Let’s hope fear management defeats Trump
Forget crisis management, risk management, anger management. The newest “management” issue for our political leaders — and consequently for us — is fear management.
Leading Republican presidential contender Donald Trump isn’t managing fear, he’s exploiting and stoking it. With his shocking call this week for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” Trump ushered in a new level of fear exploitation and hardcore bigotry in the U.S.
I last wrote about fear before the federal election, chastising the Harperites for fear mongering on a variety of issues: “We have nothing to vote against but fear itself,” I wrote. It seems we did just that.
But with recent horrific terror attacks in Paris, and in San Bernardino, Calif., and an ideologically linked tube station stabbing in London, England, something has definitely changed in the air. You can feel the fear level rising — often irrationally, but it still has to be addressed.
The New York Times described Americans as “jittery” after the San Bernardino shootings last week, during which 14 people were killed and many others wounded at a holiday party, leaving a nation wondering how a radicalized married Muslim couple with at least aspirational links to Islamic State went on such a horrifying mission.
Amidst round the clock cable news coverage and FBI updates, we heard domestically tinged phrases we hadn’t heard before: “The terror marriage.” “The fiancée visa.” “Left the baby with grandma.”
We also saw a new face of terror — images of Pakistani-born Tashfeen Malik, one half of the San Bernardino shooting team, in her hijab, alongside her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, an American-born environmental health specialist. The couple was gunned down by police after the attacks, leaving a 6-month-old daughter and a garage filled with ammunition.
Somehow the idea of a married couple, he with a steady job, she, well-educated, busy with a new baby, carrying out this deadly jihadist mission, readying themselves with trips to the firing range, only deepened the fear.
In the wake of San Bernardino, the New York Times asked its readers to describe their fears, not just about terrorism, but about mass shootings (which happen on a stunning average of once a day in the U.S.). One reader wrote: “I was in the grocery store last weekend with my 4-yearold. I found myself scouting places I could hide my little boy. It’s sad.”
This kind of fear is so easily exploitable. Before Trump outrageously went full out with his Muslim ban proposal, many politicians — in America, most of the GOP presidential candidates, or in France, the Front National party leader Marine Le Pen — had already moved to stoke up the fear of terrorists, of immigrants, of refugees. Never mind that Trump was im- mediately condemned by other GOP contenders, historians (he’s “despicable,” said author David Brinkley) and political commentators, one of whom told CNN that “Donald Trump is the taxi driver whose cab you hope never to have to get into in New York City,” so toxic are his views.
Never mind that what Trump is proposing was unacceptable under the Constitution. Or that Americans are far more likely to die in an ordinary shooting in a country saturated with assault weapons than in a jihadi-inspired attack.
Trump’s statement was a legitimately horrifying moment in fear mongering, not least because more than a few ordinary people agreed with him. Even watching inane cable commentators ask “has Trump gone too far?” produced a level of fear in me I haven’t felt before — and I’m not Muslim. Can we even stop this madness? Shouldn’t the GOP kick Trump out?
Last Sunday, in his Oval Office address, U.S. President Barack Obama sought to manage fear. He offered both reassurances that his government was already doing everything it could to thwart the deadly (and changing) jihadism confronting all countries, and these noble words: “Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear.” His critics called him weak.
Fear is contagious. It’s exponential. It’s reductionist. Fear of one thing — a homegrown radicalized jihadi attack — leads to another — refugees from Syria — then to another — a woman, in a hijab, with a baby.
The de-escalation of fear depends on several things. It depends on personal resolve. Or as someone who lives in Paris told me recently: “At some point you come to an agreement with yourself to stop being so frightened.” How else would you go to another concert, or sit laughing in a packed café again?
But it also depends on having well-intentioned, responsible leaders who communicate strength and resolve, who use language carefully. Leaders who know history and have a full catastrophic understanding of where unchecked demagoguery can lead. What shocked me most about Trump — I forced myself to listen to him several times — was how ignorantly careless his language was, how incendiary, how false. Ban all Muslims?
“We have no choice,” shrugged the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.
Luckily the public does have a choice, in both personal behaviour and in whom they choose to lead them.
Let’s hope fear management wins the day. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.