Democrats enjoy portraying Republicans as fearful

by philg

A Facebook friend linked to “Evangelicals Are Supporting Trump Out of Fear, Not Faith” (TIME) and the Hillarist faithful responded lovingly. The idea that Republicans are quivering fearfully is apparently delightful to them.

I wonder when this started. Has it always been a feature of American politics to portray opponents as acting or voting out of an irrational fear rather than because of a difference in interests?

If politicians truly believe this, wouldn’t they tone down their rhetoric quite a bit in order to soothe the fearful folks on the other side and try to win some votes? This is not what we observe. Is it that Democrats don’t actually believe that Republicans are fearful? Or Democrats don’t believe that any Republicans can be converted to the correct path? Or something else?

(Separately, the article opens with

On June 21, the writer E. Jean Carroll came forward with a vivid and disturbing claim that Donald Trump raped her in a department store in the 1990s. She is the 22nd woman to allege that Trump committed acts of sexual misconduct. These claims are more extensive and more corroborated than the accusations against Bill Clinton

so of course I had to respond with

He raises a good point. Until billionaire Republicans (even if Democrats at the time) stop raping elderly Democrats in public places, there can never be peace between the parties.

and

Another good rule is that atheist Jewish New Yorkers are the best authorities on how Christians in the South and Midwest think.

(the editor of TIME is Edward Felsenthal))

22 thoughts on “Democrats enjoy portraying Republicans as fearful”

  1. Why can’t your proposition of differing interests be in alignment with fear based politics? For example: gun owners are afraid, gun ownership is a form of self soothing; they are interested in maintaining that right. Of course conservatives aren’t going to attribute their beliefs and interests to fear, as that’s viewed as weakness. Instead, they attribute words like freedom and liberty to their motivations. Which are really code for freedom to act in irrational ways, due to fear. Why don’t democratic politicians cater to these fears? Because humoring irrational behavior and thought is reserved for children. Democrats acknowledge fear, but it’s usually more rational and often empathetic. Whereas conservatives can’t acknowledge a problem until it’s their problem and the fear is felt.

    As for conservatives being more fearful:

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201612/fear-and-anxiety-drive-conservatives-political-attitudes

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/calling-truce-political-wars/?redirect=1

    • In the old days people would say “A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.”

      But maybe part of this is that more conservatives have more to fear?

      Consider someone who lives in public housing, is a Medicaid subscriber, and gets food stamps every month via EBT. This core member of the Democratic constituency need not fear higher tax rates (since any income is either minimal or unreported cash), having his or her luxury automobile stolen, inflation (Medicaid will pay the higher rates; the EBT card will be stocked with a higher number), etc.

    • @philg mo money mo problems, right?

      I guess your proposed demographic just has different things to fear then losing some material ( insured ) wealth. Such as being harassed and killed by the police, preyed on by drug gangs empowered by federal and state drug laws, lack of access to health care, being food poor, etc etc.

      But other then that, its a wonder everyone isn’t signing up for the easy life, weird people work so hard to get out of the ghetto when its such a utopia as you describe.

    • Why would someone in a free house be in the “ghetto”? The modern public housing is “mixed income” and
      the free apartments are just 12% of the units in a new luxury building, for example.

      (Also, if people “work so hard to get out of ghetto” why do we have multiple generations living in public housing? The folks who run
      the free housing here in our town say that nobody has ever moved out.)

    • Philg, sure, conservatives have more to fear–that’s how they’re wired. Paranoia, and the resulting fear and anxiety is real, it’s just highly irrational. Gay marriage. Transgender people lurking in the bathrooms. Brown people destroying the economy. Being petrified of Muslim terrorists, meanwhile ignoring the radical white males who do most of the terrorizing. People melting into puddles without their guns. You’re constantly singing the praises of the care-free welfare life. I’m guessing you’ve never experienced the kind of anxiety low income people and their children struggle with. Just ignore all that, rise above the terrible education and lack of role models, and magically just get to work and become a productive member of society, right? Wouldn’t it be amazing if children got assigned schools randomly, rather than by socioeconomic zones? Everyone has the same opportunity, right?

    • We did send kids to schools at random starting in the 1960s. See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/us/politics/kamala-harris-berkeley-busing.html for a recent article on busing. Berkeley today has a poverty rate of 20% compared to a national average of 13.5%.

      I know a lot of low income Americans! They live in apartments in cambridge that have market values of $60,000/yr. Or live rent-free in Lincoln, MA in apartments that rent for about $30,000/year.

