Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

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Short plain-English summary of the major things he says in the article:

People in the US are generally much safer than in the past, but they also seem to be more afraid than in the past, and it seems to be because there are powerful groups that benefit (or believe they benefit) from this state of affairs: those associated with or members of the news media, the military and its private-sector suppliers, politicians, the very rich, and the police.

This shift to having the public generally fearful seems to have started in 1949 when we in the US learned that the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. Consensus in Washington became that the Soviet Union was a more immediate and serious threat than it probably really was, and the news media sold papers by stirring up fear of WW3. In the 1960s the news media made people afraid of the possibility of an actual armed revolution within the US by leftists. With the fall of the Berlin Wall the news media and politicians shifted to fear of drugs, and since 9/11 it has been terrorism.

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The main ideas / questions discussed, in his words:

[Motivating problem:] In no country anywhere in the history of the world has the majority of a population lived in circumstances as benign and well-lighted as those currently at home and at large within the borders of the United States of America. And yet, despite the bulk of reassuring evidence, a divided but democratically inclined body politic finds itself herded into the unifying lockdown imposed by the networked sum of its fears—sexual and racial, cultural, social, and economic, nuanced and naked, founded and unfounded.

[Main questions:] How does it happen that American society at the moment stands on constant terror alert? Why and wherefrom the trigger warnings, and whose innocence or interest are they meant to comfort, defend, and preserve? Who is afraid of whom or of what, and why do the trumpetings of doom keep rising in frequency and pitch?

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Paragraph-by-paragraph-ish main ideas (as far as I could tell), in his words:

Fear [is] the oldest and strongest of the human emotions.

[There is] real fear and neurotic fear, the former a rational and comprehensible response to the perception of clear and present danger, the latter “free-floating,” anxious expectation attachable to any something or nothing that catches the eye or the ear.

I’m old enough to remember when Americans weren’t as easily persuaded to confuse the one with the other. I was taught that looking fear straight in the face was the root meaning of courage.

[After] August 1949, when the Soviet Union successfully tested a [nuclear] bomb, my further acquaintance with fear was for the most part to take the form of the neurotic.

The Cold War with the Russians produced the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. For the everybodies whose lives were the stake on the gaming table, [this] didn’t leave much room for Teddy Roosevelt’s looking real fear straight in the face.

Expectant anxiety maybe weakens the resolve of individual persons, but it strengthens the powers of church and state.

Fear is the most wonder-working of all the world’s marketing tools. Used wisely, innovatively, and well, it sells everything in the store—the word of God and the wages of sin, the divorce papers and the marriage certificate, the face cream and the assault rifle, the grim headline news in the morning and the late-night laugh track.

[He tells a story of working as a reporter in NYC in 1962, receiving a press release from the Russians about new weapons tech, and having the editor of the paper mold it into a front-page fear-soaked story, presumably motivated by the desire to sell more papers.]

Expectant anxiety sells newspapers.

The Cold War was born in the cradle of expectant anxiety; so were the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

The innovative and entrepreneurial consensus in Washington resurrected from the ruins [of Russia post-WW2] the evil Soviet Empire—stupendous enemy, world-class and operatic, menace for all seasons, dread destroyer of American wealth and well-being.

Fattened on the seed of openhanded military spending (upward of $15 trillion since 1950) the confederation of vested interest that President Eisenhower identified as the military-industrial complex brought forth an armed colossus the likes of which the world had never seen.

The turbulent decade in the 1960s raised the force levels of the public alarm. The always fearmongering news media projected armed revolution; the violent fantasy sold papers, boosted ratings, stimulated the demand for repressive surveillance and heavy law enforcement that blossomed into one of the country’s richest and most innovative growth industries.

The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 undermined the threat presented by the evil Soviet Empire, and without the Cold War against the Russians, how then defend, honor, and protect the cash flow of the nation’s military-industrial complex? The custodians of America’s conscience and bank balance found the solution in the war on drugs.

The stockpiling of domestic fear for all seasons is the political alchemist’s trick of changing lead into gold, the work undertaken in the 1990s by the presidential campaigns pitching their tents and slogans on the frontiers of race and class.

Like the war on drugs, the war on terror is unwinnable because [it is] waged against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun.

[The War on Terror] is a war that returns a handsome profit to the manufacturers of cruise missiles and a reassuring increase of dictatorial power for a stupefied plutocracy that associates the phrase national security not with the health and well-being of the American people but with the protection of their private wealth and privilege.

Unable to erect a secure perimeter around the life and landscape of a free society, the government departments of public safety solve the technical problem by seeing to it that society becomes less free.

The war on terror brought up to combat strength the nation’s ample reserves of xenophobic paranoia, the American people told to live in fear.

Given enough time and trouble over the last sixteen years, their collective fear and loathing collected into the cesspool from which Donald J. Trump became the president of the United States.