Trump’s candidacy relies on the power of fear. It could be the only way for him to win.
.. Overall crime rates may be down, but a sense of disorder is constant.
.. His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention similarly made clear the extent to which his message revolves around fear. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” Trump thundered. “Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country. Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally; some have even been its victims.”
.. But he also, in a more unusual maneuver, summons fear in the abstract: There’s something going on, folks.
.. When back-to-back terror attacks hit Paris in November and San Bernardino in December, he pointed to them as proof that his warnings about Muslims were justified, and voters flocked to him ..
.. Trump’s standing in the polls rose about 7 percentage points in the aftermath of the attacks
.. Trump supporters, recent polling has shown, are disproportionately fearful. They fear crime and terror far more than other Americans; they are also disproportionately wary of foreign influence and social change. (They are not, however, any more likely than other Americans to express economic anxiety.)
.. It is a feedback loop: He stirs up people’s latent fears, then offers himself as the only solution.
.. fear is a handy tool. “Fear is easy,” Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican ad maker, told me recently. “Fear is the simplest emotion to tweak in a campaign ad. You associate your opponent with terror, with fear, with crime, with causing pain and uncertainty.”
.. A majority of Americans now worry that they or their families will be victims of terrorism, up from a third less than two years ago
.. Nearly two-thirds worry about being victims of violent crime. Another poll, by Gallup, found that concern about crime and violence is at its highest level in 15 years.
.. “the psychological management of uncertainty and fear” to be strongly and consistently correlated with politically conservative attitudes.
.. the characteristic most predictive of a person’s political leanings is his or her tolerance for ambiguity. “The more intolerant of ambiguity you are—the more you seek control over your surroundings, certainty, clear answers to things—the more you tend toward conservative preferences,” ..
.. he would bring order and control to a chaotic world.
.. I really thought this was a rational policy disagreement that was headed toward a logical compromise,” Sharry told me recently. “Now, I see it as deeply cultural. It’s racially charged, it’s tribalism, it’s us-vs.-them. It’s a referendum on the face of globalization,.. The fearful mind sees immigrants as an invasion force, refugees as terrorists, rising crime as a threat to one’s family, drugs as a threat to one’s children, and social change as a threat to one’s way of life... “Trump speaks to our id, something latent in all of us to different degrees. This is not a political campaign. It’s an identity campaign.”
.. From colonial times to the early 19th century, the pervasive, virulent fear was of Catholics, who were seen as inferior, unassimilable, and in thrall to a foreign dictator (the Pope).
.. The mass immigration of Irish Catholics in the 1830s and 1840s ratcheted up the panic and convulsed American politics, with the Whig Party collapsing and the anti-Catholic nativist Know-Nothing Party briefly becoming America’s second-largest political party.
.. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, is now campaigning on a fear-based appeal of her own—the fear of Trump.
.. as President he would escalate the likelihood of catastrophic violent conflict from without and within, posing a serious threat to the future of the United States,” her team wrote in a memo outlining their findings. This message, they noted, was far more effective than emphasizing Trump’s “misogyny” or depicting his economic record as bad for working people.
.. “Every time Clinton says, ‘Trump is dangerous,’ what people are hearing is, ‘The world is dangerous, it’s dangerous, it’s dangerous,’” she told me. “It just plays into the message of chaos.” And the more chaotic the world feels, the more people may look to Trump for comfort.
The Triumph of the Chaos Candidate
And so it came to pass, in the year 2016, on a sunny day in America’s heartland, in a hall smelling of sweat and popcorn and filled with a seething, roaring crowd, that Donald Trump—builder, shocker, demagogue, smasher of certainties, destroyer of the Republican Party, winner—accepted his party’s nomination, with a vow to restore order.
“Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities,” Trump proclaimed, his hand slicing the air, his pompadour gleaming with the reflection of hundreds of lights. “I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon—and I mean very soon—come to an end,” he added.
Yet Trump had just finished presiding over a convention that was anything but orderly.
.. This was something quite different, something rarely seen in the age of lockstep partisanship and spin: a ramshackle, thrown-together, halfhearted spectacle, one that brutally exposed the flimsiness of a campaign that has always been little more than a man, his plane, and his Twitter account.
.. if America is in chaos, Trump seems more a symptom than a remedy.
.. If this election is to be fought over chaos versus order, the convention did not make a convincing case for Trump as the candidate of control.
.. “Trump is anti-establishment, just like punk rock,” he said.
.. at one point, the conspiracist radio host Alex Jones had to be escorted out by police.
Resisting The Anti-Culture
Let’s face it: We now live in a world where refusing a man the right to expose himself in a woman’s toilet is enough to risk your city losing the right to host a football game.
.. The anti-culture warriors of this present age have very long, very strong arms and—unfortunately for the coming generations—very short sight. Just think of the Talibanic fury recently released on university campuses against any vestige of the past which does not conform to the exacting morality of the present.
Christians need to wake up to this. We have no culture to engage, let alone transform. It is thus time to drop the hip rhetoric of cultural engagement and transformation that comforts us that we are part of some non-existent dialogue and that grants the world of our opponents a dignity which it simply does not deserve.
.. He’s working from sociologist Philip Rieff’s definition of culture. For Rieff, any culture is defined by its “thou shalt nots” — that is, the things it forbids. This tells the people within a certain culture what is sacred and what is taboo. Culture is “a pattern of moral demands, a range of standard self-expectations about what we may and may not do, in the face of infinite possibilities.”
.. Modern Western culture is built on transgressing boundaries, on forbidding to forbid.
The center cannot hold because there is no center to be held.
.. Holding schoolchildren hostage to this perverse generation’s ideal of civil rights. Five years ago if you had said such an edict would come down from Washington, most people would not have believed it. Yet here we are.
.. Tomorrow it will mandate this in the public schools. And it will by no means stop there, not with this bunch, and certainly not with Hillary Clinton in the White House. It’s going to be one damn thing after another.
We no longer have a culture. We have chaos. And the people will accept it, because we have exchanged the culture we had for chaos, and we call it freedom.
I have never been the kind of conservative who thought of my government as a threat to me, my family, my faith, and my culture. That’s over.
.. It’s time to prepare for some very dark days. Those who still have a culture within them and their families and communities had better start digging in.
.. Whether Trump wins or loses, the Trump culture is ascendant. Whether in the person of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, we will get the President we deserve. The question is what next. Anyone who thinks that politics provides the primary answer to that question, is missing the larger reality.