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Why Are Americans So Afraid?

Why Are Americans So Afraid?

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

In December 2016, at a rally in North Carolina, a 12-year-old girl looked at then candidate Donald Trump, “I’m scared,” she said. “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.”

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump played off the rising fear of the American public. His “us vs. them” rhetoric eroded people’s trust in facts, numbers, nuance, government and the news media and augmented the already fragile line of truth. Despite all negatives one can say about Trump, this tactic was clearly successful. He was right to know Americans were afraid and that they would vote accordingly.

But there is a remarkable dissonance between what seems to be and what is. According to Harvard professor, Steven Pinker, “Violence has been in decline over long stretches of time and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.”

In most of the world, the rate of homicide has been sinking. The Great American Crime Decline of the 1990s proceeded right through the recession of 2008 and up to the present. Among 88 countries with reliable data, 67 have seen a decline in homicide in the past 15 years.

“You often hear people saying, on both sides of the political divide, that the world is a mess,” said Joseph Cirincione, President of the Ploughshares Fund, a public grant-making foundation focused on nuclear weapons policy and conflict resolution. “The world is not a mess. It’s just messy.” The collapse of the existing order in the Middle East, Cirincione said, is one manifestation of the world’s messiness. “But the world itself is doing pretty darn good. We do not have major powers in conflict. We have small wars. We do not have major wars.”

Yet, A poll, by Gallup, found that concern about crime and violence is at its highest level in 15 years. According to the Chapman University Survey on American Fears some 70 percent of our citizenry is afraid of threats of terrorism, economic collapse, cyber warfare and government corruption.

So how is it that we are living in what is arguably the safest time in history, yet we, as a country, exist in a culture of fear?

Christopher Fettweis, author of The Pathologies of Power: Fear, Honor, Glory, and Hubris in U.S. Foreign Policy, says it is because “our fear is not based on an intellectual conclusion, it’s a belief.” America’s fear has become a framework of belief, surpassing far beyond the plasticity of opinions. And as history has proved time and time again, beliefs are near impossible to change.

The reality is “facts” don’t mean much in the way of beliefs. Telling a person, who has the sincerest gut belief, the statistic that more Americans are killed each year by furniture than terrorism becomes somehow unconvincing, or rather disagreeable. Political psychologists call this tendency of people to conform assessments of information to some goal or end extrinsic to accuracy “motivated reasoning.” In other words, people believe what they want to believe. This cognitive process infiltrates everything from us convincing ourselves a gluten-free cupcake is healthy to our groundless denial of climate change and gun violence.

So why is this process so crucial in understanding the culture of fear in America?

It perpetuates it. Because humans will dismiss rational thinking for the sake of reconfirming their identity, their fears will eclipse facts. A person, self-identified as a conservative, turns on the news to see a terrorist attack in London. They go on Twitter to see fellow conservatives’ rants on building a wall, on protecting our borders. Their fear is legitimized within their cushy network of familiarity. But if this person encountered the statistic, “zero refugees from countries included in the president’s travel ban have killed anyone in terrorist attacks on American soil.” Well, that does not fit with their worldview. The individual does not conform to adjust his perspective but emerges unconvinced and indignantly dogged. According to psychologist Tom Gilovich, this is because the fundamental questions we ask ourselves in response to particular information conforms to what we want to believe. “For desired conclusions,” he writes, “it is as if we ask ourselves ‘Can I believe this?,’ but for disagreeable conclusions we ask, ‘Must I believe this?’” People do not confront new information looking for truth, but rather looking for their truth and this means facts take a backseat to deeply ingrained fears.

These fears are sustained through media coverage. Every time we switch on the news, a building is in flames, a new virus has swept a new nation, or a man with a gun has wreaked havoc on an elementary school. It seems a string is holding the world together. The overwhelming coverage of terrorist attacks, shootings, and other violent episodes are so entwined in our daily lives that their imminence is inflated. “Your day to day experience is that terrible things are happening and they could happen to you tomorrow,” says Cirincione. For those that have not made it beyond the US border, their perceptions of the outside world are shaped solely by this media diet. And what makes news coverage overseas? It is people having bad things happen, doing bad things to each other; it is violence and degradation.

