by Molly Ball
[SEPTEMBER 2016]
“People are scared,” Donald Trump said recently, and he was not wrong.
Fear is in the air, and fear is surging. Americans are more afraid today than they have been in a long time: Polls show majorities of Americans worried about being victims of terrorism and crime, numbers that have surged over the past year to highs not seen for more than a decade. Every week seems to bring a new large- or small-scale terrorist attack, at home or abroad. Mass shootings form a constant drumbeat. Protests have shut down large cities repeatedly, and some have turned violent. Overall crime rates may be down, but a sense of disorder is constant.
Fear pervades Americans’ lives—and American politics. Trump is a master of fear, invoking it in concrete and abstract ways, summoning and validating it. More than most politicians, he grasps and channels the fear coursing through the electorate.
Fear and anger are often cited in tandem as the sources of Trump’s particular political appeal, so frequently paired that they become a refrain: fear and anger, anger and fear. But fear is not the same as anger; it is a unique political force. Its ebbs and flows through American political history have pulled on elections, reordering and destabilizing the electoral landscape.
On August 31, Trump delivered a speech on immigration that depicted outsiders as a frightening threat. “Countless innocent American lives have been stolen because our politicians have failed in their duty to secure our borders,” he said. His acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention similarly made clear the extent to which his message revolves around fear. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” Trump thundered. “Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country. Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally; some have even been its victims.”
Notes of uplift were few and far between in the convention speech, and commentators were duly shocked by its dark tone. (The conservative writer Reed Galen called Trump’s convention “a fear-fueled acid trip.”) Trump summons fear in the conventional way, by describing in concrete terms the threats Americans face. But he also, in a more unusual maneuver, summons fear in the abstract: There’s something going on, folks.
The critics who accuse Trump of cheap fear-mongering may be failing to recognize that the fear percolating in society is real, and somewhat justified; politicians who fail to validate it risk falling out of step with the zeitgeist. They are likely right, however, that ratcheting up fear helps Trump. This is the way fear works, according to social scientists: It makes people hold more tightly to what they have and regard the unfamiliar more warily. It makes them want to be protected. The fear reaction is a universal one to which everyone is susceptible. It might even be the only way Trump could win.
If the normal categories hold in this election—the patterns of turnout, the states in play, the partisan and demographic divides—Trump will find it almost impossible to prevail. The current polls show him losing in just such a predictable way, dogged by his offenses against various groups. But fear, history shows, has the power to jar voters out of their normal categories.
Trump paints a fearful picture, and events validate his vision. This is what happened in the Republican primary: When back-to-back terror attacks hit Paris in November and San Bernardino, California, in December, he pointed to them as proof that his warnings about Muslims were justified, and voters flocked to him, boosting and solidifying his polling lead in the final stretch before primary voting began. Trump’s standing in the polls rose about 7 percentage points in the aftermath of the attacks, buoying him to the level necessary to win primary contests.
Trump supporters, recent polling has shown, are disproportionately fearful. They fear crime and terror far more than other Americans; they are also disproportionately wary of foreign influence and social change. (They are not, however, any more likely than other Americans to express economic anxiety.)
“I used to fly a lot, but now I don’t get on an airplane unless I have to,” Pat Garverick, a retired tech worker, told me at a recent Trump rally in Northern Virginia. “There’s that little voice in the back of your head that says, ‘Is this safe?’ I try to stay away from crowds. There are so many people trying to hurt us or stir up violence.”
Not all the Trump supporters I have asked in recent months say they feel afraid. One woman told me, “I’m not scared; I’m pissed off.” Others cited less immediate fears: They say they are afraid for their country or their children’s future. But many cited a visceral sense of insecurity. “I am terrified,” confided Jonnianne Ridzelski, whom I met at a Trump rally in Alabama in April. She had, she said, been making preparations for disaster, including stocking up on canned food.
What, exactly, was she afraid of? She couldn’t say, and that was perhaps the most frightening thing of all. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.
While anger makes people aggressive, prone to lash out, fear makes them cower from the unfamiliar and seek refuge and comfort. Trump channels people’s anger, but he salves their fear with promises of protection, toughness, strength. It is a feedback loop: He stirs up people’s latent fears, then offers himself as the only solution.
Frightened people come to Trump for reassurance, and he promises to make them feel safe. “I’m scared,” a 12-year-old girl told the candidate at a rally in North Carolina in December. “What are you going to do to protect this country?”
“You know what, darling?” Trump replied. “You’re not going to be scared anymore. They’re going to be scared.”
To the seasoned political practitioner, fear is a handy tool. “Fear is easy,” Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican ad maker, told me recently. “Fear is the simplest emotion to tweak in a campaign ad. You associate your opponent with terror, with fear, with crime, with causing pain and uncertainty.”
Wilson has plenty of experience. In 2002, he made a commercial that criticized Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who had lost three limbs in Vietnam, while showing images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. In 2008, Wilson made ads attacking Barack Obama by showing the incendiary statements of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. “I wanted to scare the living shit out of white people in Pennsylvania and Ohio,” Wilson said. “Today, they would all be Trump voters, I’m sure.”
Fear-based appeals hit people on a primitive level, Wilson said. “When people are under stress, the hind brain takes over,” he said. Trump, Wilson believes, has expertly manipulated many people’s latent fear of the other. “Fear of Mexicans, fear of the Chinese, fear of African Americans—Donald Trump has very deliberately stoked it and inflamed it and made it a centerpiece of his campaign,” he told me.
A majority of Americans now worry that they or their families will be victims of terrorism, up from a third less than two years ago, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. Nearly two-thirds worry about being victims of violent crime. Another poll, by Gallup, found that concern about crime and violence is at its highest level in 15 years.
