A couple of things: I'm going to stop using the word "eliminationism" to refer to conservative rhetoric that portrays liberalism as a force to be crushed rather than merely a rival political ideology. I actually agree with David Niewert that much of contemporary conservative rhetoric goes beyond mere "incivility" into portraying liberals as illegitimate political actors and liberalism as a kind of domestic enemy, but I no longer think eliminationism is the proper term for that.
The reason is that I wasn't aware of the term's origin as a historian's label for the "desire that Jews be eliminated from Aryan society," and learning it from Michael Moynihan's post the other day makes me uncomfortable about employing it to refer to contemporary American politics. Conservatives certainly speak sometimes as though liberalism is a poison to be expunged from the body politic, but liberals in America are not Jews in Hitler's Germany, and conservatives are not Nazis.
I'm not doing this out of some misguided desire to be part of a "new era of civility," or because I want to be "fair" to conservatives; it's more that I want to be fair to the facts. There is a key distinction between forcefully advocating violence and what conservative media figures sometimes do, which is what Bill Clinton referred to as leaving "the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable." That means we have to be precise in describing it.