To the individual, this news coverage is a consistent reminder of our own mortality. A study done by the American Psychological Association presents the phenomenon as follows: when confronted with thoughts of our own mortality people appear to behave more conservatively by shunning and even punishing outsiders and those who threaten the status of their cherished world views. Understanding this helps to understand how America’s current culture of fear has become synonymous with the fear of terrorism. Despite the fact that the chances of being a victim of terrorism are roughly the same as that of being hit by lightning, 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.

Terrorist attacks carry the powerful quality of uncertainty. They can happen anywhere and you, as an American, will never understand the people behind them. Since 1973, psychologists have argued that political conservatism as an ideological belief system is significantly related to concerns having to do with the psychological management of uncertainty. According to a study done by NYU, we respond to uncertainty as we would respond to a threat– with fear. As death reminders become more prevalent, society becomes more antagonistic toward those with different beliefs and values; they become more fearful of the other. The common rhetoric turns to that of us vs. them. We feel we have to build a literal wall to separate ourselves from the big, bad existential other. In this world of inflamed rhetoric, Muslims become terrorists, factual probability becomes irrelevant and doing nothing becomes weakness.

This mentality has cost the US roughly 100’s of billions of dollars annually on counter-terrorism, efforts yet terrorism is rising. In 2015, terrorist attacks occurred in almost 100 countries—up from 59 in 2013—according to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database. In America, the numbers are different. 24 people have died in America from terrorist attacks since 9/11– in other words, less than two per year. That is not to say that these lives are not important, they are, but so are the nearly 45,000 annual deaths associated with lack of health insurance. And the 37,000annual deaths from road crashes each year. And the over 59,000 of those who die annually due to the opioid epidemic. And the 99,000 who died from preventable healthcare-associated infections. And the list goes on.

Given these statistics, how the government chooses to allocate our resources comes as a shock. To combat the most likely cause of death, heart disease, the government contributes only $2 billion. And just $300 million is devoted to research on the third most likely cause of death, strokes. The US congress funded cancer research through the NCI with just $5.389 billion in 2017. Yet, as Americans we allow this to continue largely because we’re too lazy to crosscheck the facts and confront the issue logically. As long as terrorism pervades the media, the government will continue to put money where the fear is, whether logical or not at all.

Telling people do not fear terror in this hyperactive age is like trying to convince a person standing in the rain that it is a sunny day. Their experience, their worldview, their very sense of self says otherwise. This is not to say that Americans do not have the right to be afraid. Being afraid is an instinctive response, but our heightened response should be redirected to lethal fears, the ones that might actually kill us.

Header image by Wikimedia Commons.

‘Epidemic Of Fear’ Has Driven Ebola Debate, Experts Say

‘Epidemic Of Fear’ Has Driven Ebola Debate, Experts Say

By Tony Pugh, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — In his 30 years as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci has seen his share of public health scares.

When AIDS exploded in the 1980s among gay men, Fauci recalls that some people didn’t want gay waiters to serve them in restaurants. And during the anthrax scare that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many were afraid to open their mail.

But when it comes to Ebola, “This one’s got a special flavor of fear,” Fauci said at the recent Washington Ideas Forum, sponsored by The Atlantic magazine and the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy group.

The growing death toll in West Africa has helped create “an epidemic of fear” in the U.S., Fauci said, even though most experts feel the likelihood of a widespread outbreak in this country is minimal.

James Colgrove, a public health professor at Columbia University, said the chances of an outbreak in this country are “extremely remote.” Pamela Cipriano, president of the American Nurses Association, went even further. “What we know right now would suggest that there is no risk of an epidemic,” she said.

