The country that Franklin Delano Roosevelt admonished not to succumb to fear and John F. Kennedy challenged to put humans on the moon within a decade, the most powerful country and sole surviving superpower in our world, has become a Republic of Fear.
African American life has always been marked by preponderant, disabling fear, starting with slavery, through Jim Crow and persisting beyond the gargantuan accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement. Fear was a constant companion of native peoples holding on and resisting genocidal policies enacted by the colonists and their descendants. Finally, the ravages of capitalism have always meant that ordinary folks within the majority white populace have their lives dominated by fear of lacking the wherewithal to attain the “American dream”.
But the Republic of Fear is a completely different phenomenon with a specific provenance. Ever since Ronald Reagan’s winning electioneering slogan—“It’s morning in America!”—an appeal to a supposedly new dawn in America, fear has been the Republican Party’s main weapon for winning and maintaining power. Its adoption of “the Southern strategy” to counter the Democratic Party’s grudging embrace of the Civil Rights movement, however half-heartedly, and the need to keep whites in line while demonizing, mainly, African Americans and turning them into a menace, led to the embrace of thinly-veiled (at least until the Obama presidency) racism and bigotry as the recipe for maintaining power
Read the entire article in The Philosophical Salon.
