Biden’s Politics of Fear Explained -Why Are They Playing The Fear Card?
The emergence of progressive authoritarianism
Playing Fear Card
Through politicising FEAR Biden has in effect criminalised millions of Americans.
You can almost hear their sigh of relief. They have been given permission to attack and discredit their political opponents as fascists. The gloves are off and the politics of fear is in full swing. Since, President Joe Biden condemned Donald Trump as a semi-fascist there has been a veritable flowering of unrestrained, hysterical rhetoric. Like children who have been given permission to break a rule, they can’t get enough of fascism-mongering.
They treat Fascists and Nazis as if they are children’s toys
Writing in the American Prospect, Eric Alterman declares that Ron DeSantis, the Republican Governor of Florida, is an ‘Honest-to-God Semi-Fascist’ and added that ‘it’s past time for the mainstream media to say so’. Complaining that ‘the mainstream media have long been wary of applying the term ‘fascist’ to any American politician’, Alterman is delighted that Biden has adopted the language of fascism-mongering. Congratulating Biden for authorising the intemperate use of language, he remarked that ‘the word’ fascism, is now ‘as journalist say, “in play”.
Alterman can’t get enough of semi-fascism. In an aside he remarked, ‘by the way, while it may have been off-the-cuff, “semi-fascism” is a good term for employing, fascist like tactics at every available opportunity in a country that has not yet turned its institutions over to a fascist leader’. Numerous commentators have followed suit and embraced the promiscuous use of the F word. ‘I’ve long resisted using the word fascism to describe Donald Trump and his Republican followers, but we have to overcome our reluctance to use strong language and admit that America is now beset by a dangerous antidemocratic movement masquerading as a party’, wrote Tom Nichols of The Atlantic.
Promoting the politics of fear through evoking the fantasy of fascism on the march in America has been adopted by a new breed of historically illiterate politicians. Charlie Christ, the Democratic nominee for governor in Florida has decided that the best way of tackling his opponent DeSantis is by adopting the slogan ‘Defeat fascism, defeat DeSantis’!
Christ is following the path set out by Biden, which is to play the fear card in an attempt de-legitimise his opponent. Biden’s remarkable speech in Philadelphia last week represented an unprecedented escalation in the rhetoric fear by an American President. Previously Biden called Trump a semi-fascist. In this speech he denounced what he called MAGA Republicans as a form of extremism that threatened the ‘very foundations of our Republic’ He stated, that ‘MAGA Republicans are destroying American democracy’. As the commentator Matt Taibbi noted, Biden ‘sure sounded like a man preparing to criminalize Trumpism’.
It is unlikely that Biden really believes that MAGA Republicans pose an existential threat to the Republic. For if he did, he would be mobilising the military to repress this movement and prevent America’s slide into fascism. That Biden does not take his own rhetoric seriously was illustrated when in response to a question asking him what he meant by semi-fascism, he smiled broadly, and said, ‘You know what I mean’. All that was missing was a wink and a nod.
The cynicism of Democratic Party strategists is demonstrated by the fact that in recent months they have been funding election-denying ‘extremist’ Trump supporters in primaries. Why would they finance people who they claim are semi-fascists? Because they believe that they are easier to beat at the polls than mainstream conservatives. Biden hopes that scaremongering about the threat of fascism will consolidate his Democratic base and gain influence over potential Republican voters who are wary of any form of extremism. As one commentator observed in The New York Times
‘The stakes are high for Mr. Biden and his political advisers, who believe they must cast the midterms as an existential choice for voters between Mr. Biden’s agenda and a return to the extremism of “MAGA Republicans” who have enabled Mr. Trump’s ideology. Mr. Biden plunged into the cultural issues that his party believes could help galvanise Democratic voters.
It is significant that in his Philadelphia speech Biden’s linked his fear-of-extremism theme with culture war issues. He warned that ‘MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards’ and added ‘backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love’. From this perspective opponents of same-sex marriage, transgenderism or the right to choose are rebranded as potential, if not actual, fascists.
Progressive Fear Mongering
It is important to realise that the inflammatory rhetoric adopted by Biden in recent months is the crystallisation of a fear narrative that has been in place for well over a decade.
During and after the 2004 American presidential election, some Democratic Party supporters reacted to the loss of their candidate by concluding that the “fear factor” was the key to gaining the support of the electorate. For example, Don Hazen, executive editor of the online publication AlterNet, warned that the ‘fear factor is often overlooked by progressives, who frequently make appeals to logic on the assumption that if people know all the facts they will act accordingly’. Hazen asserted that ‘intellectual arguments’ are “not at their most potent at this juncture” and therefore ‘facts and analysis must be accompanied by a vision that addresses safety.’ In other words, ‘progressives’ too must learn to make the fear factor work for them. They too must embrace a rhetoric that underlines the importance of ‘keeping America safe’.
