Are You a Useful Idiot? Exploring the Concept

Useful idiots

There are lots of them about these days.

When not clogging up the streets with their protests, they must be busy breeding.

Like rabbits, only very much less endearing.

Useful idiots.

People who so hate the West that they’ll parade with placards featuring the fizzog of ‘Supreme Killer’ Khameini and the arrogant yet meaningless wording ‘The right side of history’.

Useful idiots make good headlines. In December last year, an opinion piece in The New York Times was headed ‘The “Useful Idiots” From America Whom Putin Is Playing Like a Flute’.

(Don’t you hate headline-style headlines? I do, anyway. But I love that flute simile. And I don’t mind the overformal ‘whom’ here.)

Anyway…

In January this year, the Spectator had a cover with the title ‘Iran’s useful idiots: British complicity in Tehran’s terror’.

And useful idiots don’t necessarily come in groups, even though they display herdlike or lemminglike behaviour. A headline in the Guardian by witmeister John Crace runs, ‘Trump’s not-so-useful idiot Mike Johnson drops in on MPs’, in an article about a visit by the speaker of the US House of Representatives to the UK parliament.

A betwix and between noun compound

So it’s a bit of a hybrid as noun compounds go.

On one hand, it’s a complete unit of meaning, entire unto itself, like full moon, fresh water, short circuit or, indeed, useful load. On the other, the adjective can be modified with ‘not-so’, as in the above headline, whereas, I’m not sure you can have a ‘fuller moon’, and you can’t have a ‘more useful load’ in the sense of that compound.

Looked at from another point of view, one might ask what criteria one normally applies to an idiot. ‘He’s an idiot, but he’s not useful’ is anomalous and suggests that utility is not a defining criterial feature of this kind of idiot. ‘He’s an idiot and he’s useful’ is well formed, suggesting usefulness is a possible but not criterial or expected trait. 

And useful idiots are still different in kind from, for instance, ‘Stop that, you useless idiot!’ where useless can be replaced by any relevant adjective – clumsy, dim, slow-witted, etc. The slot for useful here is what’s called an open slot, but in useful idiot it’s obviously not open.

What does it mean?

So far I haven’t defined what people mean by the term. D’oh. That’s just what a dictionary is for.

But wait, there’s a problem: it’s not in most of the smaller dictionaries, thought it’s in Merriam-Webster online and in the Cambridge Dictionary online. And – ta-da! – it’s in the OED.

Which labels it ‘derogatory’.

Who knew? 😉

And then defines it: ‘(Originally) a citizen of a non-communist country sympathetic to communism who is regarded (by communists) as naive and susceptible to manipulation for propaganda or other purposes; (more widely) any person similarly manipulable for political purposes.’

It’s obviously the second meaning that applies these days. And I would expand it by adding ‘many of whom are old enough to really know better and should avoid being swallowed into the maw of groupthink.’

A famous useful idiot

The phrase useful idiots has been assigned to discourse about the Soviet Union and its uncritical sympathisers. Indeed, there was even a BBC World Service Series titled Useful Idiots back in 2010, which incorrectly attributed the phrase to Lenin. One of the useful idiots was Doris Lessing, who is quoted on the programme site as saying: ‘I was taken around and shown things as a “useful idiot”… that’s what my role was. I can’t understand why I was so gullible.’

But the attribution to Lenin is, we know from the date of the earliest OED citation, apocryphal. Had he coined it, it would surely have surfaced earlier in English.

The earliest sighting

The OED’s earliest citation is this, from the New York Times of 21 June 1948:

L’Umanita said the Communists would give the ‘useful idiots’ of the left-wing Socialist party the choice of merging with the Communist party or getting out.

L’Umanità was the short-lived organ (1947–1950) of the Italian Democratic Socialist Party (PSDI, Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano). I simply don’t know if the quotation marks round ‘useful idiots’ are scare quotes highlighting the newness of the phrase or because it’s a translation. I tried unsuccessfully to find the article in the NYT archive.

The Italian connection

But the link to Italy is interesting and important. The Italian – how can I put this? – equivalent of the Académie Française, L’Accademia della Crusca, on which, actually, the French Academy is based, has a note about the phrase in response to a reader’s question in 2024.

The full text is at the end, for those who read Italian. My translation of the crucial first para. is:

The expression ‘useful idiot’, clearly hostile in tone, surfaces in the centre-right and right-wing press during the 1948 election campaign to denigrate supporters – be they politicians or independent intellectuals – who backed the parties of the ‘Democratic Front’ from the margins and were therefore nothing more than naïve fools who, after all is said and done, were playing into their hands. The main targets of the insulting phrase were those intellectuals (disparagingly called “signatories”) who signed manifestos and appeals by the two left-wing parties. Sometimes, instead of talking about “useful idiots”, the old tag of “self-important busybodies” [literally “flies on the wheel”]* was dusted off. Naturally, it was chiefly their opponents who spoke of “useful idiots”, while the parties that benefited from it were kinder in calling them “fellow travellers”, an expression modelled on the similar Russian one.’

So here we have a clear political context for the expression in Italian, which is picked up by the OED quotation above.

