Instead of looking at guns and Muslims, politicians need to better understand fear and insecurity. Emotions, not issues, drive politics. The desire to stem the flow of refugees into the country and the one to further regulate guns come from the same place. Americans want to feel safe and, right now, they don’t.
Donald Trump’s popularity rises because, at a time of uncertainty, he exudes confidence, even if he’s often wrong. He has answers and solutions that are uncomplicated and with little nuance. In contrast, Barack Obama often sounds like a professor trying to explain a situation with little emotional attachment. Trump has tapped into the fear and anxiety while Obama has ignored it.
Sometimes, Obama and Trump have the same solutions with different language. Obama is using tactical air raids against ISIS while Trump just wants to “bomb the shit” of them. We’ve been doing that for awhile with little obvious effect. But it sure sounds better the way Trump says it.
Fear of random mass killings scares liberals more than the threat of planned terrorist attacks while terrorists scare conservatives more than random mass killings. The way conservatives see it, their guns would protect them against a single mass murderer. They believe we might not be able to predict or prevent psychopaths from going on rampages but we can keep terrorists from coming here in the first place. Liberals believe that if we can keep guns out of the hands of people who perpetuate mass murder, be they terrorists or psychopaths, we will all be safer. Conservatives don’t believe we can keep guns out of the hands of either.
The driving emotion for Americans caught in the middle is fear. They’re scared of Islamic terrorists and they’re scared of mass murders. They feel helpless to do anything about it and they want politicians with answers, not explanations.
By the same token, they’re also feeling insecure about their economic standing. The economy may be humming along but they aren’t feeling it. People lost most of their savings and haven’t recovered economically. Median income is still below pre-recession levels, college is still getting more expensive and benefits that used to be standard are now virtually nonexistent.
On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders tapped into the economic insecurity and seemingly bleak future for young Americans. However, he’s had little response to the fear emanating from the terrorist threat. Clinton seems a little stronger than Obama on foreign policy but she, too, seems a bit cerebral and measured. Trump is the only one who is effectively acknowledging the anger and fear, telling people they are right to have those emotions and that he has easy answers to make everything better. In contrast to Trump, all of the other Republican presidential candidates just look like pretenders.
The election is a long way away and who knows how Americans will be feeling then. Regardless, the politicians need to understand their emotions instead of pandering to issues and interest groups.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Politicians understand fear only too well. It is the people who vote who don’t understand fear and how it is used in elections.
Fear manufactured by the corporate US. media to promote war and totalitarian government in the US., repeated ad nauseam by our lackey’s in the Congressional and Executive branches and now Thomas jumps on the bandwagon with the type of eggheaded article I would expect from John Wynne. No big surprise here really, Thomas is convinced that Hillary is our next savings-grace after Obama the ‘not-too-reluctant’ neo-con. No one listening to the major network news – which is primarily owned by the military/industrial complex and gets its talking points from the establishment behind the Executive branch, has the slightest idea of what happened in San Bernardino – nor any of the other convenient terrorist attacks for that matter, but the one thing for certain is that the official narrative is pure sensationalism designed to promote fear for fears sake. This country’s drift toward a military police state has reached the point where it is unstoppable because the people believe everything the television tells them. Welcome to ‘1984’.
agree with disgusted, and I am also disgusted…
Politicians are not paid to reduce fear and insecurity – they are paid to create fear and insecurity. And to use that fear and insecurity to manipulate people into doing what the Campaign Contributor Class wants.
And what do those “Masters of the Universe” want? They want cheap, docile, profitable labor and the freedom to do as they please, regardless of what the “Poors” want or need – and for some (probably related) reason they really, really want us to hate Arabs.
So we bring powerless workers into the country as fast as we can get them in, we restrict the ballot and the bullets only to those who like things just the way they are, and media keep us constantly at each others throats to prevent us from recognizing that the “Masters” are the leaders of BOTH parties and that the “Washington Consensus” includes large-scale, “pre-emptive” war in the Middle East.
After every single mass shooting, we don’t say “hope”, we say “fear” – we see nationally prominent Democrats pumping up the fear-of-guns volume every time. Soothing words of calm are restricted to the response to terrorist attacks – because terrorist fear benefits the “other side”, while mass shooter fear benefits “our side”. Neither side is against fear. Fear is the mind-killer, and it makes governing so much easier. People don’t ask so many embarrassing questions when they are afraid, they don’t protest as much, they clam up and are “satisfied with less”.
(It seems to be our belief that Syrians need to be organized with lots and lots of very expensive weapons in order to have a chance at being free, but the same logic does not apply to Americans (especially African-Americans) – no matter what it says in the Declaration of independence.)
The Washington Consensus clearly includes the belief that Americans must be kept afraid – the only politics involved at all is over exactly WHAT we should be afraid of, and which of the elite’s goals is slated to be fulfilled in order to “address” the fear-of-the-day.
For more insight, see also “Hegelian Dialectic”.
WHAT YOU AND I NEED TO UNDERSTAND IS THAT WE ALL ARE COWARDS.
You say fear, we say hope.