Why Politicians Want You to Panic

[Rob L 3,811]

Crime is down, jobs are growing, America is pre-eminent. And yet Republican candidates are still fanning the flames of fear

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/panic-american-politics-213386#ixzz3wD2TGlZq

At the beginning of this year, after a Republican sweep in the midterms, new Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell had a message for the incoming class as the party geared up for the 2016 presidential contest: Don’t be “scary.”

“I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome,” he said. “I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority.”

Story Continued Below

But then came the Mexican rapists, and Benghazi, and the plot to “Islamize” America, and Planned Parenthood acting as an agent of holocaust. We heard endless dark warnings about Obama the Nazi, Obama the ISIS apologist. We learned that the Affordable Care Act is tantamount to slavery and the Holocaust could have been averted if the Jews had just had guns, and that the Iran deal will trigger the second Holocaust (so many holocausts!).Around the same time, we began hearing more talk of the rise of the “reformocon,” a calmer, more practical, policy-minded and less viscerally anti-government stripe of Republican. One who maybe even might be able to resist the temptation to actively antagonize Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing electoral bloc. For a moment, it looked like the fever that had burned since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 had broken.

Once the Paris attacks happened, the panic tightened its grip, with two leading Republican presidential candidates suddenly possessed by dueling hallucinations of celebratory Muslims in Jersey on 9/11. Then came San Bernardino. Donald Trump, who had previously contented himself with talk of an authoritarian state in which Muslims were made to register and neighbor spied upon neighbor, doubled down, calling for a ban of all Muslims trying to come to the United States. The rest of the field, while not quite scaling such rhetorical heights, hardly distinguished itself with steely Churchillian reserve, opting instead for a flurry of Muppet arms. When Obama gave a speech emphasizing calm and fortitude, Marco Rubio responded by saying that, on the contrary, Americans are “really scared,” John Kasich said “our way of life is at stake,” Chris Christie proclaimed that World War III had begun, and Jeb Bush said ISIS is “organizing to destroy Western Civilization.”

McConnell may have tried—however lamely—to get the scary horse back into the barn, but time passes and news breaks and the beast does not abide. What is driving all this panic? It’s easy to blame it on individual demagogues and pin it all on the symptoms of Obama Derangement Syndrome. This was the view on display in a November column by the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who attributed the abundance of panic in the GOP to the fact that “many bullies are also cowards” and “the apocalyptic mind-set that has developed among Republicans during the Obama years.” There is something to that, but it’s hardly the whole story.

The fact is, the variety of political panic we are presently enjoying is woven into the fabric of our society, an unfortunate side effect of living in a continually morphing nation of immigrants. This panic has historically afflicted the right more than the left (though the left is not immune to panics of its own), and though it usually simmers just beneath the surface of our politics, it has, at this particular moment in time, not just reemerged but, seemingly, gone mainstream.

For the most part, the current field of Republicans is riding the wave, ginning up panic whenever possible, in a campaign season that often seems less like an application to the White House and more like one for the ding farm. But will it work? Can this trembling, red-eyed, dark-minded impulse at the core of our national experience be marshaled to win a national election? And, perhaps more importantly, can it be stopped?

***

For all our talk of steady hands and rugged individualism, there’s a long and hallowed tradition of sheer barking panic in American politics. “There’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical!” Sinclair Lewis wrote in It Can’t Happen Here, his 1935 novel about a folksy American politician who leads a panicky nation into fascism. And indeed, we’ve done our part to prove him right. Over the decades, Americans, minds afire with doomsday visions of wild plots and schemes, have lost it over the illuminati, the Masons, the pope of Rome and his marauding Jesuits, the League of Nations, the U.N., communist infiltrators, welfare queens, Willie Horton, Jeremiah Wright, birtherism, gay plots, “death panels,” Jade Helm, no-go zones, the aforementioned Mexican rapists/ethnic cleansers/Ebola-infected ISIS supporters, and so on.

