Has fear killed American optimism?
Not yet, but it’s time for aspirational politics.
Today, America is a fearful place, even though optimism is hardwired into the culture. What else is the Declaration of Independence, with its celebration of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” but an exemplary document of hope. “The American, by nature, is optimistic,” John F. Kennedy declared in 1960; “an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly.”
But listening to US political debates in the run-up to this year’s presidential election, hope barely features. The focus is more on bringing things down than it is on building them up. Mostly, it’s about deconstructive fear, great wallops of it. Politicians no longer pretend to sway an undecided electorate with upbeat visions of the future. Instead, it’s a slugfest to conjure the most terrifying predictions. Long gone are the heady days of Barack Obama’s “audacity to hope.” Now, it’s negative partisanship, all the way.
At the end of Sound of Freedom, the controversial 2023 film about child trafficking that became a box office hit last year, despite being panned by critics, the actor Jim Caviezel makes a personal plea. “I’m guessing some of you are feeling sad, maybe overwhelmed or even a sense of fear, which is understandable,” he says. “But living in fear isn’t how we solve this problem — it’s living in hope.”
Increasingly, this is the favored political maneuver. Pile on the fear, and just when despair sets in, make a pitch for hope. Not the born-again variety, but a hope that is so fear-drenched it can never pull away from the negative forcefield it was spawned in.
Donald Trump is the master of warped fear. “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America” was the catchphrase of his 2020 campaign, which raised the dreadful specter of rampant lawlessness were he to lose. It’s this vision of social and political breakdown that he’s been hammering home, along with his avowal to hunt down the “vermin” who’ll “do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.” As Trump has put it, “Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.” True, he backtracked during the Covid-19 pandemic when he insisted that he had played down the severity of the virus because he didn’t want people to panic. A nice conceit from a leader whose political trademark is fear.
As Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, once declared, “Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.” Even Republican lawmakers “are afraid of Donald Trump,” according to Chris Christie, a one-time candidate for the Republican nomination. They are just too afraid to back the charges against him for his actions on January 6, when his supporters breached the Capitol Building in Washington, DC.
Trump’s fear is personal, too. Sharks may terrify him, but as Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide, confided on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Trump has “a very potent fear of being poisoned.” Meanwhile, in an ironic twist, during his campaigning in Iowa earlier this year, it was Trump who accused Biden of “fearmongering” as a ploy to divert attention away from the economy.
In 2019, during the Democratic primary debates, Marianne Williamson, a bestselling author of self-help books, alleged that Trump had “reached into the psyche of the American people and he has harnessed fear for political purposes.” Her mission was to cast out this fear and replace it with love. “I’m going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field, and sir, love will win.” It was a dubious proposition at the time with a vaguely medieval twang to it. And easier said than done. Four years on and love shows little sign of winning. Now it’s all about fear, which is so far ahead in the game there’s no competition.
Another Republican contender to have tapped the fear zeitgeist, before pulling out of the race to support Trump, is the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. The denunciation of fear was a centerpiece of his campaign. Ramaswamy sees the corrosive influence of fear everywhere, especially in American education and race politics, the subjects of his polemical book Woke, Inc. “Fear has been infectious across our country,” he declared in August 2023, but “courage can be contagious, too.”
Just when it seems there is an antidote to all this soul-destroying fear in the form of courage and hope, Ramaswamy turns the table. Fear is always the flip side of the values he is espousing since those values become easier to sell if they’re jeopardized. Fear is an emotional frame for melodramatizing the gathering threats to the American way of life which he claimed to be uniquely equipped to avert, from the refugees flooding the country’s southern border to the death of the American dream.
Fear isn’t partisan, either. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in October 2023 announced his bid for the presidency as an independent, has been an outspoken fear-basher, claiming that “climate change is being used to control us through fear.” On social media he has suggested that Americans have been physically harmed and mentally cowered by Covid-19 containment measures. During lockdown, he claimed, people were unable to “exercise and eat well and fortify their immune system.” And this physical deterioration has been paralleled in the political sphere. In a bizarre medico-political metaphor Kennedy concluded, “we must never allow ourselves to succumb to fear. Fear disables both the immune system and the capacity for critical thought which is key to the survival of democracy. We will restore our health as we reunite our communities and rebuild our nation.”
Then there are the fears swirling around President Biden’s bid for a second term. While some Democrats worry that he is too old and ought to have made way for another candidate, others push a different fear narrative arguing that Biden is the only Democrat capable of keeping Trump from the White House.
History shows that fear can be divisive, stoking resentment and fueling conflict. Yet fear can be generative, too. Individuals can bond and communities coalesce around shared fears. Fear can function as a catalyst for change.
The fear which we see today is not of this kind. It motivates and builds its fragile constituencies around collective investments in spectral threats. What’s on display as the US presidential elections heat up is a politics of fearmongering that postures as anti-fearmongering; in which fear is condemned but then ruthlessly exploited to further a cause. This is ultimately a dead-end politics because it offers no way forward, no roadmap for the future, no aspiration for change. Hope in this world is a zombie, a non-being whose inner life has been divested and only temporarily reanimated by the dark energy of warped fear.
It’s time to recharge American optimism and the hope it inspires because as Eleanor Roosevelt once observed, “Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier.”