The death of fear

First, a link to my uncle's blog post on this topic. It's good reading, and a lot of what I was going to say.

I wanted to add that this election was especially interesting to me in light of a couple of the more interesting books I've read in recent years. The first I'll mention is "False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear." It's not really a political book per se, but it's about how the constant state of fear inflicted on Americans is really not healthy, and pretty silly. (Like...how many smokers ignore the odds of that damaging their health, while simultaneously panicking if a guy in a turban gets on the plane with them?) Fear is just such an innate, hard-wired response that it is incredibly easy to elicit and manipulate.

Which leads to the other book, "Conservatives without Conscience," which explores the right wing's assumption of the strong-leader role to play into the authoritarian sensibilities of their base.* For the last 7 years, the GOP has played up fear and claimed to have a monopoly on the answers to what scares you. In this election, Americans shook that off. Instead of giving into the fear of the "other" (which was the point of every whisper campaign against Obama), the majority of Americans went with Hope. That's a pretty incredible shift, biologically and electorally.

So in light of this...where does the GOP come from here? I'm going to stick with my pre-election prediction, that the GOP is going to be doing a lot of soul-searching, which is going to be quite confusing for their evangelical base.

And I thought I'd close with this...it's one of my favorite pieces of multimedia art from the 2004 election cycle, when fear-manipulation was in full swing. (The original this was mixed from is "Pet" by A Perfect Circle.) Hopefully we can put this kind of thing behind us and get on with the future!





*This is a fascinating book and I've blogged about it before, but the gist of the argument is that evangelicals are primed to buy into an us vs. them mentality and the idea of a strong leader who has all the answers.