Enhanced screenings of West African visitors allow U.S. health officials to “very quickly identify and sequester and evaluate and care for anyone who shows any type of risk,” Cipriano said. “That’s a very high level of control.”

Even in Dallas, where Liberian Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan triggered the nation’s first potential outbreak, only two nurses contracted the virus after direct contact with Duncan while he was desperately ill. That’s out of 70-plus health care workers and 48 family and community members who interacted with him.

Despite the flawed federal and local response, the Dallas episode proved what Fauci and other experts have said all along: Ebola is tough to catch and even tougher to spread when contact tracing, patient isolation and quarantines are in place.

But rather than validate experts’ calls to trust the science and impose public health precautions that reflect actual risk, the Dallas scare triggered a policy backlash driven by fear. Individual states imposed mandatory quarantines for all health care workers returning from Ebola-stricken West Africa, even if they had no symptoms and weren’t contagious.

Kaci Hickox, a Doctors Without Borders nurse who treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, was, upon returning, kept in an isolation tent for a weekend by New Jersey officials, even though she showed no symptoms of the virus.

She was permitted to return home to Maine, where officials tried to legally quarantine her. A judge ruled in her favor, requiring only that Hickox monitor herself for signs of Ebola for 21 days, which ended Monday night.

“The fear is trumping science,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

Lawmakers continue to call for outright travel bans from West Africa, which, experts say, would only cause people to seek alternative entry while discouraging U.S. caregivers from helping out in Africa.

Fauci said the severe responses are simply good-faith efforts by politicians to protect fearful constituents.

“You have to respect the fear of people,” he said. “You can’t denigrate it and say, ‘Why are you afraid?’ You’ve got to try and explain to them and you’ve got to do it over and over. … It’s just that as a health person, as a physician and a scientist, I would say you look at the data, and it tells you what the risk is.”

Ebola is only transmitted by direct contact through broken skin or mucous membranes with the body fluids of infected people. Airborne transmission of the virus — through tiny, dry particles that float through the air — does not occur.

But if larger saliva or mucous droplets from an infected person are expelled by coughing or sneezing and come in contact with another’s eyes, nose or mouth, that person could become infected. No such infections, however, have ever been documented.

Americans’ lingering fears about the disease stem partly from health officials’ misstatements about the nation’s readiness to fight it.

Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, originally said hospitals in this country were ready to care for Ebola patients. Many, in fact, were not.

The agency then had to revise its outdated and insufficient guidance on personal protective equipment to ensure the safety of Ebola caregivers. The CDC also provided contradictory information about whether people being monitored for Ebola symptoms should be allowed on public transportation.

“Some of the missteps have eroded some of the trust that the public has had,” said Cipriano, the nurses association president. “I think that it certainly has added to the sense of, ‘Well, who do we trust?’ ”

Colgrove said Frieden’s mistakes were surprising, because the CDC director had always excelled in the art of communicating risk. Frieden used to refer to public health in an epidemic as “the art of controlled hysteria,” Colgrove said.

“You want people to be worried enough that they give you the resources that you need to do the job,” explained Colgrove, the Columbia professor, “but you don’t want them to be so worried that they do stupid things. It’s a very, very delicate balance that he has to walk. That any public health official has to walk.”

With a lull in the number of new Ebola cases, many are hoping the U.S. has seen the worst of the deadly virus. But Benjamin, of the American Public Health Association, knows better.
“I always remain skeptical and vigilant,” he said. “So while I’m hoping that we have, I still believe that we have to keep a high index of suspicion.”

AFP Photo/Chip Somodevilla

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Why Occupy Wall Street Should Scare Republicans

Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) — In Florida this week, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was asked about the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. “I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare,” he said.

Romney’s right. It may be dangerous — to his chances of being elected.

