Fearmongering
Earlier this week Chris Hayes gave some blog real estate to reader BH. After noting that the Obama campaign is having the youth text “HOPE” to receive Obama updates, BH writes
I hear the republicans are jumping on the bandwagon…you can now text “FEAR” to 62263 and you get local updates on things to be afraid of—dirty bombs, smaller portions, secularism, socialized medicine, sweater vests, immigrants taking your job, the writers strike, doctors killing babies, taxes, activist judges, vegan cupcakes, and so on and so forth…
I have to assume BH hasn’t been following the Clinton campaign, or the general drift of Democratic politics in the Bush years. The idea that Republicans have a monopoly on fearmongering strikes me as pretty odd given the leading Democratic candidates’ fearmongering (if I may) on income dispersion, trade, and of course the environment. It’s easy to create a parallel list:
obesity, arsenic, theocracy, the Ku Klux Klan, foreigners taking your job, the writers strike, the patriarchy, the AMT, having to support your elderly parents, Bill Gates drinking your milkshake, and so on
One of my old classmates, Alex Gourevitch, offered a pretty provocative take on climate change and the rhetoric of emergency during an n + 1 symposium.
Environmentalism is not just some politics. It’s a political project, a full-bodied ideology, and one that presents itself in terms of progress and aspiration. But when you look at what this ideology is built on, it’s built on the idea that a collective threat that makes security the basic principle of politics and makes the struggle for survival the basic and central aim of our social and political life. This, to me, is not a progressive politics at all.
It is, instead, a politics of fear, like the rhetoric surrounding the ever-present terrorist enemy. Find the symposium if you can.
There is something unnerving in the hostility towards entrepreneurs that is becoming increasingly common, and I say this as someone very sensitive to the kind of self-dealing chronicled by David Cay Johnston. I find it as unnerving in its own way as the militarization of patriotism. Consider the way our morbid obsessions, from fear of asbestos to crippling status anxiety, have in a real sense damaged American children. Perhaps sowing irrational fear of ecological doom and sex offenders and foreign manufacturers and Bin Laden hiding under the cupboard is the only way we can take sensible steps to protect the environment or fight crime or create jobs or kill terrorists. But I doubt it.
Am I nuts, or has Reihan gotten a lot more stridently conservative over the past few months?
That said, how is survival ever NOT the basic and central aim of our political life? Everything flows from survival – if you don’t have survival, you don’t have anything. Recognizing that fact isn’t progressive or regressive – it’s basic human and biological instinct.
Rather, environmentalism, like national security or any other political issue can be sold via fear or via a progressive rhetoric. We can talk about global warming disrupting food and water supplies for billions, or we can talk about developing a renewable energy infrastructure that will allow for ongoing growth for centuries. Likewise, we can talk about radical muslims nuking American cities, or we can talk about overthrowing tyranny and spreading freedom.
(And that latter example should serve as proof that just because an idea’s pitched as being a positive step forward doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea… and conversely, that just because something like global warming does touch on very real and serious security concerns, doesn’t mean it should be dismissed as mere alarmism.)
— Chris · Feb 10, 07:30 AM · #
I’m fine with the militarization of patriotism — this is a time of war after all.
And I’m not sure what you mean by the increasing hostility toward entrepreneurs. Even if it has been decreasing lately (which I don’t see), approval of entrepreneurs has skyrocketed over the past 30 years, and a temporary dip isn’t much of a problem over the long run.
— PEG · Feb 10, 11:13 AM · #
I’m always fascinated by conservatives’ eagerness to dissect and criticize the “environmental movement,” such as they define it, and their general lack of interest in environmental issues. Of course, it’s perfectly legitimate to ask questions about the methods, goals and ideological underpinnings of environmentalism — but this is as far as it ever seems to go. You’d never know that there were actual issues at stake. It’s sort of like Democrats and national security. There simply is no such thing as any sort of coherent “conservative environmentalism,” even though such a notion isn’t obviously absurd or self-contradictory.
(The other thing that always jumps out in these discussions, of course, is how comically retrograde conservatives’ notions of the environmental movement remain. It’s like listening to my grandparents critique hip hop.)
— Saul · Feb 10, 06:40 PM · #
Hi Saul —
I have to assume you’re not a regular reader of TAS, as I write about environmental issues pretty often. Our archives, unfortunately, are in deep freeze, but I used to write about it quite a lot — with an emphasis on the nature and extent of the climate challenge and what we need to do about it.
But that’s fair enough.
— Reihan · Feb 10, 10:23 PM · #