“Some Remarks on Fear and Politics” D. R. Koukal Delivered to the Muslim Student Organization at the University of Detroit Mercy November 16, 2010 I would like to thank the Muslim Student Organization at UDM for their invitation to allow me to share some thoughts, from a philosophical perspective, on fear and politics. [As Professor Finkenbine has just revealed], the politics of fear is nothing new to these shores, and as we can see by observing our present political culture, it has not yet gone out of style. So the topic chosen for tonight’s discussion is apt, given the times we live in. [But unlike the historian, who dutifully interprets and presents the events of the past to us and says, at least in this particular instance, “So it has been, and so it is now,” the philosopher has a more prescriptive bent of mind, and is prone to ask, “But why is it still as it is?” Why, that is, do we still fall prey to these regular spasms of fear that contort the body politic? Have we not progressed at all as the social animals that we are? Are we not more sophisticated as a people than we were in times past? For better or worse, the philosopher tends to believe in moral progress, which may well make the philosopher more naive than the historian. But there it is.] So how should we start a discussion that will at least begin to answer these questions? I propose that we start philosophically, with at least provisional definitions of the terms central to this forum: politics and fear. In regard to the former, let us stipulate that politics under a democratic form of government is simply how the people’s business gets done. In other words, the purpose of politics in a democracy is to care for the common weal, i.e., the public or social good. In the Declaration of Independence, the public good is famously defined as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Government is instituted to secure these goods, and these institutions take forms as varied as federal and state budgets, legislative bodies, military and police forces, law courts, mail service, public schools and roads, various regulations that safeguard our well-being, etc. Note that the Declaration defines the public good very broadly, which allows for different interpretations as to how government should help secure this good. For example, does life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness mean the government should leave individuals alone to pursue these goods? Or, since life, liberty and happiness are hard to attain without good health, should government institute a system whereby every citizen has access to quality and affordable health care? Note that no one disagrees about the desirability of these goods; it’s a question as to how they should best be secured, and reasonable people can disagree about this. So, for the purposes of our discussion tonight, remember this definition: politics in a democracy is how the people’s business gets done. Fear is somewhat easier to define, as we have all experienced it to one degree or another over the course of our lives. As children we feared the fierce-sounding dog down the street, or the disapproval of our peers. In college we might fear that we won’t measure up to the expectations of our parents or our professors. When walking down the street we might fear random crime. In old age we might fear death. From these commonplace examples we might venture to make a claim about the essential structure of fear: that fear is always fear of something, be it an actually existing entity or some future event. In either case this something is experienced as something that is not-yet-upon-us, and as something that threatens our own being or well-being. If we accept my provisional claim that politics is how the people’s business gets done, then we should be able to see that politics requires sober reflection and deliberation, in order to both establish the people’s social priorities and to determine the means to realize them. In other words, politics requires the exercise of reason. Our sainted founding fathers knew this in their bones, because they were children of the Enlightenment who saw reason as the only way out of the interminable religious strife that bloodied the soil of Europe for centuries. They also knew their classical western philosophers inside and out, most of whom saw the passions as things that got in the way of clear thinking. Some of you might regard this claim with suspicion because you think of philosophers as alien creatures who espouse odd ideas, but your own experience attests to its truth. All of us, at certain times in our lives, have been too angry, or too sad, or too afraid to think clearly. We can all think of decisions made “in the heat of the moment” that we wish we could have back. Here I’m talking about personal decisions, but the same certainly holds true for political decisions. To allow our emotions to hold sway at either the personal or the political level is to allow either ourselves or our country to remain ever a mere plaything of the passions. It is for this reason that I think logic, the science of reason, should be required of every college undergraduate. It is also the reason that our sainted founding fathers would look upon our present political condition with horror. “Negative campaigning”--whereby candidates hold their opponents up to ridicule, often through deceptive TV advertisements--has been a prominent feature of U.S. politics for as long as I can remember. The problem with negative campaigning from a philosophical perspective is that candidates spend more time trading accusations and talking about each other’s personal failings than they do discussing how different policies might actually effect the electorate. In the absence of any substantial debate of relevant issues, citizens often cast their votes based on superficial impressions of which candidate seems more “trustworthy,” less “despicable,” more “patriotic,” even more aesthetically pleasing. In other words, our votes are often cast out of a personal preference for a particular candidate. And when we do this, we cast our votes out of a ignorance of the policies a candidate may or may not enact, if elected. This kind of behavior exasperates philosophers, because these are political choices not founded in reason. There’s no necessary logical connection between the “likability” of a candidate and whether that candidate’s policies would be good for the country. But what alarms philosophers even more is the politics of fear, because as any psychologist will tell you, when we are afraid we are especially susceptible to manipulation, and more likely to act irrationally and to our own detriment. When a people’s fears--realistic or otherwise--are manipulated by unscrupulous politicians and demagogues, our society dances with danger on the knife edge of catastrophe. One obvious example of a catastrophic consequence of the politics of fear is the ongoing war in Iraq. The Bush administration used the legitimate fear generated by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to declare the necessity to pursue an international “war on terrorism.” Within a month of the attacks, the administration demanded, and was granted by a compliant Congress, an extraordinary increase in executive power that allowed it to pursue this war is it alone saw fit, including the power to electronically surveil U.S. citizens without judicial oversight, indefinitely detain individuals without due process of law, and torture individuals suspected of being connected