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    • Fear and Loathing from Manhattan

    By Damion Reinhardt • • 5 comments

    To become a virtuoso in the fine art of political demagoguery, one must develop a keen sense of what voters fear along with the ability to transform those fears into action in the form of a popular backlash against the status quo. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself, as there indeed are some things worth fearing. (Sanders supporters, for example, tend to fear that a very small group of Americans with vast wealth are wielding undue influence on our political system.) In the hands of a less scrupulous populist, though, a miasmic atmosphere of fear induces mob action while choking off the possibility of rational discourse.

    Here follows a brief and relatively abridged list of people and things which Donald Trump has encouraged us to fear and loathe over the last few years.

    Chinese people

    Mexican people

    Muslim people

    Barack Obama

    Doctors bearing vaccines

    No doubt there are many more groups which could be added to the list—feel free to leave them in the comments below—but this should be enough to be getting on with for now. If you look closely, you may see an emergent pattern to almost all of this fear-mongering. Trump starts with something which is a legitimate cause for concern if handled improperly (e.g. globalization, immigration, jihad) and then generalizes the problem to a much larger group of people who are seen as foreign and frightening by the sort of people who generally find foreigners frightening. (The only apparent exception to this pattern is Trump’s anti-vax nonsense, but that too seems to grounded in a deeply-rooted fear of contamination, though without the extra layer of moral metaphor.)

    There may be some ideas which Trump promotes which are not designed to appeal to fear and loathing of designated outgroup members. If so, I look forward to reading about them.

    Category: Politics

    Article by: Damion Reinhardt

    Former fundie finds freethought fairly fab.