Few things arouse more interest at this time among Western politicians than knowing what influence the social measures launched by the current US president, Joe Biden, will have on the vote for Donald Trump. The previous president lost the White House in 2020, but he added a tremendous number, 74.2 million votes (compared to 81 million for the Democrat, in the largest electoral mobilization in decades remembered).
To what extent will solidarity and the presence of the public in the life of the United States be able to convince a part of those millions of Americans, furious with the disappearance of their old way of life, that it is true that this society does not it will return, because it disappeared a long time ago, but that the new one can provide them with pride, work and well-being? To what extent will social improvements – which Biden’s team will undoubtedly set in motion – will be able to counter the fear that Donald Trump and his followers continually encourage as a most effective political tool?
It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who first put fear at the center of the political agenda, when in his first inaugural address, in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression, he warned: “The only thing we have to be afraid of it is from fear itself ”.
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The most important task of politics and a government, Roosevelt thought, is to remove fear from the citizens. That’s what it’s all about today in the United States and in Europe. In fact, that’s what he did so much new deal of Roosevelt as the modern welfare state created by postwar Europe in the 1940s and 1950s.
For today’s European Union, almost as important as maintaining and revitalizing that welfare state (sadly abandoned in the 1990s and early 21st century) is that Biden succeed in his reforms in the next two years. It will be the best weapon so that Donald Trump does not return to the presidency of the United States in 2024, with all the risks that this would entail for the international political scene.
Very few believe that the Republican Party is capable of generating a new leadership before 2024 that will prevent the candidacy of the former president. As Trump himself said, “the Republican Party is not capable today of winning a presidential election fairly.” The only way for Republicans, today, is to turn to the New York millionaire and his populist techniques, “his immersion in a world of alternative facts and a frenzy of irrationality”, in the words of Noam Chomsky.
It is precisely against this irrationality and against the empire of alternative facts (the formula invented by the followers of Donald Trump to deny the real and verified facts) against which the followers of Joe Biden warn that you have to fight from now on if you want prevent the “big scare” from coming in 2024.
It is not a question of comparing current populism, that of Trump or that of other European models, with Hitler or with Mussolini, because it is not the same phenomenon, but another with specific characteristics, which has its own, and great, danger to democracy.
The American sociologist Barry Glassner, who wrote in 1999 a very successful book entitled The Culture of Fear (The culture of fear), calls today to denounce and combat from the first moment, in the United States and in Europe, the political use of fear, camouflaged on many occasions behind the panic of cultural changes or immigration. “One can only hope that journalists, as well as public officials and academics, do not wait so long to question the scares of the day and the use of fear as a political tool.”
Heinz Bude, his German colleague, also author in 2017 of an extraordinary book –The society of fear (Herder) -, also quotes Roosevelt, “the man who understood that addressing fear is the key to public bliss.” And that the opposite of fear is not courage, but solidarity.
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