Party of Fear

Why, for two hundred years, have some American citizens seen this country as an endangered Eden, to be purged of corrupting peoples or ideas by any means necessary?

To the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, the enemy was Irish immigrants. To the Ku Klux Klan, it was Jews, blacks, and socialists. To groups like the Michigan Militia, the enemy is the government itself -- and some of them are willing to take arms against it. The Party of Fear -- which has now been updated to examine the right-wing resurgence of the 1990s -- is the first book to reveal the common values and anxieties that lie beneath the seeming diversity of the far right. From the anti-Catholic riots that convulsed Philadelphia in 1845 to the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, it casts a brilliant, cautionary light not only on our political fringes but on the ways in which ordinary Americans define themselves and demonize outsiders.

Author: David Bennett
Publisher: Random House
Published: 06/20/2000
Pages: 608
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.74lbs
Size: 8.68h x 5.66w x 1.46d
ISBN: 9780679767213

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 12/10/1995 pg. 44

About the Author
David H. Bennett is professor emeritus of history at Syracuse University, specializing in American political extremism and military, and twentieth-century American history. Books he has written include Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-1936 and The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement.