Events

One of the most troubling aspects of American politics today is the impulse for politicians and the public alike to demonize political adversaries. Although this tendency is nothing new, recently it has veered into unexpected and brutal viciousness from otherwise ordinary, everyday people, nearly all of them political conservatives.  Neiwert identifies this hateful rhetoric as “eliminationism”—the wish to do away with perceived enemies—and asks what effects such toxic talk has on our public discourse and democracy. The Eliminationists traces the origins of much of this talk to the dank corners of the proto-fascist American right, on which Neiwert spent much of the 1990s reporting.  In the past decade, he has observed ideas, agendas, and, most of all, rhetoric transmitted from these fringes into the mainstream conservatism movement. As he reports, that movement has metastasized into something not truly conservative, but decidedly right-wing, and decidedly dangerous.  Neiwert warns Americans about the likelihood of a re-emergence of the violent domestic terrorism that characterized the far Right in the 1990s now that America has its first African-American president, and that a fascist state is a real threat. He cautiously points out that the situation is not yet irretrievable. How Americans face this challenge, he says, will depend on how well they can repudiate the politics of hate and repair the damage it has wrought. David Neiwert’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, on Salon.com, and in the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report. The author of three previous books on related topics, Neiwert won the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000. His blog Orcinus, which reports on the crossover between the mainstream and the far right, received the Koufax Award for Best Series in 2003 and 2004. He is also the managing editor of the popular video blog, Crooks and Liars.