than we should have allowed people to call themselves Bolsheviks when they weren't truly a majority, or to appropriate words like "progressive" or "liberal," when their views were in fact often exactly the opposite, and a throwback.

The prefix "trans" means (if I recall my eleventh-grade Latin correctly) "across." So transnational would mean across nations. But the people that he describes are, in fact, extremely antipathetic to the very concept of nation. It seems more appropriate, and accurate, to call them postnationalists (after nationalism), or praetornationalists (beyond nationalism), or even, to be most accurate, antinationalists, assuming he wants to stick to his Latin roots.

Well, if we are going to pick nits, the whole "post" prefix should be abolished. Used as in such phrases as "Postmodern", it implies that what is being described is the true, ultimate form, with nothing to succeed it. Instead, all the "post-"s are just another step along the path, and will be succeded themselves someday.

Another factor is that many "post-"s tend to define themselves solely in oppositional terms, as being "against" something, rather than being "for" themselves. This would make the "anti-" form the correct one.

'Postmodernism' always sounds like an attempt to trump 'modernism' by saying, "Hey, look at me! I'm more modern than modern." I saw a truly bizarre one the other week, a course in 'Post-contemporary thought'. Obviously someone's invented a time machine and we have yet to be told about it...

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That's a good one. Post-contemporary thought, eh? Now that's real vaporware.

You are right that the term is a poor one, and gives them more dignity than they deserve. BUT, even a poor word is better than none. Many of us have been struggling to express a concept, that W+X+Y+Z are really the same people with the same end-result in mind. To have a recognized term that describes that should be very useful. (And may tend to put various groups on the defensive; they may have to respond to the accusation that they are TP's, rather than have it just assumed that they are only interested in saving the whales, or the children ...)

You yourself Rand, are forced to explain rather basic things repeatedly, for lack of recognized terms. Wouldn't life be simpler if there was a word for the concept, "The line of space-craft development that led up to X-15, and then was aborted by the Apollo munitions-to-the-moon project."