And throughout, most of those eruptions have come from a certain spot on the American political spectrum. Writing in 1954, historian Richard Hofstadter, borrowing a term from the social theorist Theodore Adorno, dubbed these people “pseudo-conservatives.” In his essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” which Hofstadter wrote in response to the rise of far-right demagogues like Joe McCarthy and groups like the John Birch Society, he defined the type:

“Although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatives, [pseudo-conservatives] show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, its institutions and traditions.” They may call themselves conservatives, Hofstadter noted, but they do so mainly for the veneer of political legitimacy the term confers. In reality, they are more a mix of ultraconservative, isolationist and, occasionally, radical. “They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word.”

The pseudo-conservative, Hofstadter continued, “is likely to be antagonistic to most of the operations of our federal government except congressional investigations.” He is preoccupied with his loyalty and the perceived disloyalty of others and prone to constant patriotic “self-advertisement.” He “sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world ... cannot possibly be due to its own limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.” He believes that “those who place greater stress on negotiation and accommodation are engaged in treasonable conspiracy or are guilty of well-nigh criminal failings in moral and intellectual fiber.”

All these years later, Hofstadter’s essay reads like the whiteboard from a breakout session at CPAC. While the author blamed the confluence of uncertain times and the advent of mass media—which keeps people “in an almost constant state of political mobilization”—he also argued that the animating spirit of pseudo-conservatism was tied to the “rootlessness and heterogeneity” at the center of the American experiment:

“Because we no longer have the relative ethnic homogeneity we had up to about eighty years ago,” he wrote, “our sense of belonging has long had about it a high degree of uncertainty. We boast of ‘the melting pot,’ but we are not quite sure what it is that will remain when we are melted down.”

[Janelle2002 3,865]

The first couple of paragraphs knocked it out of the park. Repubs want to create panic. A lot of times panic creates patriotism, votes and money, especially for the gun industry.

Edited January 3, 2016 by Janelle2002

[elmcitymaven 9,712]

a flurry of Muppet arms

Nice.

[Expat1 971]

with two leading Republican presidential candidates suddenly possessed by dueling hallucinations of celebratory Muslims in Jersey on 9/11.

You know, it's funny that those "hallucinations" were reported by CBS News the week of 9/11.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3auKMHkZJnQ

It happened, I remember the news reports myself. Whether one of our candidates "saw" it is another issue, but it is not an untrue story.

The raw news feed is attached.

Edited January 4, 2016 by Expat1

[ExPatty 502]

The first couple of paragraphs knocked it out of the park. Repubs want to create panic. A lot of times panic creates patriotism, votes and money, especially for the gun industry.

lolololol please get with the program. All politicians do this, always have.

Don't believe me? Go look at the left's recent comments on gun crime. The fact is it is down precipitously in the past decade but all we hear about is the complete opposite. Misinformation is used by all politicians throughout history and always will be. The reason they can do it is because misinformed voters don't care and are too ignorant to know better.

[Expat1 971]

Not to mention the 3-decade-old imminent destruction of all of civilization due to "global warming" (recently reworded to "climate change")

[Rob L 3,811]

Not to mention the 3-decade-old imminent destruction of all of civilization due to "global warming" (recently reworded to "climate change")

I think more educated adults who have look into the science understand that there are changes occurring to the planet and that it is caused by the use of fossil fuel and methane.

The theory about co2 impact on the enviroment goes back to the beginning of the 20th century , it is only recent decades that the impacts and the science to measure them became clear.

[Expat1 971]

I think more educated adults who have look into the science understand that there are changes occurring to the planet and that it is caused by the use of fossil fuel and methane.

The theory about co2 impact on the enviroment goes back to the beginning of the 20th century , it is only recent decades that the impacts and the science to measure them became clear.

You mean looked into the science yes?

Why don't you educate us because I'm not getting why droughts are because of global warming / climate change, floods are because of global warming / climate change, hot weather is because of global warming / climate change, and cold weather is because of global warming / climate change, all in the same place.

So please lay out the mathematical correlations for us all OH Educated One.