Occupy Wall Street, now almost three weeks old, isn’t like the anti-globalization demonstrations that disrupted summits in the 1990s or even the street actions at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, though some of the same characters are probably in attendance. With unemployed young protesters planning to camp out all winter in Zuccotti Park (with bathrooms available only at a nearby McDonald’s), it’s more like a cross between a Hooverville and Woodstock — the middle-class jobless of the 1930s and the hippie protesters of the 1960s.

With the help of unions and social networking, the movement has at least some chance of re-energizing Democrats in 2012 and pushing back against the phenomenal progress Republicans have made in suppressing voter turnout in several states.

Why? Because the tectonic plates of U.S. politics are shifting in ways we don’t yet fully understand. We don’t know whether Occupy Wall Street is a carnival party — a piece of left-wing street theater that gets old fast — or a nascent political party that revives a long-dormant tradition of class-based politics.

It’s possible that these demonstrations, which have now spread to about 150 cities and campuses, will be hijacked by extremists or dissipated by obnoxiousness; the American left has practice in committing suicide. The whole thing could fade as young people find a better way of hanging out offline.

Something Consequential

But my visits to Zuccotti Park made me think it’s the beginning of something consequential. So far it looks like a younger, lefty version of the early days of the Tea Party — a leaderless, mostly organic movement with a catchy symbolic name that captures the public imagination by channeling anger against elites.

Like the Tea Party on the Republican side, Occupy Wall Street makes the party establishment nervous. It’s not just that Democratic candidates have done well fundraising on Wall Street in recent years. The bigger problem is getting the activists to draw a distinction between bringing specific greedheads to justice and mocking those parts of Wall Street that are blameless in the 2008 crash and do plenty to invest in the future of the country.

Directing Anger

But a healthy rebalancing of the national conversation is nonetheless under way. The Tea Party directed public anger against the federal government in general and President Barack Obama in particular; Occupy Wall Street directs that ire against Wall Street in general and — inevitably — Romney in particular.

This will have no effect on Romney in the Republican primaries, of course, but in a general election it could make him the poster boy of the big banks that many see as the cause of their woes. The specifics of his record running Bain Capital LLC will be subsumed in the image of his rationalizing the actions (resisting any tax increases) of the “1 percenters.”

The arguments I heard from the often-articulate protesters in the park were economic, not partisan. None of the posters depicted Romney, House Speaker John Boehner, or any other Republicans. Instead they said things like “Top 1% Want Everything,” “Listen to the Drumming of the 99% Revolution,” “Stop Off-Shore Tax Evasion,” and “Protect Medicare, Not Billionaires.”

It’s easy to denigrate the movement for simplistic sentiments that lack a clear agenda. But as the Tea Party demonstrations showed in 2009, that very shapelessness is a huge asset (to use the Wall Street term). If “We’re the 99 percenters” catches on, and the crazies can be marginalized, then the challenge will be to move from the streets to the ballot box, as the Tea Party did in 2010.

Voting Barriers Multiply

Lack of enthusiasm for Obama would be one problem. But the young people brought into activism by Occupy Wall Street may face other impediments. Today’s Republican Party is not just anti-Democratic but anti-democratic. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University just released a disturbing report showing that changes in state laws could make it much harder for more than 5 million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012. Some states are putting barriers in the way of early voting and student voting, both of which are used heavily by the liberal base.

The most appalling laws make it almost impossible to vote without a driver’s license, which 11 percent of U.S. adults don’t have. College ID cards are not an acceptable substitute in several states. Texas Governor Rick Perry recently signed a bill saying you can vote with a concealed-handgun permit but not with identification from the University of Texas.

Discipline Needed

It isn’t hard to see what Republican-controlled legislatures are trying to do. They want to make sure that the kind of free-floating anger expressed by Occupy Wall Street doesn’t end up helping Obama’s reelection. The claim that the purpose of the new election laws is to prevent voter fraud is itself a fraud, given that there’s no widespread evidence of ballots cast under assumed identities.