to terrorist activities. In due course the administration claimed that Iraq was complicit in the 9/11 attacks (it was not), and that it possessed weapons of mass destruction that it intended to deploy against the U.S., either directly or by proxy. By hyping this imagined threat at every available opportunity through the use of deeply flawed and cherrypicked intelligence, the administration eventually convinced the majority of the American people of the apparent necessity of invading Iraq. And invade it did, with the results we see today: no weapons of mass destruction found, a shattered Iraq, an unstable Middle East, countless deaths and casualties and refugees, no end to the terrorist threat, a greatly diminished American reputation within the community of nations, degraded civil liberties at home, and a costly war that continues to put enormous strain on both our treasury and our military readiness. It’s important to see how legitimate fears were manipulated to advance this ruinous policy. Most of you are too young to remember the nationwide panic that followed the 9/11 attacks, which were the most damaging foreign attacks on American soil since the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor in 1941. The nation was jumpy, and it was very easy to believe that another attack was imminent. In those frightening days following 9/11, it was not unreasonable to be afraid of terrorists; there were obviously people “out there” who wanted to hurt us. And the Bush administration took advantage of our fear and pursued policies that have damaged (and continue to damage) our country. Such are the fruits of the politics of fear. Recently we are reaping more of this bitter fruit on the domestic front. The election in 2008 of Barack Obama, a man of mixed race, to the presidency of the United States, seems to have unhinged a significant portion of the electorate. Some of this anxiety may be due to the deep economic crisis he inherited upon being sworn into office, but if the truth be told, the Republicans ran a divisive, xenophobic, and at times racist campaign against Obama in the 2008 election. They questioned the status of his citizenship from the start, and through the constant repetition of his full name (Barack Hussein Obama) tried to associate him with the terrorists of Islamic fundamentalism in the minds of voters. Despite this vile, fear-mongering campaign, Obama won the election decisively, but the vitriol against the president has only intensified over the past two years. He has been accused, among other things, of being a black racist, a socialist, a Nazi, a closet terrorist and a secret Kenyan Muslim who wants to impose Sharia law on the U.S. All of these changes are demonstrably false, but that’s the beauty of employing fear as a political strategy--it taps into already existing fears deep in the psyche of the electorate, and so it requires no evidence. The whole strategy has been to paint Obama and his supporters as somehow “not American,” as radically “Other,” as unacceptably “alien,” as the bogeyman in the closet. When fear crosses into paranoia, a lack of evidence can be taken as a validation of our fears. When we were younger, our parents may have opened the closet to show us there was no monster hiding there, yet we still could not fall asleep. A monster so clever as to outwit our parents is a monster worthy of our most acute fears. With fear this intense we are even afraid of facts. In the months leading up the just past midterm elections, the Republican party and its Tea Party fringe took full advantage of this situation and stoked fears to their electoral advantage. As always, illegal immigrants came in for their share of abuse, even though they do jobs no citizen wants. Blacks and Latinos were accused of planning massive election fraud, though no evidence of fraud on such a scale was presented. And of course there was the Islamic center in lower Manhattan, the so-called “victory mosque” that was supposed to be evidence of the creeping “Islamization” of America. None of these are legitimate fears, and it is noteworthy that since the election these so-called “issues” seem to have fallen off the national radar screen. This should tell you something: certain politicians will say anything to get elected, even if it means turning us one against the other. Politicians who would wish us to fear one another play with fire, because the resentments stoked during a campaign can smolder and flare up long after the election is over. In the worst cases, the result is a holocaust that consumes a society. All of this is not to say that there is nothing to legitimately fear about the state of our body politic. Overall, I see a political system that seems utterly incapable of addressing the various and pressing crises that presently confound us. Our politics are dominated by two parties which are barely ideologically distinguishable, the filibuster has paralyzed the Senate, and, worst of all, the increasingly unrestricted flow of big money into our politics at every level has profoundly denigrated our democracy. The Tea Partiers are afraid of big government, but I think their fears are misplaced; they should fear the big capital that largely controls our government in order to achieve its own ends. Remember our earlier definition: politics in a democracy is how the people’s business--not the business of big business--gets done. The fault remains with us if we continue to consent to be governed by those who better represent unaccountable corporate oligarchs than the common interests of the American people. Our continued subservience to monied interests is my greatest fear for our politics. It would also be the greatest betrayal of America’s promise. “We want our country back!” This is the de facto slogan of the Tea Party, and within these words we can catch a glimpse of what it really fears. Who or what is denoted by the word “our” in this sentence? Go to YouTube and look at clips from Tea Party rallies and the 2008 Republican presidential convention, and you’ll see an ocean of older, angry, frightened, pale faces animated by racial, ethnic and religious animosity. I would suggest that this is what is meant by “our.” The Tea Party is intensely uncomfortable with social change, but it fears losing an America that never was--one that was uniformly white, Christian and Anglo-Saxon. On my reading of American history, our country has always been a work-in-progress, and the demographic trends are clear: the next few decades will deliver an America that is less white and much more religiously and ethnically diverse. The Tea Party also fears the agents of this change, and this would be you. Your generation is far more tolerant of diversity than mine was at your age; it was your vote that made a significant contribution to electing the first non-white president of the United States, something I was sure I’d never see in my lifetime. And although I am far from pleased with the president’s leadership so far, there is no diminishing his election as a momentous cultural accomplishment. As you might have guessed by now, I am deeply pessimistic about our immediate political future, but the two trends that give me hope are, on the one hand, the fact that Tea Party Americans are steadily fading from the scene, and, on the other, your rising generation’s tolerance of religious, racial, and ethnic differences. It’s just a matter of surviving this latest spasm of fear that presently besets us, so we can turn to address a common future with sober deliberation.