The infantilization of American politics
By 
There, in those words, is his campaign. I am strong; politicians are weak. I speak truth and never retreat; they lie and wave the white flag to our foes. They have stripped us bare; I will build us back, make this country feared the whole world over. Everything he utters is a version of this, dressed in different raiment or reference — and he’s saying it to people, his “silent majority,” who have longed to hear these words since Richard Nixon. “He’s delivering a message of power and courage without any proof points called policy,” says Steve Schmidt, the Republican wise man and campaign warhorse who’s been watching Trump with mounting fascination. “A huge chunk of conservatives are unmoored from the issues.”
September 2015
“We look to our president as commander-in-chief and, at a time like this, as comforter-in-chief,” [Meygn Kelly] said to guest Charles Krauthammer. “And I don’t mean to say that this is the same as 9/11, but this is a terrorist attack, the FBI tells us it’s so.”
“So where is he?” Kelly asked. “And why isn’t he coming on camera tonight to address the nation.”
December 2015
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
President Obama is giving a speech to the nation tonight. The choice of the Oval Office as the venue was no doubt made to emphasize the seriousness of the occasion. The topic is terrorism, with special reference to the threat of the sort of homegrown do-it-yourself jihadism that the San Bernardino attack apparently represented.
Rational risk assessment indicates that the latter threat is nearly non-existent, as it has killed a total of 45 people in the last 14 years — three less than have died at the hands of extremist right-wingers.
45 deaths over 14 years in a country of 320 million people represents such a tiny risk that focusing on it as some sort of special threat is both absurd as a matter of statistics and, practically speaking, utterly perverse, since it’s precisely that focus that gives what political power the perpetrators of such attacks gain by undertaking them.
Purveyors of the politics of hysteria respond that the threat is “growing,” which of course is, again practically speaking, impossible to say, given that these are such radically low probability events. In any case what would a “growing” threat constitute in this circumstance? America could endure a San Bernardino-type massacre every two weeks, and the resulting deaths still wouldn’t equal the total number of children who drown in swimming pools every year.
But on one level all this is irrelevant. People have a deep desire to “feel safe,” and they look — or are told to look — to political daddy figures of one kind or another to satisfy this need. Fascism, with its overt celebration of irrational feeling over intellect, and of the Strong Leader who exploits the former while openly despising the latter, is the ideology that is most congenial to the politics of moral panic.
At the moment Americans need to feel less and think more, but, also at the moment, this isn’t a message that any politician is likely to calculate is in his or her best interest to deliver.