Appealing to our bitter devils, not our better angels
This is a big election year, Tennessee. Prepare to be frightened.
“If you want your communities to be safe, if you want your schools to be safe, if you want your country to be safe, then you must go out and get the Democrats the hell out of office,” President Trump said at his political rally in Nashville Tuesday.
Abraham Lincoln, the great Republican president, appealed to “the better angels of our nature.” Nowadays, we’re consigned to the bitter devils. The Democrats aren’t above that sort of disrespectful and divisive rhetoric.
“Donald Trump is the worst president in modern history, and he just became the most dangerous,” U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff of California said in a recent Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee email to supporters.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the great Democratic president, assured us that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
Nowadays, we have nothing to fear but the fearmongering we’re being subjected to by the people who want to lead us. That’s on us. Candidates are scaring us to scare up votes. They do it because it works.
According to a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences, Trump voters in 2016 were
motivated by “fears of waning power and status in a changing country.”
Another study by the Public Religion Research Institute attributed Trump’s success to “fears about cultural displacement” — especially among white, working-class voters.
Candidates aren’t fear-mongering so much as they’re fear-harvesting. Another word for it is scapegoating. As my colleague Otis Sanford points out, this election year’s political scapegoat is the undocumented immigrant.
In campaign ads for Tennessee governor, Republican Diane Black promises to crack down on all immigrants who are in the state illegally.
“There will be no sanctuary cities and no sanctuary policies on my watch,” she declares.
Not to be out-scapegoated, Republican Randy Boyd vows as governor to “wipe out” dangerous immigrant gangs such as MS-13, end sanctuary cities, and support construction of a border wall. “Illegal is illegal,” he says. And pandering is pandering. Black knows that there are no sanctuary cities in Tennessee. And that governors have no authority to enforce federal immigration laws.
Boyd knows that Tennessee is much closer to Canada than to Mexico. And that domestic gangs are dramatically larger and more dangerous than MS-13.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection could tell them that illegal cross-border migration is at its lowest level on record — without a $20 billion wall.
The Marshall Project could tell them that in 7 of every 10 metro areas where immigration increased since 1980, crime has stayed the same or declined.
But Black and Boyd aren’t the only candidates trying to win primary votes by stoking primal fears.
Across the country, Republicans have aired more than 14,000 similar, anti-immigration campaign ads. That’s the primary reason millions of DREAMers — undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children — have been left in legislative limbo.
That’s why Tennessee legislators passed a so-called anti-sanctuary cities bill last month, even though there are none.
Why solve a real problem if you can use it to invent one?
There are approximately 120,000 undocumented immigrants in Tennessee. Meanwhile, there are approximately 600,000 Tennesseans without health insurance.
There are an estimated 6,000-10,000 MS-13 gang members in the United States, according to the FBI. Meanwhile, there are an estimated 1.4 million domestic gang members in the country.
Undocumented immigrants are involved in a handful of murders each year in Tennessee.
Meanwhile, Tennessee suffers about 1,500 opioid-related deaths each year, and about 1,200 deaths by firearms. Unhinged mass shooters are a bigger threat to our security than undocumented workers.
You want your communities to be safe. You want your schools to be safe. You want your country to be safe. Then you must go out and demand that candidates for public office focus on real problems, not concocted fears.