A
Kirkus Reviews
Best Book of 2012
From the author of
-Isms and -Ologies
and
Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies
, here is a deeply researched, fascinating history of the role that organized hatred has played in American politics.
The New Hate
takes readers on a surprising, often shocking, sometimes bizarrely amusing tour through the swamps of nativism, racism, and paranoia that have long thrived on the American fringe. Arthur 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.
Written with verve and wit, this lively history is indispensible reading for anyone who wants to understand the recent re-ascendance of extremism in American politics.