To make something lasting of this movement, the left must move from legitimate moral outrage to a disciplined approach for electing candidates who want to make Wall Street more answerable for the mess we’re in. Even as they’re outspent by the Koch brothers and their corporate ilk, the 99 percenters will make 2012 a helluva lot more compelling.

(Jonathan Alter, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

Copyright 2011 Bloomberg.

Perry And The GOP’s Feckless Establishment

WASHINGTON — The Republican establishment is said to have grave qualms about Gov. Rick Perry. Here’s the problem: There is no Republican establishment. It squandered its authority by building up the tea party’s brigades and then fearing them too much to do anything to check their power.

Worse for those who think Perry would be a general election disaster is the growing confidence among conservatives that President Obama will be easy to beat. This feeling will be bolstered by Tuesday’s special election that sent a Republican to Congress from New York’s 9th District for the first time since 1923. If Obama is going to lose anyway, many conservatives reason, why not go with their hearts?

No, if Perry is to be defeated, he will have to do the job himself. And the week’s most important political news is that he might do just that.

His vulnerabilities were certainly on display at this week’s CNN/tea party debate. Perry still hasn’t disentangled himself from his past suggestions that Social Security is unconstitutional. He will also be hurt by his humane position on immigration. He should be praised for it, but it will only bring him scorn among GOP primary voters.

His biggest problem, however, is his executive order requiring pre-teen girls to be immunized against a disease that causes cervical cancer, a decision the religious right didn’t like and that Perry now says was a mistake. The dangerous charge here is influence peddling.

He issued the order after he was lobbied by his former chief of staff who went to work for Merck, the drug company that makes the vaccine. It turns out Perry has received almost $30,000 in contributions from Merck over the years (not just the $5,000 he mentioned in the debate), and his ties to Merck have been documented to run deeper than that.

Perry’s response to the pay-for-play intimation from Rep. Michele Bachmann was one of the worst of its sort ever offered by a politician. “The company was Merck, and it was a $5,000 contribution that I had received from them,” Perry declared, misreporting the donor’s generosity. “I raise about $30 million. And if you’re saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended.” The single question this raised in a listener’s mind was: So how much can you be bought for? The question will linger.

This helps Mitt Romney. It also cheers most Republicans who pass for establishment these days and who worry that the tea party crowd will get Perry nominated. Yet these Republicans have only themselves to blame for abdicating to the far right.

Business lobbies, once a moderating force, are largely out for themselves, concentrating their energies on how much they can secure in tax and regulatory benefits.

Moderate politicians have been drummed out of the party or silenced as its leaders have played ball with the extremists throughout Obama’s term, rarely calling out their most outlandish and mendacious attacks. The theory was that anything that weakened Obama was good for the GOP. When tea party commentators proffered conspiracy theories straight out of the old John Birch Society playbook, Republican officials either stayed mum or nodded sagely as if their new allies were referencing Edmund Burke or Milton Friedman.

The Republican triumph in a New York City district that uses a lovely stretch of water to connect white ethnic neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn will aggravate the party’s overconfidence and prevent a showdown with the tea party.

Republican Bob Turner’s victory with 54 percent of the vote in what had been Anthony Weiner’s district is certainly alarming for Democrats. The White House will be tamping down panic by pointing to local factors, but its supporters in Congress are paying heed to the ill winds that blew in from Jamaica Bay.

Still, this area was greatly affected by the politics of 9/11 and its Democratic presidential vote has dropped steadily since the 2000 election. Obama won just 55 percent in 2008, only two points more than his national share. The swing against the Democrats on Tuesday thus roughly matched Obama’s drop in the national polls. The result tells us what we already knew, not more.

Yet if conservatives see New York 9 as further evidence that Obama is a pushover, Rick Perry — if he doesn’t self-destruct — will be able to tell them he is the guy who can destroy the Great Society, the New Deal and the Progressive Era with one decisive blow. And no establishment will be there to stop him.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group