As so often happens at family gatherings, the conversation this Christmas turned to politics. One of my inlaws has been exploring the world of right wing blogs, which are highly irrational and filled with hateful sentiments, she reported. Another, who watches Fox News, pointed out that the left is not without its own foibles. I piped up and said that I had written this book, THE NEW HATE, in which I tried to put the extreme right end of the political spectrum into its historical context.

All of its racism, sexism, and xenophobia, I said, all of its florid fears for national sovereignty; all of its paranoia about Fifth Columnists and Traitors in High Places, its conspiracy theories about false flags and sinister fellowships like the Illuminati, the Jesuits, the Masons, the Communists, the Council on Foreign Relations, B’nai B’rith, Acorn, and the SEIU have been with us since the US’s founding. If plutocrats like George Soros and Bill Gates and the Rockefellers are attacked as radical left wingers today, so too were the Rothschilds, Schiffs, Warburgs, Morgans, and Harrimans generations ago (the Rockefellers too). Politicians from TR, FDR, JFK, and Eisenhower to the Clintons and Obama have been accused of belonging to the Communist Party.

Nor is there anything new about the Millennialism that sees the world as shivering on the brink of an apocalyptic race war or economic meltdown that will make Mad Max look like Little Bo Peep.

Once you recognize the patterns, you realize that none of it, none of it–is new. Society has always had its relative winners and losers, and those losers–who as often as not were yesterday’s winners–resent their diminished status. It feels like the end of the world.

Early on Christmas morning, Ernie sent me a link to a lengthy interview with a “Department of Homeland Security insider” that touches on every one of these timeless memes. A few highlights:

Look at the threats to Obama. Start there. The accusations of racism. Then look at the polls, and especially the judicial decisions about voter ID laws. Bought and paid for, or where there was any potential for problems, the judges got the message, loud and clear. Then look at the voter fraud. And not a peep from the Republicans. Nothing. His second term was a done deal in September. This was planned. Frankly, the Obama team knew they had it sewn up long before election day. Benghazi could have derailed them, but the fix was in there, so I never saw anything on my end to suggest a ready-made solution had to be implemented.

Racism? What nonsense. Minorities run this country; the only victims of racism are white Christian patriots who have been crushed by the tyranny of political correctness. Republican traitors had a hand in their own undoing.

Obama didn’t win–remember that. His victory was “bought and paid for.” And look what he’s going to do to us:

I’m not going to give it to you in baby steps. Big boy steps. This is what I am hearing. Life for the average American is going to change significantly, and not the change people expect. First, DHS is preparing to work with police departments and the TSA to respond to civil uprisings that will happen when there is a financial panic. And there will be one, maybe as early as this spring, when the dollar won’t get you a gumball…. And the preparations are these: DHS is prepositioning assets in strategic areas near urban centers all across the country. Storage depots. Armories. And even detainment facilities, known as FEMA camps…. Anyway, I am hearing that the plan from on high is to let the chaos play out for a while, making ordinary citizens beg for troops to be deployed to restore order. but it’s all organized to make them appear as good guys. That’s when the real head knocking will take place. We’re talking travel restrictions, which should no be a problem because gas will be rationed or unavailable. The TSA will be in charge of travel, or at least be a big part of it. They will be commissioned, upgraded from their current status. They, I mean Jarrett and Obama as well as a few others in government, are working to create a perfect storm too. This is being timed to coincide with new gun laws. DH: New federal gun laws? RB: Yes. Count on the criminalization to possess just about every gun you can think of. Not only restrictions, but actual criminalization of possessing a banned firearm. I heard this directly from the highest of my sources. Plans were made in the 90′s but were withheld. Now, it’s a new day, a new time, and they are riding the wave of emotion from Sandy Hook., which, by the way and as tragic as it was, well, it stinks to high heaven. I mean there are many things wrong there, and first reports are fast disappearing. The narrative is being changed. Look, there is something wrong with Sandy Hook, but if you write it, you’ll be called a kook or worse.

Back in 1956, as I wrote in THE NEW HATE, Leigh F. Burkeland of the anti-Communist Minute Women of the USA wrote a much-reprinted editorial in the Santa Ana Register which claimed that the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act, which provided funds for building mental hospitals in Alaska, was actually a plan to build gulags for conservatives. “This legislation,” she wrote, “will place every resident of the United States at the mercy of the whims and fancies of any person with whom they might have a disagreement, causing a charge of ‘mental illness’ to be placed against them with immediate deportation to SIBERIA, USA!”

All the way back in 1948, Merwin K. Hart of the National Economic Council (Hart would later be involved with the Minutemen himself) urged Americans to buy “one or more guns” lest what happened in Spain and France a decade before happen here (Hart was a great fan of Franco, so it wasn’t a Fascist uprising he was worried about–it was the Loyalist resistance; as for France, he apparently believed that if more Frenchmen were hunters, they would have been able to stop the Nazi juggernaut at the border–not that Hart, who was an early Holocaust denier, saw that much to complain about in the Nazis).

As reported in the liberal tabloid PM, Hart’s newsletter explicitly or implicitly named “as enemies of the Hart way of life all Communists, all Zionists, all supporters of ‘bi-partisan’ foreign policy, all supporters of the United Nations, all Americans who voluntarily supported this country’s role in World War II, all trade unionists who sympathize with the French workers, and all people who believe in American democracy….Hart is asking that a minority of Americans arm themselves to insure that, when the time comes, their way of life may prevail against the policies of the US government and the wishes of the majority of Americans.”

“The most salient feature of what I have come to call the New Hate,” I wrote in my book, “is its sameness across time and space. The most depressing thing about the demagogues who tirelessly exploit it–in pamphlets and books and partisan newspapers two centuries ago, on Web sites, electronic social networks, and twenty-four-hour cable news today–is how much alike they all turn out to be.”

With the country heading over the so-called fiscal cliff and new shootings being reported daily, there will be many more occasions to remark on this in the months to come.