The Old Hate and the New Hate

It's easy to understand why all that pandering would have pissed off Ann Coulter. Pretty much every one of the 11 senior candidates swore their fealty to the king of the Jews the other night, bragging that they wouldn't make a move in foreign policy without Bibi's permission. In Ann Coulter's parents' day, the Jews wouldn't have gotten through the door of the Republican club. Now, as I suspect she sees it, they own a big part of the GOP's agenda, virtually all of the left's, and almost everything else in between. A classic anti-Semite from her parents' era might have seen it as the ultimate pincer move, exactly as the Elders of Zion planned it (cf. Protocol IX,#4: "WE HAVE IN OUR SERVICE PERSONS OF ALL OPINIONS, OF ALL DOCTRINES, RESTORATING MONARCHISTS, DEMAGOGUES, SOCIALISTS, COMMUNISTS, AND UTOPIAN DREAMERS OF EVERY KIND. We have harnessed them all to the task: EACH ONE OF THEM ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT IS BORING AWAY AT THE LAST REMNANTS OF AUTHORITY, IS STRIVING TO OVERTHROW ALL ESTABLISHED FORM OF ORDER"). Even as Jewish left-wingers disparage the Republicans in the media that they control, Jewish billionaires like the gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson put their candidates in their pockets. It's Henry Ford's worst nightmare and Republicans aren't allowed to say boo about it, or even make jokes. In fact they have to pretend that they like it.We've come to a kind of crossroads of hate. Historically, the American Paranoid's reigning obsessions were:1) Papism (meaning Roman Catholic immigrants)2) Atheistic intellectualism (Masonry and Illuminism back then, secular humanism today)3) Calibanic Demonicism (this is my own coinage; I use it as a shorthand for what our Puritan forebears saw as the dangerous sexuality and unregenerate sinfulness of natural man as embodied in blacks and aboriginal Americans--attributes that were also ascribed to suffragists and birth control advocates in later generations and to LGBT people today). Another word for this is "sex" *4) The Anti-Christ (This last includes Jewish bankers, Jewish arms dealers, and Jewish pornographers, which is to say Hollywood producers and popular culture purveyors, as well as the "left wing media" which they control. International Communism falls under this rubric too**The moneyed interests that have historically exerted the most power in this country and that are most deeply invested in the Republican party today have never been monolithic in their aims or beliefs; most of them were and are too cosmopolitan to give those paranoid obsessions full credence and too cautious to fully align themselves with the groups that do. But they don't disbelieve them either, and they've never stopped using them to manipulate the debt-burdened dirt farmers, struggling artisans, and exploited (or nowadays discarded) mill workers to vote against their economic interests.That deep substructure of Hate is pretty much as it always was, but its superstructure has changed beyond recognition. Hitler made anti-Semitism disreputable, as, after much struggle, the Civil Rights movement did the most overt forms of racism (structural racism, of course, is a different story). Catholicism has joined the mainstream; most people have never heard of Know Nothingism, but Nativism is as powerful a force as it ever was, as Donald Trump's continuing success (and Ann Coulter's support for him) proves daily. With Catholicism, anti-Semitism, and overt white supremacism off the table, Islam and Sharia have taken their place, alongside sex and to a lesser degree anti-scientism (which never went away).Of course it wasn't just Hitler. Starting in the '60s, a handful of neo-Conservative Zionist Jews made a tactical decision to throw in their lot with the GOP; later, they forged even weirder alliances with apocalyptic fundamentalist Christians, who need a Jewish Israel to fulfill the prophecies about the End Times. The vast majority of Jews want nothing to do with either, but the donor class that funds AIPAC and many of the other major Jewish organizations that claim to speak for Judaism believe that they are good for Israel.In the wake of Roe v Wade and Stonewall, religious Catholics and Evangelicals also forged a firm alliance that would have once been unthinkable. Strangest of all are the neo-secessionists; the programmatic racists who joined the Party of Lincoln after LBJ's great betrayal, and the Libertarians who believe that all government is tyranny.All of these people--many of whom wouldn't know what to say to each other if they had to sit next to each other on a long airplane flight--have crowded into the Republican big tent, along with the usual suspects who think their taxes are too high and their businesses over-regulated. It's no wonder that some of them feel the need to step outside for a breath of fresh air from time to time, or to let off a little steam.Seen in this light, it makes perfect sense too that Carly Fiorina would have singled out Iran and Planned Parenthood as America's two greatest existential threats, or that the world's leading brain surgeon would have hemmed and hawed about the utility of vaccines after Donald Trump re-told his story about the beautiful child who became autistic after getting shots. It also makes sense that the three leading hopefuls would have never held elective office.And Ann Coulter? She's just feeling a little cranky is all. "Republicans all agree 100 percent that we are pro-Israel, pro-Life, pro-gun," she protested. "So why do we spend so much time on these issues?"*Slavery and colonialism are about a lot more than sex, of course, but both are sex-haunted.**Communists (and I'm not talking about the nation states that were pointing missiles at us during the Cold War, but about the specter of domestic subversion that drove the Red Scares of the teens and McCarthyism) don't get their own category, since they are Jewish in the classic American paranoid understanding, and share the same ultimate goals as the billionaire bankers (cf the Protocols).PS For Goldwag completists, I adapted this into a longer essay for Salon, (This is Why They Have Such Hate: Trump, Coulter, Carson and the Real History Behind Right Wing Intolerance).