      Anxiety? They don’t have enough anxiety to go out and look for a W-2 job that would disqualify them from continuing to receive free housing, health insurance, food stamps, and smartphone!

    • Philg, you know them, or you know of them? Significant difference. Have you really known any poor people?

  2. Phil,
    Whenever you read someone speculating on the motives of others, especially the motives of others one has never met, I recommend you move on to to something else. I mean most of us can’t even understand our own motives most of the time much less the motives of strangers. It is like the psychologists and psychiatrists speculating on the hidden motives of the Donald or Barry Goldwater when they can’t even understand the motives of their own wives, husbands, children.

    • That’s a good point. In the Last Stone book that I recently finished, prison psychologists gave a glowing report about Lloyd Welch regarding his rehabilitation from being a molester of a 10-year-old girl. They didn’t notice that he was guilty of participating in the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 10-year-old and 12-year-old girls (and possibly guilty of a bunch more similar crimes).

      However, even if there is no way to evaluate the truth of folks’ assertions that Republicans are paralyzed by fear, it is still interesting to look at how enjoyable contemplating this assertion is for Democrats!

  3. The traditional criticism of capitalism has been everyone is fearful because they don’t have a government safety net. Not sure how the media connected religion, rape, & fear, but there must be a government safety net in it, somewhere. Just another 5% on medicare & you’ll never have to live in fear again. Then again, maybe another 10%.

    • Yet a lot of European countries have extensive safety nets and yet minimal risk-taking (entrepreneurship).

  4. Ms Carroll told CNN “most people think rape is sexy … think of the fantasies”, and in 2012 tweeted about good TV shows including “Law & Order” and Trump’s “The Apprentice” (she’s a “massive fan”). Strangely, her allegation of Trump bursting into a Manhattan Bergdorf’s women’s dressing room is literally a plot from an old episode of “Law & Order” where a couple plays out a fantasy with the man bursting into a Manhattan Bergdorf’s women’s dressing room. Can drinking a magnum of white wine while watching TV induce false memories?

    • So we are forced to conclude that Donald Trump worked as a screenwriter for the Law & Order TV show? And he drew on his experience with this elderly woman for a script?

  6. Because they’re playing to the self-identified holiness of their side.

  7. I can’t speak about your Facebook friends who probably are as you describe them, but do want to note the author of the piece is David French, who himself is an Evangelical Christian Republican (https://reason.com/podcast/why-libertarians-should-care-about-the-illiberal-right-as-much-as-the-illiberal-left/) and since he is writing about Evangelicals he may not be imputing motives to them but speaking from first hand knowledge. At one point in 2016, Bill Kristol proposed French as the Republican write-in candidate to oppose Trump.

    I do agree though that in general the argument “so and so isn’t rational, isn’t voting in their best interests, I know better than they do about what is in their best interests” is a bullshit argument, and a common one.

  8. I’ve had this idea bouncing around my head since the election, and it wasn’t until reading the lede of that article that I finally made the connection to what I consider to be a perfect illustration. It has been said that the OJ verdict — and the overwhelming sentiment of black people in America supporting it — was based on sticking it to the man, and winning one against white people, and for the black community, no matter how guilty he was. (The excellent TV miniseries puts a fine point on it at the end.)

    I posit that conservatives are coming from the same place, against a liberal media, in the election of Trump, and that this kind of reporting is only guaranteeing his reelection. According to the media, allegations of sexual misconduct weren’t enough to take the presidency away from Clinton. Conservatives are now living in the world that liberals created: Personal morals don’t matter; only the agenda. They are relishing the turnabout, and every attempt by the media to unring that bell will only make them dig their heels in deeper.

    Combined with the so-far in-credible Democratic field of potential candidates, I’m predicting an easy win for Trump/Pence in 2020. My own politics are quite a mashup of all sides, so all the parties have something to offer me, and I’m ambivalent about it. I’m only claiming to understand WHY it’s happening, something which seems to continue to elude the media. If they really got it, they’d stop this sort of reporting. But they can’t help themselves.

  9. Leftists always accuse others of precisely the same things they are doing. I’m not sure whether this is a projection (since leftism is ideology of envy it appeals to losers and other people without much of moral sense) or simple lack of imagination.

    • Lack of imagination? I beg to differ. The strategy works.
      It worked in Russia, China, Zimbabwe, and Argentina. It worked for the US State Department on a few occasions. Thief shouting thief is a centuries old folk story that both Arabs and Chinese claim as theirs.

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