Fear in global politics
Gabriel Rahman
The frequency of the use of the term ‘ fear ’ in political spheres has risen hugely over the last several years, many would argue this directly correlates with the newfound political prominence of so called ‘ fearmongers ’ such as US President Donald Trump, UK politician Nigel Farage or Indian and Hungarian prime ministers such as Narendra Modi or Viktor Orbán. These politicians are all often described as differing degrees of ‘right - wing’, or occasionally ‘ nationalists ’ with a typically apodictic stance on immigration, typified by Trump’s 2015 remarks at his campaign launch : ‘They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people . ’ Eminent political scientists Bleiker and Hutchinson state that ‘ fear can be attributed to the feeling that something untoward may happen ’, and it’s this uncertainty, of something ‘ untoward ’ , the mysterious ‘ they ’ that Trump refers to, that many argue He, Farage, Modi, Orbán and many others rely upon for their political success; and the subsequent typically inward looking fearful response to it by the electorate. However, along with this inward response (usually a shift to the right), it is possible also to argue that fear plays an equally crucial role on the ‘ left ’ , as people seek unequivocal protection for what they see as hard won and quasi-sacred rights that fall under the political umbrella of democracy. The fear of the collapse of this sacralized democracy is what causes many on the left to discount what is often an electoral majority, and disregard their previously amicable fellow citizens as ‘ racists ’ or ‘ bigots ’ . This type of language has become commonplace in the contemporary public political sphere and is only fuelling division and partisan thinking, which clearly plays a crucial role in the political shape of individual countries and our global political climate as a whole. Furthermore, any potential solutions to the role of fear, and what we can do to try and minimize its global ramifications are of course by nature extremely complex. However, many believe that the key to addressing this growing concern lies within embracing multilateralism and emphasizing the often forgotten positives of globalization. The current global precedent I have alluded to is that the ‘ fear ’, of Bleiker and Hutchinson’s ‘ untoward ’ or Edmund Husserl’s ‘ other ’ , is typically used most effectively by politicians placed on the ‘ right ’ of our political system, traditionally labelled as conservatives. Jonathan Haidt speaks of ‘ the conservative advantage ’ in his book The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion , and states that this concept of a ‘ conservative advantage ’ when appealing to voters stems from our morals. Haidt states our morals are based in our intuition rather than in our logic, and globally conservative parties tend to appeal to more areas of a given voter’s moral foundations which are all intuition -based. Haidt speaks of five moral foundations, those of ‘ Care/Harm, Loyalty/Betrayal, Fairness/Cheating, Authority/Subversion and Sanctity/Degradation ’ , based on collecting data of over 130,000 American voters. These five foundations are all strongly and equally endorsed by those who label themselves as ‘ conservative ’ . However, when those that labelled themselves as ‘ liberal ’ went through the same process, only the moral foundations of ‘ Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating ’ were endorsed very strongly, while the remaining three ‘ Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion and Sanctity/Degradation ’ , were strongly and uniformly rejected. Haidt goes on to state simply that ‘ Republicans [conservatives] understand moral psychology. Democrats [liberals] don’t’ , as within their slogans, speeches and
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