Local School Board Clown

[Dill]

I don't find the term "extremist" very descriptive in any context.

Yesterday's extreme is today's status quo.

Yesterday's status quo is extreme today. E.g., support for segregation.

"Radical" is different. The term can be useful to describe positions which "go to the root" of
ideological positions. A radical socialist would want to socialize virtually all private industry
and private property. Even then, the term is always contextual, understood with respect to something not radical,
like mixed socialism.

Civil rights workers fighting to overcome segregation in the 1950s were "extremists" then,
but also "radicals" in that they wanted to go to the root of the proposition that all men are created
equal and make that the basis of law and policy. Feminists were even more radical if they wanted "men" to also mean "women."

"Radical" and "extremist" tend to get used interchangeably to mean "any political position far away from
the one I presently hold." If someone tells me that Bels is a "socialist" I have some idea of what the term means, just as if someone says he is a "Catholic" or a "Steeler fan," though the reference is still pretty broad.

If someone says Bels is an "extremist," I have no idea at all what that means.
I would have to make calculations based on the speaker's ideological position,
given the term itself has no fixed reference.