Asked this week what his new economic policy was, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson replied: “Boosterism!” He wanted to put “rocket boosters” on the British economy, as a way of “turbocharging” it. Turbocharging (in aviation, originally “turbo-supercharging”) sounds perfectly thrilling, as long as the vehicle one turbocharges is not heading straight for a concrete wall. But is it quite the same as “boosterism”?
A rocket “booster” is the massive first stage of a multipart rocket, such as the Saturn V that delivered the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon. But the verb “to boost”, as well as meaning “to steal” in thieves’ cant, has also long meant to support or encourage. And so “boosterism”, since 1926, is the act of talking something up, whether it be a dodgy stock or one’s own reputation, a new invention or a country. (Some leftwing intellectuals during the cold war were accused of “Soviet boosterism”.)
Quite appropriately for the new prime minister, in particular, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that boosterism is “the expression of chauvinism”. Whether a Trump-like boosterism is all a post-Brexit economy needs to function, of course, remains to be seen.
