Economy

I have the original (c) 2009 paperback, not the digital edition. What we had then, in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore and 9/11 and Iraq and Afghanistan and Enron and Bear Stearns, was some uncomfortable discourse on the Left. Go back to my posts here right after Obama's election, my excoriation of Geithner and Summers. I got reamed for it. That's "uncomfortable discourse," but it's not eliminationism. And Neiwert doesn't claim it is.

This is one example, also from the "Introduction," of what he's referencing. That in 2008, or whenever he was writing, these people were out there, and they were already feeling free to voice their hate and their desire to eliminate the objects of their hatred. Yes, we had a long series of policies of hatred and eliminationism before, but officially -- supposedly -- we were working as a country and as a government away from it. What Neiwert is documenting is the slide backwards, which both allowed Trump a place on the public stage and accelerated the slide with him to push it.

The little Tualatin pancake house was an Oregon woman’s favorite breakfast spot because the owner, who often doubled as waitress, had always been friendly to her family, often carrying her youngest son about and serving them with a ready smile. But one morning in 2004, she went there alone for a cup of coffee and a side order of bacon, and wound up fleeing in fear.

An older couple in one of the booths next to hers was playing a card game; they told the waitress they were playing “Al Gore Gin,” which they explained meant you could make up the rules as you went along and “anything goes.” When the waitress came to the woman’s table to fill her cup with an amused look on her face, the woman remarked that it sounded more like a “Bush game” to her. Overhearing this, the card-playing couple started talking loudly about the virtues of President Bush.

Soon the occupants of another booth—three men, one middle-aged and two in their twenties—began chiming in loudly. In the process of declaiming the virtues of the president, the older man turned to the woman and remarked, “I hate all you fucking Democrats. You fucking deserve to die. Hopefully, we can kill the fucking bunch of you soon.”

The woman quickly got up, paid for her meal, and left, shaking and shaken. As she did so, she noticed that no one said anything to the man, who had turned to the others and carried on with his tirade.

Even in the absence of official (or unofficial) policies of eliminationism -- which we are now getting -- these people were perfectly willing to openly express their desire to eliminate a group of other people. And yes, he cites many other examples.

The Left hardly exists in this country because it's been systematically . . . . eliminated.