I grew up with the radio on most of the time, tuned into a university radio station with educational shows on the arts, public affairs, cooking, gardening. The shows expanded imagination, for example, providing insights about foreign lands and people from those lands—building empathy and understanding. It was an introduction to a type of cosmopolitanism welcoming Otherness.
But what happens if the radio listened to builds prejudices instead of taking them down? What if the shows you hear make you suspicious towards the Other instead of welcoming? What if the shows make you feel threatened by difference and even superior to the Other? Unfortunately, millions of people listen to radio that has these effects (Hochschild, 2016).
John F. Kennedy noted right-wing radio’s effects in the 1960s and used federal powers to curtail it (never to be forgotten by right-wing hosts); but after President Reagan dismantled the Fairness Doctrine (requiring alternative views to be presented on the same program), conservative radio took off and provides most radio entertainment in “red” America (Matzko, 2020). The shtick of such programming is to tell listeners that they are victims and the perpetrators of the injustice are demonic.
David Neiwert (2009, 2017) describes the decades-long history of how talking points from the extreme right infiltrated mainstream conservatism via the whitewashing of talk radio, specifically, conservative radio. Hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who were considered to be bona fide conservatives, brought in cleaned-up extremist ideas (e.g., “feminazis”) and made them sound conservative. A key feature of right-wing radio is to scapegoat and demonize “enemies.”
After several decades of extremist view seepage into the discourse of conservative-credentialed pundits, extremist ideas are now central to Republican discourse. For example, David Duke, infamous former Klu Klux Klan leader, noted that the Republican Party’s platform in 1996 was very similar to his 1988 platform when he ran for president: antigay, antiimmigrant, antiabortion, antiwelfare, anti-affirmative action. Neiwert explains how this took place.
Right-wing extremism represents a conservatism “movement” in the USA, distinguishable from conservatism per se which is about conserving tradition and making change slowly and carefully with the future in mind. In contrast, the conservatism movement focuses on threat and exclusion, demonizing and dehumanizing those who don’t follow the party line. It’s about power. It manipulates the emotions and perceptions of listeners/viewers who are lured in with entertaining stories and who are susceptible to threat cues.
Recall that susceptibility to threat cues is often shaped by early life stress, contra the evolved nest, which undermines healthy development, for example, of the stress response system (Lupien et al., 2009). Over the decades, early life stress has increased, for example, with the speeding up of labor with the use of artificial oxytocin, undermining the interplay of mother and fetal hormones for a less painful and dangerous birth (Davis-Floyd, 2003).
The focus on hating those outside the sanctioned fold, even as infotainment, enables harmful action when the opportunity arises. As philosopher Iris Murdoch (2001) pointed out, if one routinely imagines harming someone perceived to be a threat just by their very existence, when the enabling situation arises it is much easier to take the harmful action because it has been rehearsed in the imagination so many times. Neiwert writes that “small acts of meanness” (e.g., through words or shunning) can become pervasive and can turn into large acts. He notes:
[Incidents such as] nesting personal encounters, the ugliness at campaign rallies, the violent acts of “lone wolf” gunmen—are anything but rare….what motivates this kind of talk and behavior is called eliminationism: 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.
Rhetorically, eliminationism takes on certain distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as beyond the pale, the embodiment of evil itself, unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus worthy of elimination. It often further depicts its designated Enemy as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches or diseases, and disease-like cancers on the body politic. A close corollary—but not as nakedly eliminationist—is the claim that opponents are traitors or criminals and that they pose a threat to our national security.” (p. 11)
Sound familiar? Although I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian church, eliminationism was not part of the rhetoric, though exclusionary discourse was (‘only we will be saved’). I think compounded trauma (e.g., complex PTSD), humiliation, the demagogue of Trump entertainingly blaming the “others” have contributed to shifting some Christians to eliminationist views.
In Neiwert’s account, the two key characteristics that distinguish eliminationist rhetoric from other political discourse is the focus on an enemy within the society, which targets whole groups of people as “vermin,” “animals, “monsters,” and the advocacy of eliminating those people through civil or violent means. In the USA, eliminationists hate the idea of an inclusive America. Eliminationism gives permission for people to act out their frustrations toward condoned targets.
