February 1, 2024
QAnon cousins? Here's your field guide to their eldritch politics. "Populist politicians win when enough voters feel like they're losing," writes Goldwag, author of The New Hate. Like David Bennett's Party of Fear, this book traces a right-wing political movement that exploits widespread fears of deep-seated conspiracies and absurd theories of ethnic "replacement." Such things were once whispered; now they're shouted, as when Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for Pennsylvania's governorship against Josh Shapiro, the victor in 2022, pilloried the "privileged, exclusive, elite" Jewish day school Shapiro had attended as a child. Not to be outdone, House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik tweeted the alarmist charge that Biden's White House "& the usual pedo grifters" were keeping baby formula off the market by sending "pallets of formula to the southern border" to distribute it free to undeserving immigrants. All hokum, of course, but Stefanik and Mastriano worked the Trumpian "I love the poorly educated" trope, race and education being the two things that most sharply divide American voting blocs. Thus, Goldwag writes, uneducated white Americans floated Trump into office, many of them having swallowed whole the "paranoid style of conspiracism" in which a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor was the locus of child sex trafficking and that Jews "promote miscegenation and vice" in order to weaken Christian America. The result is a spasmodic era of hatred and violence based on "narratives [that] simultaneously frighten and reassure, because they present a world without moral ambiguity." Unlike other recent students of conspiracy theory, Goldwag sees little hope that the narrative can be pointed in the direction of truth: Trump may go away, but Trumpism will endure, and "we might not recognize his successor until it is too late." A sharp survey of the political landscape guaranteed to seed nightmares among the sensible, educated, and progressive.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
April 1, 2024
The omnipresence of conspiracy theories in American politics is excavated in this savvy study. Journalist Goldwag (The New Hate) surveys centuries of conspiratorial thinking, from anti-Catholic stories featuring papal plots and convent sex dungeons to rants against Freemasonry (too impious and communistic) and antisemitic conspiracies of Jewish economic dominion popularized by Henry Ford. Goldwag presents these delusions as precursors to present-day Trump supporters’ obsessions with theories of 2020 election fraud, the supposed machinations of progressive plutocrat George Soros, and the billowing QAnon conspiracy theory that alleges Trump is battling a cabal of Democrats who rape and murder children. Goldwag analyzes all this through a social psychology lens, seeing conspiracy theories as expressions of populist bafflement at the opaque workings of government and finance, the status anxieties of dominant demographic groups, and the cognitive dissonance that arises when cherished worldviews collide with facts. His exploration of the ideology, emotionalism, and sheer craziness of conspiracy theorizing is colorful and perceptive, though his take on the underlying causes doesn’t offer much that’s new until a penetrating later chapter in which he attends a Trump rally that he describes as “more about community than ideas,” getting at a cultish interpretation of the movement wherein the outlandish beliefs serve more as a shibboleth than a coherent politics. It’s a sharp-eyed assessment of Trumpism’s deep roots and toxic potential.