The New Hate
A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right
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- USD 4.99
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- USD 4.99
Descripción editorial
From “Birthers” who claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States to counter-jihadists who believe that the Constitution is in imminent danger of being replaced with Sharia law, conspiratorial beliefs have become an increasingly common feature of our public discourse. In this deeply researched, fascinating exploration of the ideas and rhetoric that have animated extreme, mostly right-wing movements throughout American history, Arthur Goldwag reveals the disturbing pattern of fear-mongering and demagoguery that runs through the American grain.
The New Hate 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. Goldwag shows us the parallels between the hysteria about the Illuminati that wracked the new American Republic in the 1790s and the McCarthyism that roiled the 1950s, and he discusses the similarities between the anti–New Deal forces of the 1930s and the Tea Party movement today. He traces Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism and the John Birch Society’s “Insiders” back to the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he relates white supremacist nightmares about racial pollution to nineteenth-century fears of papal plots.
“The most salient feature of what I have come to call the New Hate,” Goldwag writes, “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 Web sites, electronic social networks, and twenty-four-hour cable news today—is how much alike they all turn out to be.”
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Goldwag (Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies) delivers an informative and lively history of organized hate groups and their role in U.S. politics. Less about prejudice than America's "relentless quest for scapegoats," he traces the American conspiratorial tradition from colonial times where the Puritans feared Jesuit conspiracies as much as Indian ambushes to the present, covering the movements and vitriolic commentary against the Masons, Catholics, Jews, Communists, and Muslims. A witty narrator, Goldwag combines his research with contemporary analysis to explain what conspiracy theories all have in common and to show how the new hate is the same as the old, though it's now "hiding in plain sight." The only thing different, which the election of the country's first black president brought into sharper relief, is how much more mainstream hate has become thanks to the Internet and 24-hour cable news shows, with the populist Right's obsessions becoming talking points for supposedly mainstream politicians to gain advantage with voters. The book is exhaustively well researched and passionately written, though Goldwag sometimes veers off to cover very obscure figures. Yet whether he's analyzing the origins of Glenn Beck's ideology or demystifying the Illuminati, Goldwag excels at showing how the obsessions of the past connect with those of the present.