A Short, Gross History of The Word "Scumbag"

It doesn't just mean "bad person."

Behold a scumbag. Here at Backbencher we try to produce a family-friendly newsletter, but when a word like “scumbag” gets normalized in political discourse, our only recourse is to remind you what the word means, even as the original meaning (fixed a little more than half a century ago) starts to disappear from dictionaries. A scumbag is a bag filled with scum, and it’s a certain kind of bag, and a certain kind of scum, and while the act of sexual intercourse is of course a beautiful and transcendent expression of physical attraction and/or love, its apparatus is kind of nasty, particularly when the apparatus belongs to somebody else.

In my latest print New Republic article, newly available to non-subscribers online (“How The GOP Lost Its Brain”), I note that a quarter of a century ago, when then-Rep. Dan Burton (R.-Indiana) called Bill Clinton a “scumbag,” Rep. Henry Waxman (D.-California) circulated a letter of protest. I might have added that in 2006, after the word snuck into the New York Times crossword puzzle, dozens of angry reader protests poured in. In 2012, then-Rep. Keith Ellison (D.-Minn.) had to apologize for calling his opponent, against whom whose ex-wife six years earlier had gotten a restraining order, a “lowlife scumbag.” And as recently as 2019, Rep. Brendan Boyle (D.-Pennsylvania) drew mildly unfavorable attention for calling Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller “this scumbag.”

But by 2022, nobody particularly noticed when J.D. Vance, a Yalie venture capitalist trying to sell himself to Ohio voters as a down-home prole, got himself elected by calling anyone and everybody a “scumbag.” Vance’s opponent in the Senate race was a “total scumbag.” Republicans who paid more attention to donors than voters were “basically scumbags.” Venezuela was a country populated entirely by “scumbags.” Nobody noticed when Vance said “scumbag” because it had stopped being news that Republican candidates routinely substituted vulgarisms for argument. They did this because conservative ideology was dead and they had nothing left in their arsenal except synthetic rage tailored to voters’ worst selves. That’s the subject of my latest piece, which takes Daniel Bell’s 1960 book The End of Ideology, substitutes Reaganism for Marxism, and finds that the analysis works just as well. You can read that piece here. If you like it, think about subscribing to the New Republic. (Actually, you should think about subscribing even if you don’t like it.)

Also, I posted today a piece about the pressure on nonprofit hospitals to ape their for-profit rivals, to the detriment of patients. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden are not happy about this. You can read that here.