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We’re being manipulated.
That’s bad. But not all bad.
Fear — that primitive instinct buried deep within our DNA — is being weaponized into the centerpiece of the current campaign season. The tactic is far from new, but with November’s election still nearly two months away, it’s already being exploited to exceptional levels.
“Both campaigns are all in this year on painting the future as bleak and horrible if the other side wins,” said Jesse Richman, an associate professor of political science at Old Dominion University.
TV. Social media. Mailers. Robocalls. Even texts. A bombardment of apocalyptic messages hammering a long list of imminent perils: Pandemic. Lawlessness. Immigrants. Eroding values. Threatened rights. Change. Differences. Anyone with an opposite opinion. And of course, the other candidate.
The world must be in flames outside your very door.
All that rhetoric is tough to avoid. It wears on our psyches. It’s hard on our humanity.
Why is fear the go-to tool? Because politicians, along with marketers and fundraisers, know emotion has staying power and motivates people to act: vote, buy or donate.
And of all the human emotions, fear may be the most fundamental, said Arash Javanbakht, director of the Stress, Trauma and Anxiety Research Clinic at Michigan’s Wayne State University.
“The function of fear is to protect a species from annihilation,” he said. “Basically, it’s what’s kept us around.”
Useful fear takes root from different avenues: personal experience (say, a bear attacks you), observation (you saw the bear attack someone else), or teaching (elders say bears are dangerous).
“But while it’s helped us survive it can be taken advantage of, especially by elders who have their own agenda,” Javanbakht said, like winning or keeping power.
All elections have an element of division, but the volume of us-versus-them fear-stoking is extreme this year, escalating a trend that’s been increasing in American politics, Richman said.
“It’s the tendency to focus on mobilizing support by demonizing the opposition. None of this is new, but it’s squared now. We’re at the crescendo of a presidency that’s been characterized by deep divisions, exacerbated at the present by the crises the country is facing — the pandemic and the economy and racial tensions. Everything has just continued to build.”
Cultivating fear of the other camp might help sway votes, but it also widens gaps into gulfs that can seem impossible to ever bridge.
Fear makes humans more tribal, less logical and more aggressive, Javanbakht said.
“When your safety feels threatened — your tribe, your nest, your kids — anger always follows, even if the threat is imaginary. We go buy more guns and bullets. And we follow whoever says they can protect us.”
Once planted, fear is difficult to dislodge. Rats conditioned to expect an electrical shock when they hear a certain tone will exhibit fear whenever they hear it for the rest of their lives, no matter how long it’s been since they were actually shocked.
In the human animal, fear can expand to dysfunctional degrees.
“One dog bites you and suddenly even the smallest dog is dangerous,” Javanbakht said.
Act-first-think-later might be helpful — flight or fight — when facing a genuine, physical menace, but it rarely serves a civilized society well.
“Those are caveman instincts,” he said, “and we’ve come tens of thousands of years not to be cavemen.”
Over the past decade or so, said Richman, the emergence of 24/7 cable news channels catering to specific ideological slices has helped make a wedge easier to drive. Business models feed profits by packaging highly charged opinion segments — heavy on outrage and fear — into a format that looks like news.
“Opinion is cheap content to create while deeply researched journalism is expensive,” he said. “So we’ve wound up with audiences who are living in such different argumentative worlds.”
Partisanship can become so hardened it functions on auto-pilot. Richman described a study where researchers secretly switched the attributions of political speeches then presented them to devoted party supporters. Listeners loved speeches they thought were from their own party and loathed the same speeches when they thought they were from opponents.
“Identical content,” he said, “and that points to that tribal element — the us-versus-them — which goes beyond thinking carefully about the content itself.”
Humans across the globe are susceptible to fearmongering, but Richman hopes it’s nearing a “high-water mark” in the U.S. and will start to recede.
History shows ebbs and flows. Our last period of excessive partisanship, in the early 1900s, was mended by World War I.
But even when we’re drowning in negative, vicious politics, Richman said, America’s style of government usually does a decent job of buffering extremes.
“Our system isn’t built to require agreement on everything but what it is built to do is stymie those who don’t have broad support from getting much done. Power is so divided across so many different centers it tends to mean that no side or one faction has control of all the levers.”
Citizens might get frustrated by the gridlock but it keeps the pendulum from swinging too wide. So does a two-term limit on presidents, which was added to the Constitution in 1951.
But America is not indestructible, particularly from within. The Civil War came close just 150 years ago. And in other countries — notably South and Central America — presidential democracies similar to ours have collapsed when divisions became too vast and politically motivated violence climbed.
“When demagogues manage to get hold of our fear circuitry,” Javanbakht said, “we become brainless weapons they can use.”
Considering our wiring, it takes purposeful effort to blunt those attempts.
Javanbakht has some suggestions:
Recognize scare tactics when you see them. That alone should help take their impact down a notch.
If you watch cable news, switch channels now and then to hear other sides. But turn it all off after an hour.
Travel, even if it’s just outside your neighborhood. Try to meet people who look different from you. Javanbakht cited neuroscience evidence that shows our brains unconsciously reacting when we simply view faces from other races and cultures.
That’s the tribal thing again, which he calls a “biological loophole” that can be harmful to a species now as widespread as humans — walling off whole groups of people who don’t communicate and “hate without even knowing each other.”
What’s the one good thing about a political strategy that’s aiming to scare the bejeebers out of the most people possible?
Oddly enough, it can cause a backlash that can help hold a republic together.
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During the last presidential contest, Richman said, Americans were exposed to such a volley of vitriol that “a large number of people were convinced that neither Trump nor Clinton were worthy, and that neither side had a positive enough vision to sell.”
Yes, that discourages some people from bothering to vote, which is not ideal.
But it can also block even the eventual winner from galvanizing an unhealthy amount of eternal allegiance — the kind that builds a “durable, decisive majority that can shift the country too far its way.”
Such control by a single voice would leave too many others fuming out in the cold, the makings of a real rebellion.
Richman wonders what would happen if a campaign focused on stirring emotions other than fear.
“Love? Hope? Humor? Who knows?”
Joanne Kimberlin, 757-446-2338, joanne.kimberlin@pilotonline.com