{"id":14224,"date":"2024-05-07T15:50:47","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T15:50:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=14224"},"modified":"2024-05-07T15:51:29","modified_gmt":"2024-05-07T15:51:29","slug":"the-politics-of-fear-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinosreadytovote.org\/?p=14224","title":{"rendered":"The Politics of Fear Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fear is not what\u2019s driving Americans to support Trump\u2014it is, instead, how many justify their support.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Peter Wehner<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A few months ago, I had an email exchange with a person who works in the right-wing-media world. He said that crime was \u201csurging,\u201d a claim that just happened to advance the Trumpian narrative that America during the Biden presidency is a dystopia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I pointed out that the preliminary data showed a dramatic drop in violent crime<\/a> last year. (Violent crime spiked<\/a> in the final year of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency, during the coronavirus pandemic, and has declined in each year of Joe Biden\u2019s presidency.) During our back-and-forth, my interlocutor at first denied that crime had dropped. He sent me links showing that crime rates in Washington, D.C., were increasing, as though a national drop in crime couldn\u2019t be accompanied by an increase in individual cities. He insisted the data I cited were false, implying they were the product of the liberal media. \u201cPerception is reality,\u201d he told me. \u201cNobody is buying the narrative that crime is getting better.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, after I responded to each of his claims, he reluctantly conceded that crime, rather than surging, was<\/em> dropping\u2014but ascribed the source of the progress to Republican states. I corrected him on that assertion, too. (Crime has dropped in both red and blue states.) He finally admitted that, yes, crime was decreasing, and in blue states too, but said the drop was inevitable, the result of the pandemic\u2019s end. So he blamed Biden when he thought violent crime was increasing and insisted Biden deserves no credit now that violent crime is decreasing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I consider where we ended up a victory, but only a partial and temporary one. His fundamental storyline hasn\u2019t changed. Virtually every day he insists that life in America under Biden is a hellscape and that his reelection would lead to its destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Welcome to MAGA world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mention this exchange because it reveals something important about the MAGA mind. Trump and his supporters have a deep investment in promoting fear. At almost every Trump rally, the former president tries to frighten his supporters out of their wits. He did this in 2016<\/a> and 2020<\/a>, and he\u2019s doing it again this year.

\u201cIf he wins,\u201d Trump said<\/a> of Biden during a rally in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, \u201cour country is going to be destroyed.\u201d Trump also said this<\/a> of Biden: \u201cHe\u2019s a demented tyrant.\u201d After Trump\u2019s victories on Super Tuesday, he told an audience of his supporters<\/a>, \u201cOur cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other politicians have been fearmongers, but none has been as relentless and effective as Trump. He has an unparalleled ability to promote feelings of terror among his base, with the goal of translating that terror into votes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as I recently argued<\/a>, Biden has been president for nearly three and a half years, and America has hardly entered a new Dark Age. In some important respects, in fact, the nation, based on empirical evidence, is doing better during the Biden years than it did during the Trump years. And evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, who comprise the most loyal and embittered parts of the Trump base, enjoy perhaps the greatest degree of religious liberty they ever have, and they are among the least persecuted religious communities in history<\/a>. The number of abortions, of particular concern for evangelical Christians, declined steadily after 1990<\/a>. A<\/a>t the end of Barack Obama\u2019s presidency, during which there was a decrease of nearly 30 percent, the number of abortions reached its lowest level since Roe v. Wade<\/em> was decided, in 1973. (During the Trump administration, the number of abortions increased by 8 percent<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many Trump supporters, then, fear is not so much the cause<\/em> of their support for the former president as a justification<\/em> for it. They use fear to rationalize their backing for Trump. They have a burning need to promote catastrophism, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But why? What\u2019s driving their ongoing, deepening fealty to Trump?