An Election Dominated by Fear

W.J. Astore

It’s “Take America Back” Versus “We’re Not Going Back”

This year’s presidential election is as grim as can be, and that grimness is reflected in the campaign slogans. Trump wants to “Take America back,” the implication being that bad people, I suppose the Democrats, have captured America and ruined it, and that only Trump can fix it. Harris says “We’re not going back,” meaning Trump can’t win again because he’d take America back to a hateful and brutal past.

Not a positive election, is it? How do you like your future, very bad or even worse?

It’s reflected in a story I saw in The Boston Globe this AM. Here’s an excerpt from a report on the swing state of Wisconsin:

Here in this key swing county of a key swing state [Wisconsin] that may well decide the presidency, voters across the political spectrum are gripped by fear over who will win the upcoming election.

Instead of expressing excitement about supporting their candidate — or simply relief that the election will soon be over — more than 50 voters interviewed here three weeks before Election Day repeatedly used words like “anxious,” “apprehensive,” “scared,” “worried,” and “terrified” to describe their feelings about the other party’s candidate winning.

Voters supporting former president Donald Trump said they fear that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, inflation, crime, and illegal immigration will rise, leading to a fundamental change in American life. And Harris supporters say another four years of Trump would increase division and undermine the country’s democratic institutions.

Two memorable quotes about fear occur to me. One is from Master Po from “Kung Fu” who said, Fear is the only darkness. And then Frank Herbert from “Dune”: Fear is the mind-killer. And of course FDR who told us at the height of the Great Depression that the only thing we had to fear is fear itself.

It’s an incredible disservice to the American people for both candidates to be stoking fear. What cowardice by both the Blue and Red Teams!

That’s yet another reason why I like third parties and why Jill Stein and the Green Party appeal to me. Stein presents a positive vision of the future, a more peaceful one, one in which Americans come together to tackle common problems like climate change, health care, infrastructure, and the like.

I refuse to vote for parties and candidates that stoke fear, that promote darkness and that seek to kill my mind.

Trump supporters at a rally in Wisconsin (Scott Olson/Getty)

Sorry, Democrats and Republicans: I’m not going “back” to you and your fear.

13 thoughts on “An Election Dominated by Fear”

      1. Good excuse to not bother discerning which side of the equation is more full of it. Because one side is lying more than the other. Feel free to decide which, but it’s a mistake to look at them as equivalent. If two men are fighting in a parking lot, you can assume they both just decided to have a fist fight, which might be the case, but it might well turn out that if you bothered to find out what was really going on, one guy took a swing and the other guy defended himself, the rest followed.

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        1. Both sides are appealing to fear–it’s undeniable. And both sides mischaracterize and exaggerate the other. For Trump, Harris is a woke Marxist anti-Semite. For Harris, Trump is a fascist dictator, the next Hitler.

          It’s not a fight in a parking lot between two men.

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          1. I am not exaggerating when I call Harris a woke Marxist. That’s objectively the case. They are exaggerating in the extreme when they claim Trump is a fascist. The Marxists are the fascists. And the appreciate the cover these false equivalencies create for them. My two cents anyways.

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  3. As an antiwar activist for decades, I’m not happy with the Democrats or the Republicans. What we need, aside from replacing the electoral college with direct voting for President, is ranked-choice voting. Both major parties oppose this, because it would strengthen third parties by better demonstrating the true sentiments of voters. That being said, the Republican party has effectively morphed into a reactionary, theocratic fascist organization. Given the importance of judicial appointments, it’s critically important to oppose this in the most effective way possible, which means holding my nose while I vote emphatically Democratic.

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    1. The problem with ranked-choice is that while one person might make the Green Party the first choice, and another person the Libertarian, ultimately one of the two major parties will be a second or third choice of both these voters and, together with the low-involvement voters, who will select as their first choice one of the two major parties that they always have voted for, then the ranked-choice procedure ends up as not bringing any value-added.

      For instance, in Canada, there are three major parties, the Liberals, the Conservatives and the New Democratic party, until recently, with an avowed goal of making Canada socialist. A Liberal voter’s second choice might be NDP or Conservative; a Conservative voter’s second choice would be Liberal, while an NDP voter’s second choice would be Liberal. So with ranked-choice the Liberals would always win.

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      1. To some extent I agree with you, but I would make two points: First, looking at American history, while the Democrats and Republicans have had a long-term lock on being the only major parties, this was not always true. We have had Presidents belonging to the Democratic-Republican, Federalist, and Whig parties, all of which no longer exist. So it is possible for major parties to be supplanted by other parties, and this is still happening occasionally at the state level with senators and congresspeople. Second, depending on the state, third parties typically need to go through expensive procedures just to get on the ballot, unless they have permanent ballot status. Usually, getting permanent ballot status depends on their surpassing some particular vote percentage in a previous election. Ranked-choice voting would result in more “third” parties obtaining that automatic ballot status, thus allowing them to use more of their resources to get more votes.

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