They're Out There

They're out there.

That's the first sentence of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a novel about an insane asylum as seen through the eyes of a mute Indian. It's meant to convey a sense of foreboding, warning, and danger, and those three simple words express anonymity, exclusion, and ambiguous distance, and it's all about being afraid.

Fear is a basic human instinct. It's what keeps us alive, and like the need for food and sex, it is subject to manipulation and exploitation. And in its basic form, politics is a science that is founded on juxtaposing fear and hope and the manipulation of the two. It's the easiest way to get people to the polls: vote for X and your world will come to an end; vote for Y and the terrorists win. But vote for W and all the world will be safe and angels and archangels and all the hosts of Heaven will alight upon your shoulders and whisper hosannahs in your ear. It never says why a vote for X or Y is wrong or why a vote for W is heaven-blest; the mere implication that fire and brimstone will burst forth is enough to impel the voter to pull the lever, and that is good enough.

Less than two weeks out from an important election and the fear factor is growing exponentially. Straw men and boogeymen lurk in the ads of a desperate congressional candidate in Indiana. Sublte racism has crept into the Senate race in Tennessee where the Republican candidate uses jungle drums as background music whenever the name of his opponent, a black man, is mentioned. (As Josh Marshall notes, racism has been a foundation of Republican politics for generations, so it is no surprise that it is creeping into a contest in a Southern state where the polls show the outcome as too close to call.) And now that the New Jersey Supreme Court has come to the breathtaking conclusion that gays and lesbians are entitled to the same rights as every other citizen of the state in terms of forming a committed and legally recognized relationship in the eyes of the state and to do otherwise is a violation of the basic rights as put forth in the state's Constitution, you can be sure that there will be those who will make every attempt possible to scare the foolish and the weak into believing that somehow two queers sharing a house in Asbury Park or Lawrenceville is a threat to life on Earth and that voting against the Democratic candidate for the United States Senate will somehow make a difference.

Both political parties are masters at exploiting fear, but it's been the strong suit of the Republicans for the last few years. As many have noted, we've gone from Franklin Roosevelt's call to courage in 1933 -- The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- to the Bush administration's perpetual state of Be afraid of everything. The difference, of course, is that Roosevelt offered optimism, light and leadership while the current administration offers intimidation, threats of darkness, and bluster. They cannot even match Ronald Reagan's cloud-city vision of the shining city on a hill.

What's behind this exploitation of fear isn't just the same politics as usual. What drives this is the fear of being found out that there is nothing behind the bluster and the tough talk. Like the school-yard bully who is deathly afraid of being found out that behind all the swagger and muscle is nothing but a frightened coward, the Republicans are running on the desperate gamble that no one will see how truly scared they are. And so they have to invoke the time-honored tactic of pointing in every direction, telling us what to be afraid of, and doing nothing more about it than repeating over and over again the mantra of Chief Bromden: They're out there.