Fear and Trembling and Republicans unto Death

Grzegorz Klaman, Fear and Trembling. Installation piece, Schmidt Center Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, April-May 2007.

David Brooks takes on the Quality of Fear:

There’s been a lot of tutting-tutting about the people who are overreacting to the Ebola virus. There was the lady who showed up at the airport in a homemade hazmat suit.

Yes, Brooksy, and then there was the nationally syndicated Washington Post columnist who insisted in several public venues that the Ebola virus could fly through the air from a sneezing patient to infect you, and the senator, famous for his hatred of czars, who demanded that the president hire an Ebola czar, except then the president chose the wrong one, and the congressman who was worried that members of a Palestinian militant group might go to West Africa in the hopes of catching Ebola, flying to Mexico, and sneaking themselves across the border into Texas to spread disease, as a very slow suicide bomb.

The critics point out that these people are behaving hysterically, all out of proportion to the scientific risks, which, of course, is true. But the critics misunderstand what’s going on here. Fear isn’t only a function of risk; it’s a function of isolation. We live in a society almost perfectly suited for contagions of hysteria and overreaction.

So how did George Will (also see Vixen), John McCain, and Joe Wilson get so isolated, anyway?

In the first place, we’re living in a segmented society. Over the past few decades we’ve seen a pervasive increase in the gaps between different social classes.... That means there are many more people who feel completely alienated from the leadership class of this country, whether it’s the political, cultural or scientific leadership. 

Oh, that. Never mind.

Image via Ohnotheydidnt.

However much he may want to portray Ebola terror as a clownish affliction of the alienated lower orders (even as he continues to promote policies in government spending, minimum wage law, and especially taxation, that widen that class gap), it is in fact plainly driven by political and journalistic elites, especially Republicans for whom fear is a campaign tool especially in October in even-numbered years, and TV news organizations using fear to bring up flagging ratings like CNN, or in the case of Fox News both. When Fox "psychiatrist" Keith Ablow writes,

I believe the president may literally believe we should suffer along with less fortunate nations. And if he does, that is a very dangerous psychological stance from which to confront Ebola

is that really because he perceives a "vast status gap" between himself and "people in authority"?

There actually is no mass panic, not even in Dallas. Nobody's fleeing the city in droves, burning down hospitals, murdering Jews, or holding parades of self-flagellation to appease the angry YHWH.

Who's really panicking are the legislators, including too many Democrats, screaming for useless quarantines and badmouthing courageous health workers. Brooks, trying to hide these irresponsible and ill-educated fearmongers behind his warmed-over amateur sociological analysis of a situation that does not in fact exist, is really not helping.

Edinburgh artist Frank To dressed as a medieval plague doctor, 2011. Photo via BBC.

Driftglass tests himself: can he guess what's in today's column without reading beyond the first sentence? And does spectacularly well (though with Burkean modesty he only gives himself an A-).