Trump supporters are more concerned than most. According to further PRRI data, 65 percent of Trump supporters fear being victims of terrorism, versus 51 percent of all Americans. Three-fourths of Trump supporters fear being victims of crime, versus 63 percent overall. Trump supporters also disproportionately fear foreign influence: 83 percent say the American way of life needs to be protected from it, versus 55 percent overall. Two-thirds of Trump supporters also worry that they or a family member will become unemployed, but this is not much different than the 63 percent of non–Trump supporters who have the same concern. Economic anxiety, while widespread in America today, is not a distinguishing characteristic of Trump supporters; other anxieties are.
Trump’s audience of conservative-leaning voters may be particularly susceptible to fear-based appeals. Researchers have found that those who are more sensitive to threats and more wary of the unfamiliar tend to be more politically conservative. “The common basis for all the various components of the conservative attitude syndrome is a generalized susceptibility to experiencing threat or anxiety in the face of uncertainty,” the British psychologist G. D. Wilson wrote in his 1973 book, The Psychology of Conservatism. In other words, an innate fear of uncertainty tends to correlate to people’s level of conservatism.
Subsequent experiments have confirmed this idea. In a 2003 paper reviewing five decades of research across 12 different countries, the psychologist John Jost and his collaborators found “the psychological management of uncertainty and fear” to be strongly and consistently correlated with politically conservative attitudes. (This “fear of threat,” however, is not the same as anxiety in the sense of neuroticism, which correlates strongly with liberal political attitudes.)
In study after study, the characteristic most predictive of a person’s political leanings is his or her tolerance for ambiguity. “The more intolerant of ambiguity you are—the more you seek control over your surroundings, certainty, clear answers to things—the more you tend toward conservative preferences,” Anat Shenker, a liberal communications consultant and cognitive-linguistics researcher, told me.
But it is not only conservatives who are susceptible to fear. Almost all of us exist somewhere on the continuum between the extremes of “totally averse to the unfamiliar” and “totally enthusiastic about the unknown.” Experiments find that everyone’s political views become more conservative when they are provoked to become more fearful. In one study, liberal subjects who had just been confronted with a threat immediately reported more conservative views on abortion, capital punishment, and gay rights.
If fear is strong enough, it can accomplish something exceedingly rare: It can override people’s preexisting partisan commitments. This happened in the wake of the September 11 attacks: Political scientists say Republicans’ success in the 2002 and 2004 elections can be largely attributed to Americans’ increased fear of terrorism. “There is evidence from 2002 and 2004 that people’s concern about terror was a very good predictor of their voting habits, even apart from partisanship,” Shana Gadarian, a political scientist at Syracuse University and the author of The Politics of Threat: How Terrorism News Shapes Foreign Policy Attitudes, told me. (Democrats, Gadarian notes, also use fear to push their agenda on issues with which they’re associated, like climate change and health care.)
Shenker makes the case that the world is changing these days more quickly than any of us are inherently equipped to handle. “The modern condition of life is pretty much an assault on our brains,” she told me. “We’re experiencing change and ambiguity at a rate unprecedented in human history. Think about how long it took to get from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution. And now all of a sudden the climate is changing, women are becoming men, I’m talking to you on a little sliver of plastic and metal. We have change in every dimension faster than our brains have evolved to deal with it.” In studying Trump voters on behalf of MoveOn.org, Shenker found that they responded strongly to the idea that he would bring order and control to a chaotic world.
Gadarian, the political scientist, said, “When people feel anxious, they want to be protected.” Trump’s policies, she pointed out, are a literal answer to this desire: protectionist economics; a wall that physically protects the country from outsiders. “How do you overcome the threat of terror, of crime, of immigration? You say, ‘We will protect the country by building a wall.’ ”
Here is a case study in the power of fear in politics. Immigration reform has seemed ripe for bipartisan compromise ever since President George W. Bush tried to pass it during his second term. Majorities of voters consistently say they support allowing undocumented immigrants to become citizens, and oppose mass deportation. Yet the policy has been derailed by intense, concentrated, visceral opposition. Meanwhile, the reaction to mass migration has upended the politics of virtually every European nation, including the U.K., France, and the Scandinavian countries.
Frank Sharry, a proponent of immigration reform who heads the group America’s Voice, has worked on the issue since the 1980s, but the rise of Trump forced him to revise his understanding. What had always seemed to him like a policy dispute now strikes him as something more profound and primal, he told me.
“Ten years ago, when [John] McCain and [Ted] Kennedy were working together on comprehensive immigration reform and George W. Bush supported it, I really thought this was a rational policy disagreement that was headed toward a logical compromise,” Sharry told me recently. “Now I see it as deeply cultural. It’s racially charged, it’s tribalism, it’s us-versus-them. It’s a referendum on the face of globalization, on a moment of demographic and cultural change.”
There are legitimate policy arguments against increasing immigration or legalizing the undocumented, but Sharry came to believe that they were not the drivers of opposition to the issue. Once you see fear as an axis, it resonates across any number of political debates. The fearful mind sees immigrants as an invasion force, refugees as terrorists, rising crime as a threat to one’s family, drugs as a threat to one’s children, and social change as a threat to one’s way of life. Almost everyone is somewhat susceptible to fear’s appeal; those naturally inclined to be conservative are somewhat more so. But it takes a particular type of politician to push the buttons in human nature that activate these fears.
“Some people’s sense of who we are as a country is threatened to the core,” Sharry said. “Trump speaks to our id, something latent in all of us to different degrees. This is not a political campaign. It’s an identity campaign.”