The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself

I've been thinking a lot recently about the roll fear plays in American life and culture. I've been wanting to write about it, but haven't had quite the right angle I wanted until I came across two posts from two of my favorite bloggers that got me going on it:

The first was by Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings. (Click on her name to see the whole article.) In a posting titled "Oh Please" she quoted the great genius Senator James Inhofe as saying

"Regardless of what polls show, Inhofe said, voters will have to ask themselves a question once they get behind the curtain in the voting booth on Election Day.

"Do you really want to have a guy as commander in chief of this country when you can question whether or not he really loves his country?" he asked.

"That's the big question." (...)

She closes with this: "You'd think the voters of Oklahoma might get tired of having their Senator insult their intelligence. I hope so."

The problem is that it's the voters of Oklahoma (and it's not just OK, either) who insult their own intelligence by electing people like this time after time. And, personally, I don't think intelligence has that much to do with it.

After thinking about it for a bit, this is more or less what I wrote in the comments section of her post:
As it happens, I used to own some (worthless, inherited) farm land in northwest Oklahoma, and I know lots of wonderful, otherwise intelligent people out there who think very much like Inhofe when it comes to politics.

The thing that they have in common, and Inhofe articulates so stupefyingly, is an extreme form of xenophobia - in effing spades!

Fear of the unfamiliar. Fear of anything different from us and the way things have always been. Fear of the new and untried.

When you're hanging on by a thread - and huge numbers of rural Oklahomans have been just barely doing that for all their lives - any kind of change is terrifying. You've just barely got a handle on the life you know; you're acutely aware every day that with one slip you're down the tubes. If anything happens to change that life, you might not know how to deal with it, and zoop! there you go.

It doesn't matter that the change promises to do away with your very need for the thread with things like a functional economy - one that includes you, even - and a social security (small esses) system that will provide for your needs while you're gearing up to participate in that economy. All you know is your thread and holding on to it. What happens if you can't master the new ways? Or, more likely, what happens if the new way turns out to be an illusion, only now they've taken away your thread?

Oklahoma isn't the only place where decades centuries of economic uncertainty have left folks feeling this way - just perhaps the most prominent in our minds, thanks to the big, articulate mouth of their most prominent Senator.

West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the central and southern parts of my own state, Illinois, the rural South, and anywhere else where life has always been marginally viable have always been full of folks just hanging on by a thread. That's why they're full of nutcase religionists and send people like Inhofe to be their voices to speak to the great big outside world.

The second article, and the one that clarified my thoughts and got me moving to post something of my own on the matter, was by the brilliant, articulate Chris Bowers at Open Left, a web site that if it isn't already, ought to be daily reading for any progressive who still thinks there might be a chance to heal and take back America.

In an article titled How Far Should Obama Be Ahead? Chris ponders the causes for the statistical variances between the polls that ask how many Americans favor what are basically Obama's policy positions (~70%, based on their anti-Bush polling numbers, or ~53% based on the 2006 elections) and how many people plan to vote for Obama over McCain (~48% Obama vs ~43% for McCain).

Again, after some consideration I posted my thoughts, and because I'm a lazy bastard, all I've done is cut and paste them here (with a tiny bit of editing, 'cause who can't be more clear after having had time to think a bit more?) Here's what I said:

The limits of statistics
Chris: You and Paul [Rosenberg] are two of the most gifted statistical analysts the left has, and I can't say often enough how grateful (despite some of the shit I've occasionally given Paul) I am for your work for the progressive cause, but there are limits to how far statistical thinking can take us.

Sadly, rationality plays too small a part in deciding national elections. For as long as I can remember (and I'm in my 60s) elections, and especially presidential elections, have been determined by emotional, rather than rational responses to the candidates.

You can take all the polls you want that say that umpty percent of Americans agree with Obama on the issues, but you absolutely can't extrapolate that percentage into votes for the guy.

When a pollster asks "Who are you going to vote for?", what (s)he's really asking is who do you feel the most comfortable voting for? Who do you "like" the best? And in America, that can be distilled down further to "Which candidate scares you the least?"

Despite which fiscal/social/security policy they favor, for a good one-half of this nation, when it comes to politics their controlling emotion is fear - fear in the form of xenophobia: fear of the unfamiliar, the different, the new, the untried - fear of anybody or any thing not like us - not like the way it's always been.

That is the simple, obvious, and irrefutable explanation for the differences between the policy and election polls. Fear makes otherwise intelligent people vote against their own stated objectives time and time again.

FDR could have been talking about current times for the Democratic party and the progressive movement when he observed that "the only thing we have to fear is fear, itself." And until we recognize the fear in the electorate, and find "healing" ways of addressing it, we're going to be doomed to more and more years of GWB-type government, no matter what the polls say about universal health care or the economy or anything else, because the Republicans understand that fear.

The Republicans have absolutely no interest in healing the fear. They've mastered the art of irritating it and keeping it raw and using it to manipulate the electorate with bogus issues like "patriotism" and flag pins and gay marriage and other "scary" stuff.

Until progressives can stop ridiculing and complaining about the comments people make out of fear and start addressing the fear-based community with compassion, and understanding them as otherwise intelligent fellow humans who have been brutally and callously manipulated into an irrational state where they vote against their own best interests, all of our efforts are doomed to accomplishing nothing more than reinforcing their fears and their fear-based voting patterns further.

More on this subject in future posts - perhaps even before the weekend is over. I want to talk about some of the other ways that fear in general and xenophobia in particular impact our culture and maybe even offer up some thoughts on how to begin working to heal it.