The Politics of Fear!

The Politics of Fear

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears” – nelson mandela

Fear is one of the most complex emotions most humans feel. From an abusive relationship, to uncertainty at a workplace, the fear of what is known or unknown remains to be understood as most other emotions which most often can be diagnosed, managed or even treated.

When we feel fear it mostly an emotional reaction to something. In cases where these triggers are known, we feel fear because we feel powerless to control or confront it. Reactions to fear like most other emotion is to fight to freeze or to fight. The fear we feel as a result of social behavior are more domestic in nature. When it expands into politics, the concept of fear hits home. That is so because then we feel our financial wellbeing, our ability to love, our culture, our religion etcetera threatened.

In a political climate, fear can easily metamorphose into a commodity that is much more complicated. Because, anger usually precedes fear the world’s most infamous leaders have exploited it. They understand the emotion of anger is a symptom of fear. Since the advent of the twentieth century, the world’s most notorious politicians have used this tool mostly to divide and to rule. It works

When people go to the polls to cast their votes….

Let us take this closer home and look at the US politics. From a distance, the Trump campaign and Sanders come across as a stark contrast in terms of ideology. A cursory look tells a different story that there is more they have in common than what separates them.

When Trump says Mexicans are rapist, Africans come from shithole countries, Muslims are terrorist he exacerbates what is perceived to be the worse of these cultural or ethnic units in a way that elevates their threat to other cultural or ethnic units. By doing so, he draws a line around our ability to co-exist with one another along these ethnic, religious or cultural lines. His message? They hate us. It’s us against them and I will fight for you.

For Sanders it is much of a different ideology but grossly the same symptom. His brand of politics targets Billionaires, Wall street, Banks, Insurance companies’ etcetera. He says they are the reason the world is the way it is, the reason the system is rigged against everyday working people. His surrogates propagate the message that these institutions as an existential threat to your wellbeing. Like Trump, he also draws a line around our ability to co-exist with these institutions and establishments along economic lines. Their theme? They hate us, it’s us against them and I am the man to fight for you.

So in summary, while Trump focuses on cultural or ethnic sentiments, Sanders on the other hand is focused on social and economic and sentiments. Both speak to anger – a symptom of fear!

Silly as it may sound, this brand of politics has been shown time and time again to appeal to different spectra of people. People attribute fear to the ever-growing populist movement across Europe. They see it as a reason the communist party’s authoritarian rule has been successful in China and when you put Russia in the equation, the signs become rampant of a strong state power despite it being a democracy.

For most Democratic leaning voters, the most important thing on the top their mind is to defeat Trump and return to some degree of normalcy. That brings to fore the overarching conversation around electability which Biden comfortably fills according to current polls. But there is also an issue here and as Van Jones puts it, Biden sees Trump as a disruptor of normalcy while Sanders sees Trump as a result of it.

That is telling even if both agree with most democrats that the most important job to get done is to get Trump out! While Biden offers stability, Sanders is perceived by many moderate as threading the dangerous line of a revolution at the behest of his supporters and not even the political establishment can stop the movement. Many who are not tuned in to his message argue against building a radical movement on top of chaos. They think it will only lead to even more chaos. That is their main paranoia, which essentially is another version of fear. Sanders has not been able to address this. You don’t have to look beyond his health plan to see why.

Don’t read between the lines lest you miss the message that is not on display here.

Add that to Trump’s fueling of fear and its easy to see why this can speak to different ethnicities in a different way.  What seems to have eclipse that argument is…..

To bolster that argument, Sanders seems to point to the fact that he is winning the ideological argument and not the electoral argument. That argument gets thrown out the window when you consider how much we know of how populists’ movements have invigorated electorates, flamed excitement in political discourse, ultimately translating into turnouts and overall winning. One or both haven’t been the case with Sander’s movement.

Political ideologies engineer turn out In a world where politics has become tribal, that argument gets thrown out of the window. Not the least his insinuation that those who oppose his ideologies are “a part of the establishment”. By saying so, his team have thrown the pragmatism of African American voters into abysmal significance. You have to pause to understand that African Americans bear the most brunt of a Republican leadership. Talk about Social security, Healthcare, Social Justice etc. and then the fear of an economic sabotage as Sanders has vigorously campaigned wouldn’t mean much compared to the reelection of a Donald Trump. Yet, that is a conversation for another day.