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the explanation is partisan loyalty. Every party rallies around its presidential nominee, even if the nation is flourishing under the stewardship of an incumbent from the other party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that reasoning takes us only so far in this case. For one thing, it\u2019s nearly inconceivable to imagine that if any other former president did what Trump has done, Republicans would maintain their devotion to him. Richard Nixon committed only a fraction of Trump\u2019s misdeeds, and the GOP broke with him over the revelation of the \u201csmoking gun\u201d tapes<\/a>. It was not his liberal critics, but the collapse of support within the Republican Party, that persuaded Nixon to resign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond that, Trump was not an incumbent this cycle. In 2020, he lost the presidency by 72 electoral votes and 7 million popular votes; Republicans lost control of the Senate, and Democrats maintained their majority in the House. In the past, when a one-term president was defeated and dragged his party down in the process, he was shown the exit. But despite Trump being a loser, Republicans remain enthralled by him. So something unusual is going on here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal affiliations. Some are drawn to what the Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen calls the \u201cneed for chaos<\/a>,\u201d and wish to \u201cburn down\u201d the entire political order in the hopes of gaining status in the process. (My colleague Derek Thompson wrote about Petersen and his work<\/a> earlier this year.) And social scientists such as Jonathan Haidt point out that mutual outrage bonds people together. Sharing anger can be very pleasurable, and the internet makes doing this orders of magnitude easier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For several decades now, the Republican base has been unusually susceptible to these predispositions. Grievances had been building, with Republicans feeling as though they were being dishonored and disrespected by elite culture. Those feelings were stoked by figures such as Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, who decivilized politics and turned it into a blood sport<\/a>. And then came Trump, the most skilled and successful demagogue in American history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An extraordinary connection between Trump and his base was forged when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 and employed his dehumanizing language. Almost every day since then, he has selected targets at which to channel his hate, which appears to be inexhaustible, and ramped up his rhetoric to the point that it now echoes lines from Mein Kampf<\/em>. In the process, he has fueled the rage of his supporters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump not only validated hate; he made it fashionable. One friend observed to me that Trump makes his supporters feel as if they are embattled warriors making a last stand against the demise of everything they cherish, which is a powerful source of personal meaning and social solidarity. They become heroes in their own mythological narratives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it doesn\u2019t stop there. Trump has set himself up both as a Christ figure<\/a> persecuted for the sake of his followers and as their avenging angel. At a speech last year at the Conservative Political Action Conference<\/a>, Trump said, \u201cIn 2016, I declared, \u2018I am your voice.\u2019 Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not selling \u2018Morning in America\u2019 from Mar-a-Lago,\u201d Steve Bannon, one of the MAGA movement\u2019s architects, told<\/a> The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 Charles Homans. \u201cYou need a different tempo. He needed to reiterate to his followers, \u2018This is [expletive] revenge.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Malice, enmity, resentments: These are the emotions driving many Trump supporters. They\u2019re why they not only accept but delight in the savagery and brutishness of Trump\u2019s politics. They\u2019re why you hear chants of \u201cFuck Joe Biden\u201d<\/a> at Trump rallies. His base constantly searches for new targets, new reasons to be indignant. It activates the pleasure center of their brain. It\u2019s a compulsion loop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which brings me back to the exchange I described at the beginning of this essay. My interlocutor was clearly rooting against good news; though he would deny it, the implication of his response was that he wanted crime to get worse. Not because he was rooting for innocent people to die, though that would be the effect. What appeared to animate him\u2014as it has for the entire Biden presidency\u2014is the awareness that good news for America means bad news for MAGA world. Worse yet, good news would be celebrated by people\u2014Biden, Democrats, Never Trumpers\u2014he has grown to hate. But hate is an unattractive emotion to celebrate; it benefits from a polite veneer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this case, the finishing coat is fear, the insistence that if Biden is president, all that Trump\u2019s supporters hold dear will die. This isn\u2019t true, but it doesn\u2019t matter to them that it\u2019s not true. The veneer also makes it easier for Trump supporters\u2014evangelical Christians, \u201cconstitutional conservatives,\u201d champions of law and order, and \u201cfamily values\u201d voters among them\u2014to justify their support for a man who embodies almost everything they once loathed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even as Donald Trump\u2019s politics has become more savage, his threats aimed at opponents more ominous, and his humiliation of others more frequent\u2014he has become ever more revered by his supporters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I imagine that even some of the Republican Party\u2019s harshest liberal critics could not have anticipated a decade and a half ago that the GOP would be led by a man who referred<\/a> to a violent mob that stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power as \u201cpolitical prisoners,\u201d \u201chostages,\u201d and \u201cpatriots.\u201d It\u2019s been an astonishing moral inversion, a sickening descent. And it\u2019s not done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Peter Wehner<\/a> is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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