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Especially in times such as these when there is so much, whether ginned up or not, uncertainty about.
We like to think that here in the US of A we are immune to fear, that our so-called pioneer spirit that defines us will never succumb to something as base as fear. Yet our history is replete with examples when demagogues used fear of the unknown to gain power. Unfortunately, many times that fear was very well known and manifested itself in the other.
Sinclair Lewis wrote an American Masterpiece called “It Can’t Happen Here”. It showed that it didn’t take much at all to push people against each other when fear was in the air. That was only fiction, they say, it can never really happen here. But it has, it does and in case you hadn't noticed, it still permeates our politics.
The politics of fear usually subsides when a younger generation with its own fears and uncertainty beginning to take power but the cycle resumes when fear of being denied seemingly safe rights and rewards are again at risk.
We look to Hitler’s Germany and say that something like that can never happen here in the US. But it has and it will again. It took 80 some years, four generations of the decedents of freed slaves, before there were laws written into the books that it was illegal to discriminate against those of color. It took almost another 50 years before the power of that other was somewhat muted.
Now comes the "others" who would due us wrong. It’s right out of Jim Crow, right out of Nazi Germany. Gay Marriage will make us weak as a nation, the eastern establishment is not like us, they don’t share our “traditional” values, don’t trust intellectuals for they will trick you and steal your money, they hate you for our freedom, all Arabs should be subject to full body searches. And the list goes on and on and on.
Why didn’t it happen here in the US when it was happening throughout Europe? Why wasn’t there widespread unrest throughout the Great Depression? Well Joe Kennedy thought Hitler was a swell guy, Father Coughlin and Huey Long used the Hitleresque speech patterns to whip up their audience, the same us against them rhetoric that the Fuhrer used to such great effect. There were thousands of despotic “populists” running around the country spouting the same type of hatred that poisoned Europe.
One thing was different. FDR used the power of the government to give people hope. To lift up people all across the country who had no real connection to the government, FDR gave them the rural electrification act, running water and hired thousands of men who never had a paying job in their life.
He was also smart enough to take fear head on, to make it the number one enemy.
People are easily swayed when they feel threatened. If there is no hope on the horizon, it becomes easier to blame your travails on the other. It takes no time at all to change the nebulous other into the specific. McCarthy and his cohorts did it with communists. His brand of fear was so powerful that even Ike was leery of taking him on head to head.
What is going on now in Mass could be a harbinger of things to come. The GOP has nothing to fear. If the fear card, this time disguised as fear against the nameless bureaucrats, does work and they win the seat, look for the 2010 blueprint to resemble Gunner Joe’s tactics during the witch-hunts of the 50’s. If they lose, well they were not supposed to win that one anyway. If they come close, look out Dems in iffy districts.
It's interesting that one of the seminal points in American History, the Salem Witch Trials, happened in Massachusetts. It's more than a little ironic that this modern day fear monger is co close to grabbing a seat in the US Senate using a strategy based almost entirely on fear of the unknown.
America, you now have everything to fear from fear itself.
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