But Fear Itself

The headline is simple: "Moderates still don't understand why conservatives voted for Trump." What made the article stand out for me was the teaser on The Week's homepage:

"Moderates still don't get conservatives' fears."

My first thought was "Of course they don't." Understanding what people are afraid of, and why it frightens them, means actually taking the time to talk to them and understanding what they think may go wrong, and why they can neither change nor control it. And, as the kids these days like to say, "Ain't nobody got time for that."

Some of it is just an inability to take the things that people claim to be afraid of seriously. Mr. Goldman notes: "[A]nd some political scientists have found support for Trump and minimizing the importance of the Jan. 6 riot are correlated with the belief that whites don't enjoy social advantages or may even face discrimination in [sic] today." People who find the idea that it is now Whites who are discriminated against in the modern United States patently ludicrous are unlikely to dig deeply enough to find the economic (or other) anxiety that sits beneath the belief. And so it's chalked up to paranoid delusions or racist trolling.

Clay Shirky is credited with coining the phrase: "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." And it's the sort of thing that's bandied around when someone wants to point out that someone else is allergic to fairness. But here's the thing: when privilege is legitimately earned, equality can absolutely be oppression. Not all advantages are the result of unethical behavior. And to the degree that people tend to cast themselves as the heroes of their own stories, they don't think of themselves as going around prying their benefits from the desperate grasp of the more deserving. The mythology of the United States may be just that, but it's often powerful nonetheless. People have been told that they made it to where they are because they worked hard and followed the rules. And they believe that because they understand that this is what makes them worthy people. Telling them that they're the beneficiaries of hundreds (if not many more) years of injustice is unlikely to simply ring true to them.

But it's likely easier than working to put people at ease. The United States is a culture of scarcity, and as a result, is often harsh in its judgments, as it looks for ways to sort the "deserving" from the "unworthy." And being found unworthy has consequences. American history is littered with the desolate tales of those it was decided were unworthy of important resources.

I'd always thought that the old Franklin Delano Roosevelt quote that "There is nothing to fear but fear itself," translated to "there is nothing to be afraid of, other than being afraid." But now that I'm an old man, I think that maybe he was referring to the fears of others. Maybe people are mostly afraid of each other's fears, and this is why they so often go unexamined, despite the benefits that such examination would bring.