Fear is what you feel when you face something that is unknown or a perceived threat to you. But fear goes beyond that. Fear is also related to the need to understand, in that if you don’t understand why something is going on, it is instinctive to fear it. Today we are vulnerable to the politics of fear. The politics of fear is when leaders use fear as a driving or motivating factor for the people, to get them to vote a particular way, allow excesses in spending, or accept policies they might otherwise abhor. It’s banking on the fact that presenting people with an alleged threat to their well-being will elicit a powerful emotional response that can override reason and prevent a critical assessment of these policies. Populist politicians use such language to develop a cult-like following, divide nations, create culture wars and instill hatred. It is all about disguising the actual project.
As Edmund Burke (1729-1797) who fiercely opposed the French Revolution wrote, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” “People react to fear, not love,” explained Richard Nixon, a scaremongering maestro whose cries for “law-and-order” were a coded message to white citizens worried about black crime. “They don’t teach that in Sunday school. But it’s true.” And no President has weaponized fear quite like Trump. He is an expert at playing to the public’s phobias. The America rendered in his speeches and tweets is a dystopian hellscape. He shapes public opinion by emphasizing dangers – both real and imaginary – that his policies purport to fix. As author Mark Vernon has noted “… the politics of fear plays on an assumption that people cannot bear the uncertainties associated with [risk]. Politics then becomes a question of who can better deliver an illusion of control.1,2
The problem is that the lens of fear distorts what you see. It focuses primarily on the negative, exaggerates the potentially threatening, filters out alternative views, and causes you to compromise your core values out of the urgent need to survive. Another notable difference today is that many people feel that they may have to confront threats on their own. As a citizen you may become more compliant, more willing to surrender your rights for vague promises of safety. As an employee you are less demanding, less willing to take risks. These days, the measurable loss of faith in government combined with the difficulty of fighting terrorism has given the public less confidence that they will be kept safe. The narrative of fear presents a vision of a shrinking future, not a better one. This fear of losing what they already have is a source of stress.
There is a significant challenge in securing actual facts today. We have a strong propensity to seek out and remember information that confirms things that we believe to be true, and we quickly dismiss and forget information that challenges our beliefs. Consequently, we are vulnerable to misinformation that reinforces our worldview and confirms our suspicion that people we do not like are just as sinister and untrustworthy as we think they are. The echo chambers of our favorite social media and cable TV news convince us that our views are in fact shared by most people, and this can make us feel pretty smart and confident. In such echo chambers, even the wackiest conspiracy theories acquire a veneer of truth and rationality that seem incomprehensible to people outside of the bubble.
Conspiracy theories can be especially seductive in an atmosphere of fear. In order to hack into the minds of the public, people need to feel fear or uncertainty. That could be caused by economic instability or pre-existing cultural prejudices, but the emotional basis is fear. “There is some research to suggest people turn to conspiracy theories more when they’re confronted with crisis situations,” says Douglas. Some psychologists have compared conspiracy theories to religious beliefs, in the way that they help us to feel more in control, by taking unpredictable or random events and making them seem somehow predestined or shaped by human hands. Eventually, conspiracy theories can become so popular that they enter a positive feedback loop, in which the more they’re discussed, the more legitimate they seem. By taking fringe ideas mainstream, the former US president taught new and dangerous lessons about manipulating social and mass media.2
Populist economic policy claims to design policies for people who fear losing status in society, and those who believe they have been abandoned by the political establishment. The populist economic agenda focuses on single and salient political issues, over emphasizes negative aspects of international economic exchange and immigration, and/or blames foreigners or international institutions for economic difficulties. Populists exploit racist myths and stereotypes to instill fear in working-class who have genuine economic problems. In 2016 Donald Trump was elected on a wave of anti-establishment fervor in the wake of increasing inequality, the anger he could exploit and deflect toward the easiest and most vulnerable target: immigrants. Is there significant push back? No, Republicans clearly feel empowered by Trump. He frees them to reveal their darkest desire – which is to end democracy as we know it, and to cut any corners or break any laws necessary to get the job done.
Fear is created not by the world around us, but in the mind, by what we think is going to happen, observes Elizabeth Gawain. The Trump administration’s failed public health response to COVID was mirrored by its failure post-COVID to respond to the largest global economic crisis in a century. This created the worst economic shock since the Great Depression – societies were in turmoil and economies in a nose-dive. We fear new because of the uncertainty it brings – we might lose what is associated with change. Our aversion to loss can even cause logic to fly out the window. The Republicans need a distraction, and turn to their old playbook: an emphasis on urban disorder and racist fears of illegal immigrants moving into largely white neighborhoods is a familiar play. It has boosted the party’s candidates at least since President Nixon’s “law and order” campaign in 1968.
[S]ince love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved, notes Niccolò Machiavelli. Americans are more afraid today than they have been in a long time. One of the many unhappy byproducts of the election since Donald Trump announced his campaign for 2024 is the return of fear to the political table. Are Republicans afraid of Trump? Actually, no – he’s destroying democracy and they love it. But these actions of the president are possible only with the craven acquiescence of congressional Republicans. As a group, they are pushing towards replacing democracy with a system where a powerful minority holds power. Like their leaders, Republican voters are feeling done with democracy and eager to follow Trump into a new world, where the majority of Americans who vote for Democrats are kept out of power, by any means necessary.
Ben Johnson observes, “Fear is implanted in us as a preservation from evil; but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it. It should not be suffered to tyrannize in the imagination, to raise phantoms of horror, or to beset life in supernumerary distresses.” We fear new because of the uncertainty it brings – we might lose what is associated with change. Our aversion to loss can even cause logic to fly out the window. Fear cannot be characterized solely as a socially constructed phenomenon, nor as the instinctual response to personally felt traumas. The growth and nature of fear must be studied as a process that develops under its own inertia, feeding off its antecedent past, and as a phenomenon that is shaped by and in turn shapes its institutional setting. Fear should be understood as both structurally determined and socially transformative.
It is necessary to harness the politics of fear to create transformation. Transformation is an internal fundamental change in your beliefs of why you perform certain actions. It modifies values and desires. We need to replace individualism of neoliberalism with a new common sense based in a sense of we, with its understanding of our interdependence and collective agenda. Transformation is an assertion that our actions today create our future tomorrow. The future is about closing the common goods gap that will be realized by freeing ourselves from constraints of special interest projects. The new system is about not being afraid to implement an agenda that spells the end of Project 2025. This means enacting policies that support access to health care for everyone, subsidizing the college system, to make the criminal legal system more just and humane for all. A butterfly is a transformation, not a better caterpillar.3
1 https://m.aliran.com/web-specials/2016-web-specials/we-are-a-nation-at-war-with-itself
2 https://time.com/4665755/donald-trump-fear/