Radical chic

Coined in the 1970 article "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's" by journalist Tom Wolfe, the term has become widely used in languages such as American English, French, and Italian.

Unlike dedicated activists, revolutionaries, or dissenters, those who engage in "radical chic" remain frivolous political agitators—ideologically invested in their cause of choice only so far as it advances their liberal elite social standing.

This derivative, however, de-emphasizes the class satire of Wolfe's original term, instead accentuating concerns over the semiotics of radicalism (such as the aestheticization of violence).

[Wolfe's] subject is how culture's patrician classes – the wealthy, fashionable intimates of high society – have sought to luxuriate in both a vicarious glamour and a monopoly on virtue through their public espousal of street politics: a politics, moreover, of minorities so removed from their sphere of experience and so absurdly, diametrically, opposed to the islands of privilege on which the cultural aristocracy maintain their isolation, that the whole basis of their relationship is wildly out of kilter from the start.

[12][13] Shortly after the October 17, 1997 burial with military honors in Santa Clara, Cuba, of Guevara's disinterred and identified remains, found in the Bolivian jungle by forensic anthropologists,[14] New York Times columnist Richard Bernstein argued that the third-world revolution that Che embodied was no longer even a "drawing-room, radical-chic hope".

Noting the sustained interest in Che, Bernstein suggested that "the end of the cold war and the failure of the third-world revolution" allowed for the "scrutiny of Guevara, [as] a symbol of both the idealism and the moral blindness of the decade of protest" to take place in a context "free of ideological partisanship and rancor.

In his blog entry on 11 December 2008, Reason journalist Nick Gillespie used the term "killer chic"[16] in his review of Steven Soderbergh's film Che.