The Politics of Fear

One of the biggest hypocrisies of the left is their condemnation of what they call "the politics of fear." It is particularly attached to the Bush Administration's insistence that the war in Iraq furthers America's national security interests. They claim that President Bush says that he is fighting against terror, when in reality he is fighting for something else. Some say oil, some say to avenge his father's unfinished war, others flat out call him an evil war-monger who wants to see death and carnage across the earth. Either way, the left considers it out of bounds to use 9/11 (or any of many other terrorist attacks that happened because of or under Clinton's watch) to persuade people to support the war. But the GOP has no copyright on the "politics of fear."

If there was a left-wing equivalent to the Iraq war, it is global warming, now taking yet another form - "climate change" (they realized that no actual warming has happened in several years, and that their claims of record temperatures are actually not factually correct, so they have to call it climate change). Watch 5 minutes of "An Inconvenient Truth" and tell me that it isn't meant to scare us into being more environmentally "responsible." Listen to one nut-head college professor talk about the effects of "climate change" and tell me that he/she is not trying to use fear as a tactic. Their basic claim is that if we aren't more responsible with the earth now, then in the near future there will be devastating hurricanes and ice caps and tornadoes and earthquakes and meteor showers that will annihilate life as we know it. To me, that's even scarier than terrorists taking over our country and forcing us to worship Allah, and the evidence is less convincing.

Another case of left-wing fear mongering is the recent economic babble. "Oh the dollar is going to be worthless in a few years! We need to put freezes on interest rates and hand out money to the middle class or our entire economic structure will collapse and we will all be starving and homeless!" Ok, they aren't that ridiculous, but the fact is that they need us to be pessimistic and fearful of pending doom to further their agenda. On the other side of that coin are people like Mitt Romney, who can acknowledge the weaknesses in the market, but convey a vision of hope and optimism combined with a strong plan based on the principles of capitalism and hard work.

You see, the left has made their careers out of pessimism and fear. Healthcare, global warming, economics, poverty, they all play to the fears and guilts of people.

Still to come: The politics of guilt and unity