The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right

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."

From the 9/11 "Truthers" who think our government allowed the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks to happen, to the "Birthers" who claim Barack Obama was not born in the United States, extremism in this country is increasingly becoming a part of the norm. Arthur Goldwag delineates the origins of these "new" theories, the economic and social factors that have contributed to their popularity, and how today's fringe groups relate to similar movements that preceded them. Ultimately, he makes clear that the rhetoric and theories embraced by contemporary hate groups are deeply rooted in the past, and that, in fact, the only thing new about them is how mainstream they've become.