(Thanks to Norm.)

The flames of fear that I wrote about before among some white, English speaking Christians in the US that they are under siege from Hispanics on the one hand and Muslims on the other has been fueled by xenophobic elements and fanned by media outlets like Fox News that have created a climate that people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin have been able to exploit and whip up, each to serve their own personal goals. The coverage they get from so-called ‘reputable’ news outlets serve to merely expand the audience for their craziness. The few times I have seen these three people perform (and I use that word advisedly) I get the sense that they seem to be laughing at the stupidity of their ardent fans, at how easily they can be frightened. For such cynical manipulators, the whole thing seems to be a show that they use for their personal gain. Beck and Palin even had the audacity to hold an event on September 11 in Anchorage and charge for tickets ranging from $75 up to $225.
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America is a big and diverse country so any generalization that treats its people as a single entity with one set of qualities is going to be wrong. But having said that, I do want to make some fairly broad statements about one particular group, that of white, middle class, middle-aged and elderly Americans. Understanding the state of mind of this particular group is important because although it represents only one segment of opinion and class interests, it is vocal, votes disproportionately, and the shallow and sensationalistic media focuses on it and is sympathetic to its interests. Furthermore, as Kevin Drum notes, how responsive politicians are to your concerns is directly related to how much your income is. The sad truth is that the fundamental premise of democracy of ‘one person, one vote’ has effectively become ‘one dollar, one vote’.

My comments about the psyche of this group are based on those events that have received considerable attention in the news recently and the results of recent primary elections running up to the mid-term congressional elections.

The one thing that strikes me is that this group seems to be in the grip of irrational fear and despair, almost to the point of paranoia. One symptom of this is that they look back on the past as a wonderful time, a golden age of peace and prosperity and wholesome living, and the current times as fraught with a vague and inchoate sense of danger. They tend to take real but small current incidents, inflate their significance beyond all reason and evidence to gigantic proportions, and then quake in fear of the monster that they themselves have conjured up.

These people seem to think that the country is under existential threat from enemies internal and external. Externally, they think that al Qaeda or some Islamic equivalent is plotting to launch another attack on targets in the US. This is actually very likely to be true (after all, those groups explicitly keep saying they want to attack the US and its interests) but why does it cause such fear? Even the US government says that there exist less than a hundred such militants in Afghanistan, with the rest (still a small number) in the remoter areas of Pakistan. While such a small but determined group can create some death and destruction, even the remote possibility of one on the scale of another 9/11, it would still be a tiny pin prick for a country like America and not by any means an existential threat. Does anyone really think that Osama bin Laden’s forces will defeat the US military and that he will become the ruler of the US? Any mature country and mature people should be able to shrug off the threats of groups like al Qaeda as merely irritants and go about their normal business unconcerned. And yet these people are acting like elephants terrified by mice.

Related to this is the fear that Muslims are infiltrating the country, Christianity is under threat in the US and Islam taking over, and that Sharia law will soon be imposed on everyone. It is true that the number of Muslims is growing more rapidly than the general population because Muslims, like ultra-orthodox Jews and Catholics and Mormons, tend to favor large families, but they are still a tiny minority. The proposition that Christianity will be replaced with Islam in the US is laughable on its face but that has not stopped people from taking it seriously. The fuss over the Islamic community center in New York and the attacks on Muslims and mosques in various parts of the country are symptoms of this irrational fear.

Another fear is that the country is going to be overrun by Mexicans and other people from south of the border and this has resulted in increased anti-Hispanic sentiment, rooted in concerns about illegal immigration. Again, the symptom of the irrationality lies in these people taking the 14th Amendment guarantees that almost all babies born in the US are automatically US citizens and elevating this into fear of a colossal scheme for Mexicans to come to the US purely to deliver their babies here as part of a long term plan to overwhelm the US demographically. A variant of this crazy fear is that Muslims are also coming here to deliver babies so that, in a couple of decades, they can create home-grown terrorist cells.

These trends are disturbing to say the least. When enough people develop paranoid fears, they do stupid things.

Next: How these fears are inflamed.