‘The Politics of Fear: The Peculiar Persistence of American Paranoia’ by Arthur Goldwag

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The Politics of Fear by Arthur Goldwag

Since the Civil War, America has survived periods of sharp division, including the struggles of organized labor and, of course, the ‘60s. We are in one of those periods again, and this time it looks different. We’re no longer receive our (mis) information as a mass but as a networked audience. What people in other networks are hearing is nonsense to us, and probably abhorrent. Angry people, fired up by what they “learned” online, have killed. A mob of them stormed the Capitol on January 6.

Arthur Goldwag has surveyed the conspiracists and the far right in several books and essays. He brings the subject almost up to date with a superb new addition to the literature on the crumbing of civility and consensus, The Politics of Fear. Goldwag offers reflections on America’s incompatible origin stories, which he describes as “Protestant religiosity” vs. “the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.” As he puts it, “touch them together and they spark.” Lately, those contradictory tendencies have been inflamed by “an infrastructure of cable TV news, talk radio, podcasts, and social media, aided and abetted by Vladimir Putin’s army of trolls.” 

What once were fringe John Birch ideas have been mainstreamed and adopted by the Republican Party. Those ideas have always been fueled by conspiracy theories, embraced because “they make emotional sense,” Goldwag writes. He acknowledges that conspiracies actually have occurred—just not as often as many people believe. And for those anxious believers, conspiracies “reflect a view of the world in which the secret machinations of a shadowy ‘they’ fill the role that gods and demons held for pagans”—or end-time prophesies for Evangelicals.

Goldwag is not optimistic about America’s future.

Get The Politics of Fear at Amazon here.

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