Fear in politics works, but must not turn to hate

This may come as a bit of a shock to those who subscribe to the bravado of fearlessness in politics, but there is an element of fear in every vote.

Depending on your perspective, it can be argued it happens in almost every democratic process.

In the Saskatchewan political context, one could argue it happened in 1944, when voters took a chance on Tommy Douglas’s Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and elected North America’s first social democratic government.

Yet on every occasion that long-standing CCF/ NDP governments have lost power in Saskatchewan — the Liberal win in 1964, the Progressive Conservative win in 1982 (when Grant Devine ran on the slogan “There’s so much more we can be”) and the 2007 Saskatchewan Party win (when “Hope beats fear” become Brad Wall’s mantra) — one can argue it was optimism that drove the change.

But it quickly gets more complicated than that.

For example, many would argue that fear — fear of a government that’s grown static and has simply refused to make the necessary adjustments, or fear that a government has become radicalized — is as big a reason why old governments eventually lose.

Certainly, it was the fear of radical medicare and more radical ideas to come that was a big factor in Liberal premier Ross Thatcher’s defeat of Woodrow Lloyd’s CCF in 1964.

Sometimes hope is hope. But sometimes it is nothing more than thinly veiled fear.

Taken to the extreme, fear — especially under the guise of something else — can be exceedingly dangerous.

One can argue that post-First World War Germans were seeking hope in 1933 when they elected the social democrats led by Adolf Hitler. But clearly, it was their fear of everything in the postwar economic crisis, including those perceived as “outsiders,” that manifested into hate against Jews and others that drove us into the Second World War.

Since then, the democratic world has been wiser about allowing such fear to fester to the point of genocidal hate.

Nevertheless, one suspects that fear will always be — to some degree — part of political strategy because fear still tends to work rather well.

Returning to our local example, the CCF-NDP were especially adept at harnessing just the right amount of fear to convince Saskatchewan farmers and others that their post-Depression gains and perhaps their very existence would be threatened if they elected a government of any other stripe.

Similarly, the Roy Romanow/Lorne Calvert NDP were no slouches at convincing people that a vote for any other party would mean a return to the bad old days of Devine government debt, incompetence and corruption. It worked and kept the NDP in power for 16 years.

And having seemingly learned from the best, fear also became an effective campaigning tool for Wall and the Sask. Party. The 2011 election fear of returning to the bad old days of Dwain Lingenfelter morphed into a new-found Sask. Party mantra that a return to an NDP government here would have the same impact as Rachel Notley’s NDP government is having in Alberta.

In other words, fear has been a bigger propaganda tool in politics than hope, which is probably something worth remembering in the context of today’s world events.

Whether it be Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential campaign or the recent Brexit vote that saw the United Kingdom narrowly vote to leave the European Union, both have been underpinned by preying on people’s fears about jobs, immigration, etc.

That we should be disturbed by the nature of this goes without saying — especially when such fear can now be rampantly spread through social media and partisan sources.

But what we may need to put into perspective is that what we’re seeing isn’t unique.

As suggested earlier, fear is ever-present in politics because it works. To remove it seems unlikely.

What we perhaps should focus on is ensuring fear doesn’t manifest into the hate we are seeing elsewhere in the world — hate that so easily destroys reasonability and clear thinking.

Perhaps here is where hope will triumph.