It is true, as Franklin Roosevelt said, that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." Unfortunately, the fear in our times is so powerful and overwhelming that those who agree with Roosevelt should consider unabashed panic.
We Americans are a timid, fearful lot who live life from crisis to manufactured crisis. We make little attempt to use reason to estimate the credibility or immediacy of these fears. We even go so far as to accuse those who use their reason to question these fears of being unpatriotic for not blindly accepting the terror.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt are the order of the day.
This is not a partisan thing: Rank-and-file liberals are just as likely to be scared into following as rank-and-file conservatives are - and there is no law of nature or politics saying that Democrats cannot be just as effective fear-mongers as Republicans. Though the Kerry campaign has refrained from manufacturing additional fear, many people support Sen. Kerry's bid for the presidency simply because they fear the neoconservatives in power more.
But no politician, with the possible exception of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, has done more to cultivate fear than President George W. Bush. After the election of 2000, in which he failed to win the popular vote, his support has come almost entirely from the fear that gripped the nation after Sept. 11, 2001.
He has abused that support to pass policy and wage wars that would have been dismissed as absurd before the terrorism scare. He has everything to gain by leaving the American people frightened and clutching at the frayed edges of his "security blanket" administration, and the best way to do that is to leave us ignorant.
The Bush administration has repeatedly opposed fact-finding investigations related to Sept. 11. When an investigation was eventually launched, it was poorly funded with a mere $3 million (compared to $70 million for Whitewater/Monicagate). The White House refused to provide the commission with requested documents even under threat of subpoena and testified reluctantly only after vast public pressure, and then it censored parts of the commission's report once it was completed.
Important data related to the hijackings have never been released to the public, such as the airport security camera footage of hijackers getting on the planes or videotapes from the Pentagon crash. The results of investigations into who short-sold American Airlines and United Airlines stock in the days preceding the attacks have also not been released.
Little information about the Sept. 11 attacks - or what the government did to investigate the tragedies or combat future terrorism - has come to light. Essentially, we know nothing.
The ignorant are powerless, the powerless are afraid, the afraid are compliant, and the compliant vote Republican.
Ignorance is not the only way this administration has sought to keep us cowering. The White House has made it a habit to periodically frighten us with indefinite and dubious peril.
Periodic "terror alerts," which have usually turned out to be nothing, have rekindled our fear. These terror alerts often occur after good news for the Kerry campaign or bad news for the Bush campaign. Knocking those stories off the news cycle tend to give Bush an approval ratings boost.
No politician has ever lost an election by overestimating the paranoia of the American people. This spells disaster for the Kerry campaign in November.
The Democrats have no hope of victory if they continue to appeal to higher reasoning functions. In a fair fight, where both the Republicans and Democrats argued policy and ideology, allowing for the person with the best ideas to lead the country, Kerry would squarely beat Bush. But sadly, that's not the character of American elections; no matter how much we wish it were true. Bush has sunk low, Kerry must therefore sink lower.
If Kerry wants to win, he needs to, as Bush has done, appeal to the lower instinct of fear. There is so much to truly fear about the Bush administration - the loss of civil liberties, proposed "Big Brother" programs such as the massive database Total Information Awareness, designed to survey personal credit card transactions and travel records indiscriminately, or the TIPS program to recruit mail carriers, cable installers and other persons routinely given access to private homes to act as spies for the government. Add disastrous fiscal policies, the willingness to use the military in wars of aggression and the unwillingness to enforce antitrust law, and the Kerry campaign need not fabricate a thing.
We cannot hope to be free from fear if Bush wins the election in 2004. We cannot hope to be free from fear if Kerry seeks, as he must, to win the election at any cost. It seems that people aren't willing or able to do the right thing and reject the fear, to look at the issues, and think rationally.
Practicality demands that to remove fear in the long term, we must embrace the horror in the short term.
Boyko is a journalism graduate student.
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