Fear is the Mind Killer

Some thoughts on the 2024 presidential election

I try to avoid following electoral politics closely to preserve my sanity, but the past week I’ve been scrolling and re-checking polls and glued to my various news feeds. I don’t plan on doing that through November and this will definitely not become a blog about the 2024 election, but I did want to comment on an emerging theme I was actually worried wouldn’t emerge at all.

Oddly enough, the theme is Kamala Harris’s laugh, but the commentary is (thankfully) deeper than the usual columns on candidates and gender norms (though gender and race are quite salient in the critiques of her laugh).

An increasing number of commentators are defending Kamala Harris’s laugh on principled grounds. Namely, Harris’s ability to smile and laugh about politics means that she’s offering something quite different from anything Trump or even Biden could offer: a politics of joy and optimism.

Overall, I think that’s right. I also think that message needs to be amplified.

Fear Voting Destroys Social Capital

Over the past eight years we’ve been encouraged to vote based on fear. Fear of a Not Great America, fears of immigrants overrunning our country or of immigrants being deported without due process (pick your party on this one), fears of economic and political upheaval and - according to both sides - the downfall of American democracy.

Trump has always played off fear, but Biden eventually did too. Whatever strength he had as a candidate was always that he wasn’t Trump. He was asking the American public to vote based on the fear of another Trump presidency, rather than voting for something positive we can build together. To be fair, his messaging shifted a bit here and there, but more recently especially he’s leaned into fear.

The problem with fear-based voting isn’t just the immediate electoral effects. We know it’s an effective mobilizer. The problem is that fear-based voting has powerful downstream implications for how we think about ourselves as a community.

When we vote based on fear we give ourselves a boost of tribalism, a boost of othering, a boost of in-group/out-group adrenaline. We feed the part of ourselves and of our society that wants us to think in terms of binaries, in terms of winners and losers and in terms of anger and reactivity. We feed affective polarization - how much we dislike the other side - instead of ideological polarization, which at least represents real differences between parties and platforms. When we vote based on fear we focus attention away from the positive things we can do together and turn instead toward all the reasons we should remain apart.

When we vote based on fear we reject the reality that we exist on a shared four-dimensional landscape and instead revert to the one-dimensional fake world of Us vs. Them.

Fear-based voting destroys the shared landscape I hope to explore as a radical moderate.

And everyone is worse off when candidates engage the electorate with fear. This is true even when you take into account substantive policy positions that might be better on the fear side. Whatever tangible policy gains we might make by voting for Fear Candidate will be counteracted by the in-group/out-group and zero-sum thinking that fear as a motivator supports.

I sometimes hear policy wonks emphasize policy over culture, but I don’t think that’s (usually) right. And that’s not because I care more about symbolic speech than about real world policy. I care deeply about policy. Nothing is more important than working together to find ways to get people out of pits. And that’s exactly why fear-based campaigning (and ruling) is so incredibly damaging.

When candidates base even solid policy positions on tribalism and aggression, they undermine the social norms and expectations that make human social life in a diverse society possible. Once you open that Pandora’s box it’s really hard to get it closed again. As we’ve learned the hard way over the past 8 years, it’s a lot easier to destroy social norms and cultural barriers to despotism than it is to build them.

Fear-based voting also makes it harder to come back together again to implement whatever excellent policy positions a candidate might have run on. However great those policy positions might be, they become much less acceptable to the side that’s been othered or marginalized. Fear taints even the best policy positions because it turns those positions into zero-sum games. Fear destroys bipartisanship, coalition-building, and the possibility for future collaboration. And we need all that to get anything real and worth doing done.

All that’s even assuming there are policy positions that Trump supports that I think would be better than the status quo or Harris’s alternative, and I’m not sure that’s true. But it’s a truth that applies just as much to Biden’s anti-Trump campaigning.

Voting for Optimism

I don’t know yet who I’ll vote for in November. As a New York resident, I have options that people in swing states might not.

But I do know that on balance, I’ll be voting for a candidate who offers a positive vision of the future where fewer people are stuck in pits and where people with different opinions, values, and goals can still work together to achieve good things for themselves and for society. I’ll be voting for the candidate whose messaging focuses on optimism about the future, not fear. I’ll be voting for the candidate who offers nonzero solutions and who reaches a welcoming hand out to whoever wants to solve problems with them. I’ll be voting for the candidate whose message about human social life represents the complexity and joy (and admittedly frustration) that is possible when different people work together to solve problems.

That’s true even if I disagree with that candidate on a range of issues and approaches.

The reality is that no presidential candidate will get all or even most of their platform through into tangible policy, but the effect of his or her words and actions and attitudes about politics on the social norms that bind us together as a polity hit immediately and deeply and have long-lasting effects.

There’s a reason Harris seems to be resonating with people who have given up on politics and it’s not (mostly) about identity politics, from what I can tell. At least some Americans - call them the silent optimists - are desperate for a candidate who can bring joy and optimism and the promise of real community back into politics.

I’m not sure yet that candidate is Harris. She has the opportunity to run on a positive and optimistic platform, but she may yet pivot to fear-based campaigning. But I’m much more hopeful than I was two weeks ago. And that’s enough for me for now.

As always, let me know what you think! Leave a comment and if you like what you read, please share widely!