{"id":16419,"date":"2016-01-13T08:01:17","date_gmt":"2016-01-13T13:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16419"},"modified":"2016-01-13T08:05:52","modified_gmt":"2016-01-13T13:05:52","slug":"the-power-of-exaggerated-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16419","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Exaggerated Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Power of Exaggerated Fear<\/a><\/h3>\n

As the American middle class shrinks and\u00a0citizens feel\u00a0vulnerable and angry, politicians\u00a0have found that exaggerating the dangers from some bogeyman \u2013 \u201cthe Muslim terrorists are out to get you!\u201d \u2013 works wonders in distracting\u00a0them from\u00a0far more serious threats, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n

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Journalists have noticed how much current political campaigns are trading on fear. As observed in\u00a0a recent article<\/u><\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>, \u201cMost of the Republican presidential contenders and their allies are now waging campaigns focused on fear \u2014 bombarding voters with ominous television spots that warn of national security threats and amping up their alarming rhetoric on the stump.\u201d<\/p>\n

ISIS and foreign terrorism figure prominently in the bombardment. As a media tracker cited in the same article observes, such scare tactics usually don\u2019t get relied on until late in an election campaign. (The famous\u00a0\u201cDaisy\u201d ad<\/u><\/a>\u00a0that Lyndon Johnson\u2019s campaign used to associate Barry Goldwater with nuclear war in 1964 aired only once, in September of that year.)<\/p>\n

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\"Sen.<\/a><\/p>\n

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

But in the current campaign, the GOP candidates are trying to outdo each other with the fear factor as a way of getting attention before the primaries have even started, and trying to use the scaring of people as \u201cthe fastest way to create an ad that resonates.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a long history across many nations of fear-based demagoguery leading to extreme and sometimes disastrous political results. Even if that isn\u2019t the result in this U.S. election year, even if the candidates using the scare candidates do not really believe their rhetoric, and even if any one of them, once in office, would try to take a less fearful and more measured approach to business, the rhetoric and the public fear that it stokes have consequences. They help to create a political milieu in which anyone in office will have to operate.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Power of Exaggerated Fear As the American middle class shrinks and\u00a0citizens feel\u00a0vulnerable and angry, politicians\u00a0have found that exaggerating the dangers from some bogeyman \u2013 \u201cthe Muslim terrorists are out to get you!\u201d \u2013 works wonders in distracting\u00a0them from\u00a0far more serious threats, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes. Journalists have noticed how much current […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6963,11676,1239,446,447,9140,11677,7245,5228],"class_list":["post-16419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-consortium-news","tag-exaggerated-fear","tag-is","tag-isis","tag-islamic-state","tag-marco-rubio","tag-muslim-terrorists","tag-paul-r-pillar","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16419"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16421,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16419\/revisions\/16421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}