In 2009, Neiwert argued that movement conservatism was not fascism –which would be openly revolutionary, dictatorial, reliant on intimidation and violence. However, he perceived “para-fascism” because although they threatened with bluster, movement conservatives lacked “the visceral, paranoid anger that animates so many actual fascists. They try to talk and walk like a fascist, but underneath, they lack the street violence and thuggery, the actual eliminationist enterprise that is the true fascist’s hallmark” (p. 27). At the time, Neiwert credited these distinctions for a situation then that was not irretrievable, remarking: “It is by small steps of meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity” (p. 28).
Times have changed.
More recently, Neiwart (2023) notes that moves toward fascism has been embraced by the Republican party. See Project 2025. He quotes the definition of fascism by Robert Paxton (from his 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism):
[fascism is] “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based part of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” (p. 218).
A confluence of factors has led to fascism’s rise in the USA, says Neiwert:
- USA’s roots were in racism and white supremacy at the founding of the country.
- A right-wing media machine that came about after the fairness doctrine was overturned during the Reagan presidency, resulting in a massive growth of right-wing radio and television that normalized extremist views.
- Social media algorithms encourage whatever keeps eyeballs engaged, which is usually entertaining misinformation and triggers of outrage.
- The Supreme Court has been undermining democracy-promoting laws, as with the Citizens United ruling allowing dark (unaccounted for) money into elections, enabling billionaires and corporations to more completely meddle, and invisibly, in elections.
Two other contributions have been named recently:
- Increasing detachment of the ultra-rich from supporting democracy because they feel entitled to do whatever they want without paying taxes, respecting laws, or citizenship duties. They support politicians who support socialism only for themselves and their corporations. (See Harrington, 2024, Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism). Elon Musk and Donald Trump are cases in point.
- The misunderstanding of freedom as negative freedom (freedom from restraint), rather than positive freedom which requires structures and systems that promote individual sovereignty, unpredictability, mobility, factuality and solidarity (see Snyder, 2024, On Freedom). (More on Snyder’s wonderful book in a later post.) The USA has neglected positive freedom for Whites for perhaps 40 years and has never fully provided it for non-Whites.
But what is at the root of all these features? Yup, you guessed it. The lack of nestedness across generations that leads to disconnection and dysregulation. We carry epigenetic inheritance of anxiety and dysregulation and unhealed trauma from European settlers’ unnestedness over generations (passed directly onto the Indigenous Peoples of Africa and the ‘New World’) (Menakem, 2017). Still today, the dominant culture has forgotten how to raise babies and children to avoid building in epigenetic dysregulation and insecurity into their bodies and psyches. The psychic soil for eliminationism and fascism was prepared long ago and modern culture has added to it.
Humiliation is a big part of the story. See next post.
REFERENCES
Davis-Floyd, R.E. (2003). Birth as an American rite of passage. University of California Press.
Harrington, B. (2024). Offshore: Stealth wealth and the new colonialism. W.W. Norton.
Hochschild, A. (2016). Strangers in their own land: Anger and mourning on the American Right. The New Press.
Lupien, S.J., McEwen, B.S., Gunnar, M.R., & Heim, C. (2009). Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 434-445.
Matzko, P. (2020). The radio right: How a band of broadcasters took on the federal government and built the modern conservative movement. New York: Oxford University Press.
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery press.
Murdoch, I. (2001). The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge Classics.
Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture and wisdom. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Neiwert, D. (2009). Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right
Neiwert, D. (2017). Alt-right: The rise of the radical right in the age of Trump. London: Verso.
Neiwert, D. (2023). The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy. Melville.
Paxton, R. O. (2005). The anatomy of fascism. Vintage.
Richardson, H.C. (2020). How the South won the civil war: Oligarchy, democracy, and the continuing fight for the soul of America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Snyder, T. (2024). On freedom. Crown.