The call for the liberal Left to connect with the public through the promotion of fear was also advanced by Michael Walzer, coeditor of the periodical Dissent. He stated that ‘fear has to be our starting point, even though it is a passion most easily exploited by the right’, Echoing the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Walzer argued that protecting people from the fear of death is a ‘legitimate and necessary task,’ and he proposed a version of the politics of fear that was apparently more ‘progressive’ than that practiced by President Bush. ‘The Bush administration exploits our fears, but it is not interested in a collective effort to cope with them—that is, to provide the necessary forms of protection and to stimulate the necessary forms of mutual assistance,’ Walzer wrote. From this standpoint, a synthesis of the politics of fear with an enlightened social agenda represented the way forward for the liberal Left.1
The so-called progressive version of the politics of fear gained momentum with the candidacy of Donald Trump. At the time Trump was rightly criticised for his use of the politics of fear. His critics piled in to depict Trump as the personification of the politics of fear. Bob Woodward’s book, Fear: Trump in the White House (2018) was paradigmatic in this respect. However, it soon became clear that denunciations of Trump’s politics of fear were communicated through an alarmist rhetoric that more than matched the intemperate language of Trump. This rhetoric became so extreme that in a few years respectable commentators referred to Trump as the ‘American Monster’.
Even before was Trump elected the ‘he is just like Hitler’ rhetoric kicked in. At the Emmy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles in September 2016, film director Jill Soloway compared Trump to Adolf Hitler. She claimed that Trump ‘otherised’ people to achieve political power in the same way that the leader of the Nazi party did. Soloway echoed an outlook already embraced by the cultural elites who assembled for this ceremony. An article in Newsweek sympathetic to Soloway sentiments asked ‘Just how similar is Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler?’. The answer offered by the author, Maiken Umbach, a professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham directly anticipates Biden’s Philadelphia speech by six years.
Umbach wrote that ‘what makes the comparison between Hitler and Trump so poignant is not just the rhetorical marginalisation of groups, lifestyles or beliefs, but the fact that both men represent their personal character as the antidote to all social and political problems’. But of course many politicians do that; they play the saviour card. Focusing on this one personal attribute that Trump and Hitler reportedly share is as arbitrary as finding relevance in the fact that both of them have problems with their hair.
More recently, Biden took up this theme when he warned about the danger of blind loyalty’ to a single leader. Both Umbach and Biden seize on the alleged character flaw of Trump to construct a spurious comparison with Hitler.
Once the California based cultural elites gave the go-ahead for promoting the Hitler meme there was a veritable explosion of the just-like-the-1930s theme
Back in January 2017, the British Labour MP, Dennis Skinner compared Trump to Hitler and argued that the US President should be banned from entering Britain on the ground that he was a fascist. Others penned scare stories that drew direct comparison between Hitler and Trump. See for example ‘Thirteen Similarities Between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler’ where we are informed that they were both obsessed with architecture and buildings
It is important to note that the denunciation of Trump as a fascist kicked in years before the riots in Washington DC on 6 January 2021. This narrative was already widely promoted years before Trump and his supporters kicked up against what they call a ‘stolen election’. What has changed is this narrative now occupies central stage in Biden’s political theatre. This weaponization of fear has important consequences.
Through labelling a significant section of the American public as enemies of the Republic, Biden has in effect criminalised of millions of Americans.
This is a very dangerous departure from the conventions of American political life. Who would have imagined that the election of Biden would serve as a point of departure for the emergence of a new form of anti-authoritarian authoritarianism? Can the land of the free fall under its spell?
Michael Walzer, “All God’s Children Got Values,” Dissent (Spring 2005): 35–40.
The demagogues are working hard. One of the most absurd is Charlie Crist, who has never supported a real principle in his entire career. He probably will emulate the crazed speeches of Biden's speech writers, even with a red backdrop for his hectoring. He's a silly man, and obviously, so is Biden.
National-socialism and fascism were invented by individuals who were into right-wing collectivism and authoritarianism. Sure that there are authoritarian progressives as in the USA. However, left-wing collectivism is not a justification for right-wing collectivism. In the case of Furedi, he is not anti-authoritarian but only anti-left-authoritarian. https://glibe.substack.com/p/national-socialism-made-in-sweden