# How can we eliminate eliminiationism? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 25, 2009, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553 "2009-09-25T18:42:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![FriarTed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/friarted/32/1052_2.png) [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553/41 "2009-10-06T15:15:49Z")
> [@LonesomePolecat](#): > > Hey! It was MY idea! I looked over the thread & I think BG started it at post 34 & sealed the deal at post 38. ---
**Author:** ![LonesomePolecat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a88e57/32.png) [@LonesomePolecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonesomePolecat)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553/42 "2009-10-06T15:22:02Z")
> [@FriarTed](#): > > I looked over the thread & I think BG started it at post 34 & sealed the deal at post 38. But I’m the one who introduced the conspiracy angle. I still say I get a cut. ---
**Author:** ![lissener](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lissener/32/6139_2.png) [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553/43 "2009-10-06T15:53:12Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > This is what happens when you develop a culture in which the government is seen to be the source of wealth and security for all. You politicize everything. You turn people against each other as they squabble over the spoils of government. You take what used to be private decisions and you make them public. You entangle everyone. When everyone is everyone else’s keeper, you have constant conflict. > > It’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse. > > It takes a village to create hordes of villagers with torches and pitchforks. I know you’ve received some snarky biteback from this, Sam, but I’m going to try to address it civilly and respectfully. I think you’ve got it wrong. I don’t think that’s what’s driving it at all. First of all, the most virulent eliminationists are not by any stretch “fighting over the spoils.” Spoils don’t come into it. What they fear is _change_. One of the driving forces behind the two world wars was the advent of new technology. Historically, Europe had been a patchwork quilt of discrete nations and peoples; how else do you develop completely different languages in so many geographically adjacent places? Germany was Germany; France was France; Italy was Italy. (A vast oversimplification, but perhaps you get my point.) As the technologies of travel and communication reached new levels of sophistication, the world began to shrink. Increasingly people from one nation had to deal directly with people from other nations. Other peoples, other cultures. Traditionally, for the most part everything they could see was “theirs”; national boundaries tended to be largely topological. This side of the water(or mountains, or whatever), us; that side them. As this changed cultures clashed; elbow room came to be increasingly at a premium. Frictions arose. Obviously, this was by no means the main factor in great wars of the 20th Century. But it was part of the political psychology of the time. POINT BEING: That kind of “the world is changing around me” fear can lead to some pretty drastic and even violent manifestations. I think what we’re seeing here is something similar: the world is no longer a White country and a Black country and a Brown country (or whatever). Cultures continue to mingle and overlap as the world continues to shrink. Obama represents a mindset that’s open to that kind of change; a mindset that acknowledges the inevitability–the absolute necessity, even–of keeping up with the rest of the world. The wildest-eyes fanatics of the new radical right want to put up a cultural iron curtain, and keep their world the way it was when they were dandled on their granny’s knee; they want the world to be a comfortable, familiar place. Hell, so do I. But it’s changing. And if we follow the lead of the far right, we will not change with it, and we well be left behind. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553/44 "2009-10-06T16:04:41Z")
[Latest (rather laughable) manifestation of RW eliminationism.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=534749) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553/45 "2009-10-06T16:13:34Z")
> [@lissener](#): > > What they fear is _change_. From [_Democratic Strategist_](http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/2009/10/watch_out_dems_the_tea_partyto.php#more) (blog): > [@](#): > > The “yellow peril” comparison suggests a much more robust conceptualization of the protesters attitudes – not as an antagonism against African-Americans in particular, but as a broader antagonism to the growing racial and social diversity of America in general – to the replacement of a white-dominated, traditional, conservative small-town American culture with a “Tiger Woods” racial mélange of white, black, brown red and yellow Americans and an eclectic urbanized culture of diverse tastes, values, music, clothing, slang and even sexual preference and expression. It is a reaction against a new world of Spanish signs on stores, Asians and Indian families moving in next door, gays calmly accepted as part of ordinary daily life and the necessity of having to be retrained in new jobs and fields in response to the economic demands of a complex globalized world. The “real America” the protesters want to restore is the America of Tom Sawyer and Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” – a culture rooted in the rural and small town values that are still a very real and significant part of America. > > Democrats need to call this perspective by its correct name. It is not simply anti-Black racism, but rather a modern version of the “nativism” or cultural xenophobia that has been a recurring feature of American culture and politics throughout the country’s history – a fear not simply of alien and foreign ideas but of wrenching social and cultural change in general. > > This outlook was a powerful force in the early decades of the twentieth century when millions of European immigrants transformed America into an industrial society of large cities. In that era it was the “dirty” Poles, Jews, and Italians who were “taking away our country” from the Anglo-Saxon Protestants of small town America as they filled the factories and bustling ethnic neighborhoods of the industrial cities. Along with their strange languages and customs they brought foreign religious beliefs – “Papist heresies” from the catholic countries