Author(s): Arthur Goldwag

Politics

'The most salient feature of what I have come to call the New Hate is its sameness across time and space. The most depressing thing about the demagogues who tirelessly exploit it — in pamphlets and books and partisan newspapers two centuries ago, on websites, electronic social networks, and 24-hour cable news today — is how much alike they all turn out to be.’

From ‘Birthers’ who claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States to counter-Jihadists who believe that the American constitution is in imminent danger of being replaced with sharia law, conspiratorial beliefs have become an increasingly common feature of US public discourse. In this deeply researched, fascinating history of the ideas and rhetoric that have animated extreme, mostly right-wing movements from colonial times to the present day, Arthur Goldwag reveals a disturbing pattern that runs through the American grain.

The New Hate reveals the parallels between the hysteria about the Illuminati that wracked the new Republic in the 1790s and the McCarthyism that roiled the 1950s — and between the anti–New Deal forces of the 1930s and the Tea Party today. He traces Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism and the John Birch Society’s ‘Insiders’ back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he relates white-supremacist nightmares about racial pollution to 19th-century fears of Papal plots. Goldwag takes readers on a surprising, often shocking, sometimes bizarrely amusing tour through the swamps of nativism, racism, and paranoid speculations about money that have long thrived on the American fringe.