I just finished The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right, by Arthur Goldwag (Jew). A fascinating study that covers the whole history of paranoid irrationality in American politics and culture, mostly RW, but not sparing black separatism, etc. Despite the title, his point is that the New Hate is not all that “new” after all. He sees a lot of common memes and themes in all past forms of it, mostly the ones Richard Hosftadter identified, regardless of whether the demonized all-powerful Other is the Jews, Freemasons, Catholics, Illuminati, atheists/secularists, intellectuals, Communists, capitalists, bankers, whites, nonwhites, immigrants, or (as is not seldom the case) some combination of the foregoing.
He concludes:
Now, what we’re going through now does look kinda new. It takes an insightful analyst to spot the almost tedious similarities to previous iterations.
And, following on that, there is one more important point, which all all contemporary conspiracy theorists and Tea Partisans should take to heart:
All of the previous iterations, without exception, were completely worthless.
The Jefferson=Jacobin crowd, the Know-Nothings, Anti-Masons, anti-Catholics, Free Silverites, bank-hating economic producerists, anti-Semites, Klansmen, American Nazis and White Nationalists, John Birchers, Pat Buchanan paleocon-populists – all of them were always utterly, entirely wrong in every single thing that distinguished their worldviews from the mainstream. None were ever of any good use whatsoever to the American polity or society. None brought anything of value to the table ever. None ever did anything but to make irritable gestures resembling thoughts, stir up hatred, and make things worse for America.
How was that possible when you’re posting here nearly continuously from the time you get up until the time you (I assume) pass out at your computer? Kudos to you for doing what you love, but imagine if you put all that effort into something, er, practical.
A conspiracy theorist is not someone who theorizes that there are conspiracies. There are conspiracies, every time two or more people communicate in furtherance of a criminal enterprise. The common law has provisions for dealing with it; the law of conspiracy predates American independence.
Conspiracy theories are much more all-encompassing. They imagine dark secretive forces, in some cases persisting over centuries, behind everything that goes wrong in life, pulling strings from behind the scenes, causing wars and depressions and revolutions and even apparent natural disasters for their own nefarious or deluded ends.
Conspiracies do work. The 9/11 attack was a conspiracy. But conspiracies cannot be kept up and kept secret for a very long time, certainly not for centuries.
What’s the longest one? The Catholic baby snatching ring in Spain lasted ~50 years and involved what, a couple dozen doctors, nurses, and nuns? That’s pretty good, especially for a non-governmental entity.
There are strains of hate in all populist political philosophies. People hate. That’s why such strains are called “populist”. But each time around the hate gets lessened, because hate is bad and society becomes increasingly less tolerant of hate. The only time it gets dangerous is when the hate is deemed acceptable, and unfortunately class hate is still permissible. It really should go the way of all the other hatreds.
There’s a book called Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson. He spends time with various extremist fringe group and in general, he found they really are sincere in their beliefs.
That doesn’t mean their beliefs are true, obviously. But these people aren’t faking it.
Doesn’t keep them from being dangerous. Even if they always lose in the long run, in the short term, they can do incredible harm. And there’s no guarantee they’ll lose. The French Revolution went terribly awry, and something of that general nature is not impossible, here or anywhere.
Looking at today’s events in Cairo is heartbreaking. How does a nation go forward after such tumult?
I’m afraid comrade BrainGlutton is mistaken on this. We far-left crazies want the bankers summarily guillotined after being declared counter-revolutionaries by properly constituted People’s Tribunals.
I realize you’re joking, but what’s interesting about that is even if you weren’t, that would seem a relatively mild form of hate, whereas if you inserted just about any other group of people in that sentence it would be beyond the pale.
Lawyers? Not beyond the pale. Politicians? Not beyond the pale. Dentists? Not beyond the pale, though pretty odd.
Physicians? Beyond the pale, weirdly enough.
Anyway, it’s not beyond the pale because banking (like lawyering, etc.) is an occupation, not a race, sex or creed. Although I see that some occupations appear to have protected status, while others do not.
I’m usually the last Jew to raise an eyebrow on the internet, but I found that very unsettling. And he did the same thing in another thread in GD just before this one. Is it a subliminal message? Is it part of the new hate? Why, BG?