of southern and Eastern Europe – and European ideologies like socialism and anarchism. > > The response was a fierce anti-immigrant and anti-cosmopolitan reaction – a demand to protect traditional small town American way of life from the corrupting influence of big cities and a profound fear of “pollution” from foreign cultures, religious ideas and ideologies. A wide range of laws were passed and campaigns launched against immigrants, Asians, socialists, anarchists, trade unions, Catholics and many other aspects of the new, industrial 20th century world. > > Confusing this culturally conservative, politically reactionary “nativism” with “racism” against African-Americans is not only sociologically inaccurate but politically counterproductive. It provokes a sincere, self-righteous indignation on the part of the protesters and their sympathizers because they genuinely and correctly feel that in opposing Obama they are not actually thinking about the traditional racist stereotypes of African-Americans – they know in their hearts that the color of Obama’s skin or possible loyalty to his “brothers in the hood” is far, far, far down on the long and bitter list of objections they have to him and everything he represents. > > Just consider how utterly stupid and idiotic conservatives seem to serious Democrats when they smugly tell each other that progressives and Democrats are all really “fascists” because they support a variety of mild social-democratic polices. Within their closed ideological bubble the conservatives feel quite certain that they have achieved a deep psychological insight by recognizing that latent Adolph Hitlers lie just beneath the surface of everyone from Teddy Kennedy to Robert Redford and Jane Goodall. They actually sit around and pat themselves on the back for their penetrating aptitude at psychological analysis. > > This is exactly how stupid progressives and Democrats appear to culturally conservative Americans when they label as “racism” beliefs that these Americans know are in reality vastly different and more complex. It makes Democrats appear to be trapped in a smug, self-satisfied ideological bubble just as pathetic as the fevered alternative universe of the delusional right. However, whether the author so intends or not, this also raises the obvious question of whether racism or nativism is **worse.** “Wrenching social and cultural change in general” is an ineluctable fact of life in the modern world, and more so with every decade. Is there any better name than “idiot” for people who can’t accept that and struggle against it? ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553/46 "2009-10-06T19:33:01Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > However, whether the author so intends or not, this also raises the obvious question of whether racism or nativism is **worse.** “Wrenching social and cultural change in general” is an ineluctable fact of life in the modern world, and more so with every decade. Is there any better name than “idiot” for people who can’t accept that and struggle against it? “Idiot” is much too complimentary. “Bigot” is the proper word. What we are dealing with here is malice and willful ignorance, not just stupidity. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2009, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553/47 "2009-10-06T19:43:25Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > “Idiot” is much too complimentary. “Bigot” is the proper word. What we are dealing with here is malice and willful ignorance, not just stupidity. I don’t think nativism, as described above, is rooted in malice, just fear and bewilderment. And stupidity. But I think even open-minded teenagers can empathize, at least to some degree, with the kind of deep-seated unease “future shock” engenders. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2009, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553/48 "2009-10-07T22:59:51Z")
I didn’t know what eliminationism was. But isn’t that what was done to the Fascists in Italy & the Nazis in Germany after the big giant national pride movements got their nations **conquered**? I have no problem with outlawing the GOP, since they chose corruption over good government in the last dozen or so years. A national disaster doesn’t need to be kept alive to hurt us all again. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2009, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553/49 "2009-10-07T23:22:53Z")
> [@foolsguinea](#): > > I didn’t know what eliminationism was. But isn’t that what was done to the Fascists in Italy & the Nazis in Germany after the big giant national pride movements got their nations **conquered**? Well, the difference is that they demonstrated that they really WERE that bad. And they weren’t exterminated. To repeat the definition: > [@](#): > > Eliminationism is the belief that one’s political opponents are not just wrongheaded, misinformed or even acting in bad faith but that they are a cancer on the body politic that must be excised — either by separation from the public at large, through censorship or by outright extermination — in order to protect the purity of the nation. So at most what happened just edges into “eliminationism” territory. And they DID unlike their victims demonstrate that they really were that dangerous. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2010, 12:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553/50 "2010-03-24T12:59:58Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > This [present U.S. political vitriol] is what happens when you develop a culture in which the government is seen to be the source of wealth and security for all. You politicize everything. You turn people against each other as they squabble over the spoils of government. You take what used to be private decisions and you make them public. You entangle everyone. When everyone is everyone else’s keeper, you have constant conflict. > > It’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse. > > It takes a village to create hordes of villagers with torches and pitchforks. Reading an old thread, I spotted this nonsense! The U.S.A. is the one developed country where government is _not_ seen as a source of security, and is also the one developed country where political vitriol has developed to the present absurd level. Yet Mr. Stone pretends to believe that it is the U.S. welfare state that has led to the vitriol. :smack: Wow! 😕 :mad: :dubious: I mean _ **WOW** _ :smack: [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-can-we-eliminate-eliminiationism/511553.md?page=2)