[Rob L 3,811]

You mean looked into the science yes?

Why don't you educate us because I'm not getting why droughts are because of global warming / climate change, floods are because of global warming / climate change, hot weather is because of global warming / climate change, and cold weather is because of global warming / climate change, all in the same place.

There is plenty of material that is accessible and understandable on this topic. I can't put Jesus in someones heart, they have to take the step to read the material with an open mind.

[OnMyWayID 1,489]

Crime is down, jobs are growing, America is pre-eminent. And yet Republican candidates are still fanning the flames of fear

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/panic-american-politics-213386#ixzz3wD2TGlZq

At the beginning of this year, after a Republican sweep in the midterms, new Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell had a message for the incoming class as the party geared up for the 2016 presidential contest: Don’t be “scary.”

“I don’t want the American people to think that if they add a Republican president to a Republican Congress, that’s going to be a scary outcome,” he said. “I want the American people to be comfortable with the fact that the Republican House and Senate is a responsible, right-of-center, governing majority.”

Story Continued Below

Good thoughts.. Go back and watch the first Republican debate and Jeb Bush was towing the line on this - He was the sole defender of common core, he was against the knee-jerk anti immigration stances, he even said his brother was wrong to go into Iraq... What did it get him? He went from the guy with all the money and backing to an after thought. His sky-is-falling competition got all the press.

The Democrats are no better - they spend most of their time telling us the world will come to an end if a Republican wins..

Fear mongering pays.

Edited January 4, 2016 by OnMyWayID

[Rob L 3,811]

Good thoughts.. Go back and watch the first Republican debate and Jeb Bush was towing the line on this - He was the sole defender of common core, he was against the knee-jerk anti immigration stances, he even said his brother was wrong to go into Iraq... What did it get him? He went from the guy with all the money and backing to an after thought. His sky-is-falling competition got all the press.

The Democrats are no better - they spend most of their time telling us the world will come to an end if a Republican wins..

Fear mongering pays.

I totally agree that politicians of all parties and stripes will , or need to act out to get the attention.

An educated electorate is to my mind the solution, is critical thinking a thing of the past?

[Expat1 971]

There is plenty of material that is accessible and understandable on this topic. I can't put Jesus in someones heart, they have to take the step to read the material with an open mind.

Summarized as yes, it is true and pass the plate because with enough fees, taxes, and regulation YESSSSSS we can control the weather can you gimme hallelujah.

Gotcha St Rob!

Edited January 4, 2016 by Expat1

[OnMyWayID 1,489]

I totally agree that politicians of all parties and stripes will , or need to act out to get the attention.

An educated electorate is to my mind the solution, is critical thinking a thing of the past?

Good question. A lot of this feeds into itself and it is hard to point to a place on a circle for a starting point.

People have chosen sides and it is more about winning than informed decision making.

[The Nature Boy 7,659]

Not to mention the 3-decade-old imminent destruction of all of civilization due to "global warming" (recently reworded to "climate change")

Or class warfare, or jumping on every racial situation possible to further the tensions, we could go on. I am glad the dems do want you to be scared .

Wasn't New York supposed to be underwater by today

and of course gun owners and ranchers. Be real scared of them

[ExPatty 502]

An educated electorate is to my mind the solution, is critical thinking a thing of the past?

I don't know if it existed in the past, but it doesn't now. I simply belief we need to limit voting to people with a demonstrable knowledge of the topics. Too many voters are patently ignorant of every topic and we need to cut out the "get out and vote" stuff. We are not collectively made better by morons voting. And human nature is such that a large segment of the population just don't care about anything not in front of their face.

In other times this problem has been addressed by limiting votes to land owners, but that puts even more power in the hands of the rich, so my proposition is a basic skill testing question. If you can't get an 80% on it, go home we don't want your opinion.

My view on this is not popular, but it exempts exclusion by race, sex, economic background. It is a simple litmus to see if you know anything at all, because without knowledge how can you have any wisdom?

Edited January 5, 2016 by ExPatty