FDL Book Salon - The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized The American Right

Digby reviews book at Firedoglake here.

I grew up in a right wing household, so I'm not one of those liberals who've never spent any time connecting on an intimate basis with conservatives. I spent my early life hearing conservative talk around the kitchen table, drinking right wing philosophy along with my Nestle's Quick.(Not long ago I came across a letter my mother had written to her parents in 1960 in which she lamented the fact that John F. Kennedy had stolen the election out from under that fine man Richard Nixon!)

Until the last 15 or 20 years, I felt that I understood conservatism quite well, even as I disagreed with virtually every aspect of it. And while I found much of it repugnant, particularly the racist side which the Southern Strategy embraced, I had never actually feared it. Perhaps that's because the people I knew might have been right wing, but I had never heard them say that all liberals (blacks/gays/feminists) should be killed. That was new to me. . . .

When I started blogging six years or so ago, I wrote a lot about this, trying to describe what I was seeing and hoping to understand what had happened to the mainstream conservatism I had grown up with and thought I knew. Until I came across Dave Neiwert's blog Orcinus, I didn't even know there was a word for it. Once I read his series of posts called "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism," I did. It's called "eliminationism," which Neiwert defines as "a politics and a culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas in favor of the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through suppression, exile, and ejection, or extermination." . . .

Neiwert has been studying the American far right for years, writing about the militia movement and listening to the voices of the right as they grew ever more radical, violent and insular. He understands where many of these people come from, he gets what social elements feed into their paranoid sense of victimization. And he documents all of that in his fascinating new book The Eliminationists. But he does something even more valuable than merely observe this social and political phenomenon. He analyzes how this worldview makes its way into mainstream American culture and that is perhaps the most startling and downright chilling revelation in his book. Once you understand how that happens, you will never see Glenn Beck and Michael Savage as benign figures of fun again. . . .