A word investigator on another site antedates its use in English by a couple of months in the same Italian political context:

He called Socialist Leader Pietro Nenni, who is co-operating with the Communists, the ‘No. 1 useful idiot assisting Communist aspirations to control Italy.‘

San Francisco Examiner, 6 April 1948

(The ‘He’ in question was the leader of the fiercely anti-communist Christian Democrats (DC (Democrazia Cristiana)).)

The Serbo-Croat connection

The question arises whether useful idiots arose as a phrase out of the ether. That same investigator notes the use of the parallel ‘useful innocents’ from as early as 23 September 1946.

Now, that is in another context involving communists harvesting the support of sympathisers: Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia. The phrase appears in the Reader’s Digest article cited here by a former Yugoslav official who fell out of love with the regime:

In the Serbo-Croat language the communists have a phrase for true democrats who consent to collaborate with them for ‘democracy’. It is Koristne* Budale, or Useful Innocents.

Given Italy’s border with (the former) Yugoslavia, it seems reasonable to  suppose that somehow the Serbo-Croat phrase was known in Italian, and then utile idiota was based on it, making it a sort of half-loan translation. Similarly, useful idiot is an English loan translation from Italian (are there any others from Italian, I wonder?). Better known calques include beer garden from German, and the moment of truth and fifth column from Spanish.

Wheels within wheels…

As always when one starts looking into words, there are wheels within wheels (first OED citation, 1679), or plentiful rabbit holes (first OED citation, 1938, which surprised me) down which to tumble headlong. Fellow traveller in the sense of someone you’re physically travelling with is as old as 1581; the political meaning dates to 1925, in a translation from Trotsky.

The Italian expression mosche cocchiere – flies on the wheel – is apparently used in the expression fare la mosca cocchiere, as explained on the Treccani dictionary site here. That in turn is probably a loan translation from the French faire la mouche du coche. In English there is an idiom ‘a fly on the wheel’ as known, for instance, to Francis Bacon, but not recorded in the OED. And understandable by practically nobody nowadays.

The Francis Bacon quote is from his 1612 Essays, under ‘”Vainglory”: It was pretily deuised of Æsop. The flie sate vpon the axletree of the charitot wheele, and said, What a dust doe I raise!

The French connection

The origin of the French is from the Fables by Jean de la Fontaine. You can read it in French here or in the English translation here – it’s no. 9 in Book VII. Long story short, in the fable the fly thinks he alone, by buzzing around the horses and the driver and biting them, is responsible for the coach and horses surmounting a laborious hill.

The fable ends like this:

Thus certain ever-bustling noddies

      Are seen in every great affair;

    Important, swelling, busy-bodies,

      And bores ’tis easier to bear

    Than chase them from their needless care.

Or:

Ainsi certaines gens, faisant les empressés,
            S’introduisent dans les affaires :
            Ils font partout les nécessaires,
Et, partout importuns, devraient être chassés.

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I’m grateful to Pascal Tréguer on his site wordhistories.net for all the information he provides which I hereby credit.

* The correct Serbo-Croat is korisne budale.

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The illustration heading this post is of La mouche du coche. You can see a rather fetching Salvador Dali interpretation of the same fable here.

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L’espressione utile idiota, di chiaro tono polemico, affiora nella stampa di centro e di destra durante la campagna elettorale del 1948, per apostrofare il fiancheggiatore – si trattasse di un politico o di un intellettuale indipendente – che sosteneva dall’esterno i partiti del “Fronte democratico” (comunisti e socialisti) e quindi non era altro che uno sprovveduto che alla fin fine faceva il loro gioco. Presi di mira dalla frase ingiuriosa erano soprattutto quegli intellettuali (detti spregiativamente firmaioli) che sottoscrivevano manifesti e appelli dei due partiti di sinistra. Talora, invece di parlare di utili idioti, si rispolverava il vecchio epiteto di mosche cocchiere. Naturalmente erano fondamentalmente gli avversari a parlare di utili idioti, mentre i partiti che ne avevano un tornaconto li chiamavano più benevolmente compagni di strada, un’espressione ricalcata sull’analoga russa.

La locuzione utile idiota si è continuata a usare anche in seguito nel linguaggio politico italiano, riferita non solo ai fiancheggiatori dei partiti di sinistra, ma a qualsiasi fiancheggiatore di qualsiasi partito. Tanto che ha finito per essere impiegata in un’accezione più larga perfino nella lingua comune, per indicare ‘chi si impegna a vantaggio altrui senza badare ai propri interessi’.

The phrase “useful idiot” went on being used afterwards in Italian political discourse, referring not only to supporters of left-wing parties but to any supporter of any party. So much so, that it has ended up being used in a much broader sense in everyday language to denote someone ‘who works for the benefit of others without looking out for their own interests.’

Quello dell’utile idiota è un tipico atteggiamento di ipocrita dabbenaggine, o di abile furberia mascherata da ingenuità e disinteresse, che si può riscontrare in ogni epoca e in riferimento ai più diversi schieramenti politici. E infatti anche in passato e sotto altri regimi anime candide di utili idioti non sono mai mancate, seppur indicate con altri nomi.

The behaviour of the useful idiot is a typical expression of hypocritical gullibility, or of clever cunning disguised as naivety and selflessness, which can be found in every era and across the whole political spectrum. Indeed, even in the past and under other regimes, useful idiots with ingenuous souls have never been lacking, albeit under other names.

Massimo Fanfani