Overcoming Fear Culture and Fear Itself

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Savvy politicians understand exactly how and when to exploit these tendencies. “In conditions when conventional political ideologies fail to inspire, there is a temptation to resort to the politics of fear,” writes Alex Gourevitch in the Winter 2008 edition of the journal n+1. “The hope is that the quest for security, rather than anything higher, can become a unifying political principle in its own right.”

Unleashed in service of partisan politics, fearmongering serves not to unify the whole, but to solidify divisions and further our experience of fear as an isolating emotion. Over the past eight years, we’ve seen the politics of fear exploited and used to shape the Bush doctrine, the war on terror, and unprecedented restrictions on civil liberties.

Fear becomes a cycle that is all but impossible for politicians to abandon. Gardner recalls a town hall meeting in early 2008 during which Obama was asked about the politics of fear. He began brilliantly by blasting it. “You could tell this was what he really believed,” Gardner says. But then Obama’s “political mind got going.”

Covering his bases, the candidate gracefully shifted gears to acknowledge that there are thousands of terrorists out there who would like to do the United States harm, and that he would of course be diligent about protecting American lives.

“The political calculus always favors the politics of fear,” says Gardner. The rhetoric is so dominant that, until just recently, to simply reject it—to declare that the public’s fears are perhaps partially unfounded, if not at the very least answering to miscalculated priorities—would amount to political suicide.

Toward the end of the 2008 election season, however, the John McCain and Obama camps’ responses to the polls stood in sharp contrast, says risk analyst Paul Slovic, a professor at the University of Oregon and president of Decision Research. People operate on two levels, Slovic explains. System one is the gut, our feelings, from which many of our unfounded fears spring. System two is the analytical element, our minds, and people generally reach decisions in a combination of these two modes of thinking.

As the polls began to favor Obama, the McCain campaign’s response was to rely ever more on the gut. Republican strategists “sensed” that the polls were wrong, denied the scientific, and attempted to keep their hopes alive. The campaign strategy descended into triggering instinctive feelings and heightening misplaced fears.

For the first time in a long time there was an alternative: A candidate whose campaign emphasized hope, sacrifice, and trust in fellow citizens. Whose decidedly “system two” approach to answering questions (that is, thoroughly explaining all the relevant details) was so alien that his lengthy responses were at first mocked as being overly wonky. A candidate who said we can do better than this.

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