(2009), Isms &; Ologies (2007), and The Beliefnet Guide to Kabbalah (2005). His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Salon, Truthout, the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog, and others.
Goldwag applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia, and reported the following:
So I opened The Politics of Fear to page 99, and about two paragraphs down, this is what I found:Visit Arthur Goldwag's website.Then came 2015 and the inexorable ascent of Donald Trump. Though Jeb Bush had been the favorite of the Republican establishment, Trump surged to the top of the polls and stayed there. I published an op-ed in The New York Times in which I called Trump ‘the latest in a long line of demagogues that have appeared throughout American history to point accusing fingers at Blacks, foreigners, Masons, Jews, socialists, central bankers and others.’ White nationalists were energized to see so unapologetically ‘pro-white’ a politician, I wrote, and ‘would-be Joe-the-Plumbers are inspired to see someone who talks and seemingly thinks just like they do and yet who has so much money.’ Trump’s poisonous message, I concluded, ‘may carry him to the White House.’Page 99 certainly captures my feelings about Trump back then. But what a reader who read jus
t that one page would miss are the efforts I make throughout its nearly 300 other pages to put our current crisis in its historical, cultural, and economic contexts.
I’m not so much interested in Trump as I am in the phenomenon of Trumpism, whose seeds, I argue, were planted at America's founding. Eruptions of QAnon-level paranoia have happened time and again throughout our history, whenever the two main wires that feed into the American identity cross. One of them is Protestant religiosity. The other is the worldly individualism that we associate with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Each is bottom-up and anti-aristocratic, and both are compatible with capitalism. But they are not always compatible with each other; touch them together and they spark.
I write about America’s long-standing urban/rural divide, the ravages of technological displacement, the fear of racial displacement, and the psychic toll that the false promises of the Prosperity Gospel exact from our economy’s left-behinds. I explore what cognitive dissonance theory tells us about the stickiness of irrational beliefs, revisiting Leon Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails, the classic ethnographic study of the members of a UFO cult whose behaviors when the world failed to end on the day their leader said it would eerily anticipated QAnon believers’ in the wake of Trump's electoral defeat.
I write about America’s oldest hatred, which is anti-Catholicism, and the rise of Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style antisemitism in the last century, which informs the many flavors of paranoid conspiracism today. I do some on-the-ground reporting at a Trump rally, whose crowds, it seemed, were less interested in Trump’s bombast than spending time with each other.
When I started writing The Politics of Fear in 2021, my great fear was that as Trump faded into obscurity, we would forget how perilously close to the brink our democracy had come. Now, I almost think of it as a letter to the future, a piece of evidence for its historians to parse as they sift through the ruins and try to figure out what happened.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
