The Election is Over - Now What Do We Do With All the Fear?

[GliderGuider]

Sharon Astyk is a pretty bright woman.

The Election is Over - Now What Do We Do With All the Fear?

Over the last few weeks, a series of articles have emerged that observe that the language of voter anger, so ubiquitous in the culture, was wrong. They argued that in fact, what the voters were was depressed, frightened, worried, anxious, unhappy - not so much angry, but lost and terrified. Indeed, I think fear is what made the outcome of this election so certain - the right overwhelmingly tried to shift the narrative into anger, and because fear and anger often go together, this wasn't an entire failure. On some gut level, most people realized that the inchoate sense of fear they feel that their lives are not getting better, but worse is probably not due to gays and Moslems, but with a semi-plausible target provided, at least their feelings of worry and discontent were legitimized in some way. At least they were told they were right to feel something.

The fundamental narrative of the Democrats came down to "it really isn't as bad as you think it is and we're trying and just give us more time, and you don't really need to be this worried, it will all be ok soon." But the problem with anything that de-legitimizes the real experience and real emotions of ordinary people is that it feels *false* - the Tea Partiers may have been lying about immigration and mosques as central issues, the traditional Republicans trying to blame Obama for a recession that started firmly on their watch, but their lies weren't as big as the one that said "it is all basically ok, you are over-reacting." Given a choice between two lies, one immoral but at least marginally plausible (scapegoating has a long history and the dubious charm of familiarity to many), the other viscerally, obviously false, it isn't too surprising what the outcome was.

Now comes one of two things - the first possibility is the race for the bottom - in which both left (which is really a shorthand in the US for "moderate right-center - we don't actually have a left) and right try desperately to place responsibility for the continued failures, the continued falling apart of people's lives on other causes - the Democrats will blame the Republicans, insufficient borrowing and mean people, the Republicans will blame the Democrats, taxes and the stimulus package, and we'll all go down to hell together, with no one ever getting close. The already frustrated, frightened, angry and depressed populace will become more frustrated, frightened and depressed, and probably more angry. They are already disgusted with both parties, and are likely to create a superb opportunity for something worse than we presently have to emerge, along, possibly with a great deal of civil unrest.

The second possibility is that we give fear a real target - because it isn't going away anytime soon. This isn't easy, but there's an opportunity here - most of the government is about to be busy with trying poorly to live up to their claims and to make the on-the-ground realities of governing sound nearly as good as campaign promises, even though it isn't. While there certainly will be some fear whipping and plenty of partisanship, we have a limited space, the better part of a year, in which to do what neither party can do - acknowledge the fear.

The thing is, most people have better bullshit detectors than we think they do - the problem is that most of the time, they don't get anything *other* than bullshit, it is tough to sort things out. But honesty, well, that has the virtue of novelty. So you can tell people that it isn't really going to get better - that the things that would have allowed us to grow our economy in the past are banging against limits, that the reality of the world is that we have to use up more and more of our money and time and energy just keeping pace.

[Blue_Tires]

1. thanks for this...