It’s easy to interpret the verbal bile of recent American politics as a new height in prejudiced and conspiracist thinking: a new hate. In the last few years, Sarah Palin has created the concept of Obama’s “death panels,” Glenn Beck has argued that George Soros was a collaborator with the Nazis during WWII — even though Soros is Jewish — and Donald Trump staked his presidential campaign on the idea that our president, black as he is and Muslim as his name seems to be, had not sufficiently proven his rights to citizenship in our country. More recently, Newt has taken to calling Obama the “food stamp president,” a title that is as racially charged as it is inaccurate.But Arthur Goldwag, author of the new book “The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right,” argues that the racist and conspiracist approach of today’s far-right pundits is largely the same as it was 50 years ago. Their language and theories are taken (sometimes verbatim) from right-wing populist vitriol at early times in American and European history, dealing in tropes well-worn by pre-WWII American Nazis, Joe McCarthy and fanatical anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic Protestant preachers of the 19th century.
Read the whole interesting interview.
Probably what’s most interesting about this phenomenon is the extent to which it’s become central to the Republican party. This is always with us — and there’s a deep strain in Southern conservative politics in particular that responds to certain aspects of it. But it’s not all that common for it to be so close to power.
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