I like this piece from Jim Wright which I came to through Jay Ackroyd. It’s a worthy rant, and it’s on a topic I keep coming back to over and over. Fear.
Fear and its role in politics is the key that unlocks the puzzle and best explains the last hundred years of American politics. Hell, it undoubtedly goes back further than that, but we can’t learn as much from history that bears little resemblance to today.
We had the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare and the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust and the Atomic Bomb and McCarthyism and the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. We almost blew up the world. We came very, very close to blowing up the world. And the reason we almost blew up the world was because we were so damn afraid.
Fear is why some professor from Texas feels compelled to ask us to risk a nuclear exchange in Korea and can get it published in the New York Times. “Oh, maybe bombing North Korea might cause a war between North and South Korea, but it’s worth the risk. Maybe China might react the same way they did they last time we occupied North Korea and go to war with us, but they probably won’t.” Why would we risk this? Why would we imperil so many people, including, potentially, all of mankind? The answer is fear. It’s the nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror that Franklin Roosevelt warned us about in his first inaugural address. It’s why Congress won’t allow the president to close down the disastrous prison in Guantanamo Bay. It’s what led Dick Cheney, once he emerged from his underground bunker on 9/11, to adopt the one-percent doctrine.
“If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.”
It’s actually about fear. Terror. It’s about people who wet their pants when they are scared.
And let’s be frank. Fear is just more of a factor in the conservative mind than it is in the liberal mind. Liberals often choose to live in violent urban environments among people of different races and religions who speak different languages. They know how to handle the unknown and the unfamiliar. They know how to live with and manage fear.
But it’s more than that. The Republican Party has lived off fear since at least the 1930’s. Fear of communism. Fear of crime. Fear that someone might be getting something for nothing. Fear that people are having the wrong kind of sex. Fear of the Ayatollah or Gaddafi or Noriega or Saddam or al-Qaeda. Fear of death panels. Fear of ACORN. Fear that there’s a War on Christmas.
You know, some of these fears are or were rational. No one wants Soviet nuclear missiles parked 90 miles off our shore. But you have to be able to manage your fear. Fear causes people to make mistakes. If JFK had listened to his advisors, we’d all be dead. Or, if you are like me, you would have never been born. But JFK knew how to manage his fear and find another way.
There will always be scaredy-cats. Some people are just wired that way. But we don’t have to have a political party that lives and thrives on stoking those fears. What is Fox News, anyway, if it not just a magnified Two Minutes Hate?
Here is what you have to fear. Here are your enemies. Here’s who is undermining your religion. Here’s who is stealing your elections. Here’s who is disrespecting you. Here’s who is trying to kill you. All day long, seven days a week, 365 days a year, the oilless Wurlitzer grinds on, stoking the fear. It doesn’t merely take advantage of people’s stupidity; it weaponizes their stupidity. It turns their gullibility into fear. It takes their fears and converts them into terrors. It makes them worse people. It makes them more miserable people. It makes them want to strike back and out at their enemies, who are mostly imaginary. This is what the conservative movement does in order to get political power. It drives us all toward conflict and war.
The centrality of this problem in my thinking is one of the reasons why my focus is so heavily on keeping Republicans out of power. There are thousands of other political things I care about, but it’s this malicious consciousness that corrodes and distorts our country and that imperils mankind that I am committed to oppose.
This is also why I am still committed to nuclear disarmament and anti-proliferation efforts. It’s very important that we achieve a de-nuclearized Korean peninsula. But we don’t have to start a war in order to prevent one. I don’t like to be threatened any more than you do, but I’m not going to risk getting hundreds of millions of people killed or even tens of thousands of innocent Koreans killed, just because I cannot manage my fear.
