Identity, Policy & Character in Politics – America Idol Trumps All.
Deep down millions of Canadians and Americans “know” that something terrible is on its way. Middle and working class know that they in particular are going to be in the eye of the hurricane. No Golden Parachutes for them. Like Germans in 1931, they want to feel safe. Like Germans in 1931 they seek a Father and a Mother figure who will make it all go away. They want simple answers even if they know that they are wrong. Also, Why do the working class want to vote Republican or Conservative here in Canada?
The Palin-Whatshisname Ticket.
But race is just one manifestation of the emotion that defined the Palin rollout. That dominant emotion is fear — an abject fear of change. Fear of a demographical revolution that will put whites in the American minority by 2042. Fear of the technological revolution and globalization that have gutted those small towns and factories Palin apotheosized.
And, last but hardly least, fear of illegal immigrants who do the low-paying jobs that Americans don’t want to do and of legal immigrants who do the high-paying jobs that poorly educated Americans are not qualified to do.
From Hype to Fear in American Politics.
When the economy is doing reasonably well, the debate is dominated by hype — by the claim that America’s prosperity is truly wondrous, and that conservative economic policies deserve all the credit.
But when things turn down, there is a seamless transition from “It’s morning in America! Hurray for tax cuts!” to “The economy is slumping! Raising taxes would be a disaster!”
But there’s a powerful political faction in this country that understands very well that any real change will create losers as well as winners.
American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety.
Why, then, are twenty-first-century Americans more fearful than their counterparts sixty- five years ago or across the Atlantic? The “roots of American fear,” Stearns suggests, lie in traditions extending back to the colonial period of “fears attached to race and Evangelical fears associated with God’s wrath” (p. 74). He also invokes the post–World War II proliferation of science fiction scenarios of alien invasion and global annihilation, along with “the contemporary American sense of the strangeness of death” (p. 88). But the underlying cause is a “new fear culture” that began to take shape by the 1920s and that manifested itself most powerfully in childrearing advice and practices (p. 93). No longer taught to master their fear through courage, Americans were now socialized to avoid it or, when avoidance was not possible, to vent it. Meanwhile, an earlier sense of fatalism gave way to beliefs that most risks are preventable (as seen in changes in tort law and insurance practices)—beliefs that heightened Americans’ fears “when their expectations are contradicted” (p. 137). They were “left less emotionally prepared than desirable for unexpected intrusions” of fear and “more open to manipulations that either prolonged fear or promised decisive remediation” (p. 110). This “new socialization” combined with “decades of war-level alerts”—Stearns retraces the red scares, the nuclear threat, and a series of Cold War crises—to produce a populace prone to emotional overreaction (p. 198). Too much fear, in turn, has generated distorted psyches and policies. Via The Journal of American History.
Update 09/16: Jeffrey Zeldman’s A modest proposal is worth linking to. Imagine, discussing the the real issues and weighing each candidates resume and views on these issues. Revolutionary! Excerpt: “If you’re selling toothpaste, your claims must be vetted by legal and medical professionals. But not if you’re selling a candidate.
If you’re selling a candidate, not only can you lie about his record, but more to the point, you can lie about his opponent”.