For some time, I've had a nagging feeling that there was a common thread running through a lot of the rhetoric of the right, yet I couldn't put my finger on it, exactly. What was the spectral element of similarity running between such ideas as the war in Iraq, the extreme reaction against bringing even one Guantánamo terrorist into this country, the railing against providing our people basic health care because it might reduce what we could spend on defense?...and on and on. What was that unmistakable yet indeterminate tone that seemed to color the utterances of such disparate public figures as Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Donald Rumsfeld and even George W. Bush?
Eureka. It's fear. At bottom, these people are all scared. This recent column by Charles Krauthammer was what made me see it, perhaps because it's fear in a little different way. Here Krauthammer nominally critiques Obama's Cairo speech but expresses the views of a rabid xenophobe and Islamophobe. We hate what we fear, and hatred infuses every sentence of this rather strange diatribe.
This one key lets us look at some of the actions and events of recent years in a new way. Rush to start a war in Iraq based on buncombe evidence? (Fight them there, or we'll be fighting them here.) Overreact to a terrible, but possibly isolated terrorist attack 8 years ago? (They're everywhere, they're everywhere!) Spend money on assuring basic health care for every American? (We can't afford it because we have to keep up defense spending.) Close down our borders and let those damned foreigners (immigrants and visitors too, by god) stay home where they belong? (They'll ruin the country.) You say the Pres actually tried to suggest some similarities between Islam and the Judeo-Christian ethic? (Big mistake, our enemies will take it for weakness.)
It's not just political fear-mongering, though many Bush administration officials clearly mastered that technique. As political leaders, their tendency to perceive the world in us/them terms made them -- consciously or not -- disturbingly like the dictators and radical strongmen they profess to abhor (Castro, Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, Chávez, and others), all of whom have depended heavily on playing up an external bogeyman to frighten people with.
Nor is it paranoia, because who among us would deny that the U.S. does have real enemies? No, it's deeper than that - this is a group of people whose lives seem to be dominated by constant fear - fear of nearly anything foreign, of Islam, of terrorists, of an economic downturn, of foreign competition, of crime, of change itself. It must be a terrible way to live. We could just feel sorry for them, if they hadn't been in positions of power. But fear also distorts rational assessment of the world around us, something we truly can't "afford."
Comments