David H. Bennett
Vintage Books
1995 (revised from original 1988 edition)
585 pages
Salutations, readers! I picked up my copy of The Party of Fear: The American Far Right Movement from Nativism to the Militia Movement from Seekers Books in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood.
The Party of Fear is a historical survey of the far right political scene in the United States. American nativism, the social ideology which persecutes peoples coded as outsiders to the ideal American society, in the various forms it has taken since late 18th century, serves as the axle around which Bennett’s history of right-wing extremism revolves. Nativist movements are composed of individuals who have constructed identities of what it means to be a true American by establishing who aren’t true Americans and then victimizing them in a variety of ways. This usually takes the form of anti-immigrant or ethnocentric sentiments. An illustrative example of nativist is the Party of Native Americans led by Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Herbert Asbury’s book The Gangs of New York. Bill the Butcher leads his gang, the Party of Native Americans against recent immigrants from Ireland and the gangs they formed in response to such assaults. And by the way, in Party of Fear Bennett actually discusses the historical Native American Party, and Bill “the butcher” Poole, that was represented in Scorsese’s film.
A More recent example are these recent political ads that identify immigration from Mexico as a major threat to the American way of life:
David H. Bennett is a professor of history at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. One of his major research interests is political extremism in the United States, and this book appears to be the culmination of his work on this topic (although he has also published the book, Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-36, in 1969, which I’ll get around to reading eventually). This work is a survey of virtually every manifestation of right-wing radicalism in the United States going right back to the revolutionary period. Nativism was and is a core concept of the extreme right wing, and almost all of the movements featured in Bennett's text are underscored by nativist fears. Bennett finds a wax and wane to the history of nativism, which he weaves through his overarching history of the American radical-right. Nativist sentiments may, at one point, be a flag carried primarily by fringe groups to only explode into the mainstream later in an event as celebrated as the McCarthy hearings to root out communists, or the incredibly popular Anti-Catholic ‘Know-Nothing’ party of the 19th century.
At other times, Nativism is represented by fringe movements at the very tip of the political spectrum. The Ku Klux Klan (discussed at length by Bennett) and its violent paramilitary enforcement of the notion of the true American as white and protestant serves as a recurring example. Furthermore, my copy of the book, the updated 1995 revision, ends with discussions about the unorganized militia movements that emerged in the United States through the 1980s and 1990s which found national attention after Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building. Bennett’s book is not just about the pervasive existence of nativist sentiments but about nativist action taken against the perceived intrusion of America’s eternal outsiders, it’s about forming specific social units that identify themselves as American by taking action against that which they identify as non-American, whether its via the judicial and political apparatus ala Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn, or via night raids and other forms of terror a-la the Ku klux Klan. Bennett discusses all of these movements, as well as the more mainstream forms, including those presidents whose administration were defined by promoting nativist sentiments, such as Calvin Coolidge. This book is excellent as a historical survey of these social movements, and although it never studies any of these movements in depth, it has a large bibliography that points to books about each individual movement.
This edition was revised to include discussion of the militia movements that emerged in the 1990s. I hope that Bennett publishes another update soon to include many of the new forms of right-wing extremism that orbit around the nativist ideals since Barack Obama’s 2008 election. The profound rise of Islamophobia, manifested in the Dove World Outreach Center and its leader (who recieved global attention for his heavily publicized wish to ritualistically burn the Koran), but also discussed at length in this report. The post-911 prominence of conspiracist Alex Jones, who, for example, issued paranoid proclamations that the film Machete was a call to Mexicans to attack white American’s in a race-war, and the renewed explosion in far-right racist groups as studied by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, and the anti-Obama ‘Birther’ movement that claims that the current president is, in fact, an alien.
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