Orlando Patterson and the 3am Ad
Orlando Patterson marks out a pretty daring thesis in his much blogged about NY times op-ed, namely that the imagery in Clinton’s infamous 3 AM recalled Birth of a Nation and that its implicit message wasn’t just that Obama’s foreign policy was weak or that he was inexperienced, but instead that “the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.”
I think Patterson is wrong to say that Clinton was consciously, or even subconsciously, trying to stir up racist thoughts or images in voters mind, instead, I agree with Yglesias’ point that the ad was “run of the mill fearmongering, reflecting Clinton’s ideas about the politics of foreign policy.” But Patterson, who really is making a fool of himself with such an easily refuted and slippery op-ed, is on to something about why using this instinctive fear mongering – literally, if we elect Barack Obama, your children will be unsafe – is bad politics for liberals and progressives.
Fear, especially fear for the live of one and ones own family, is a very powerful feeling. It can make people do amazing things, like lift cars, but it hardly encourages rationality or opendmindedness. When people feel that their kin are threatened, they are likely to turn in inward and reject Others, whether they be people of different races, immigrants, foreigners, gays – just whoever they view as “not them.” The history of fear of death leading to horrible acts of violence against the Other is just too long. But the actual empirical evidence that fear of death leads to reactionary politics is also pretty good. John Judis had a fascinating article that came out last August looking at social psychology research that showed when people were reminded of their own mortality, they would become marginally more reactionary:
Their first experiment was published in 1989. To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes “worldview defense”–their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religi- osity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger–they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you”; the other required them to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead.” They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.
The implications for foreign policy, and how it ought to be presented, are very important for liberals and progressives. The Bush administration, as Judis explains, has based it’s foreign policy around vague, shadowy reminders of our own mortality. We were lead to believe that Saddam could attack the United States, that there are secret Al Qaeda cells everywhere, ready to strike at any time, etc etc. And the foreign policy that this type of fear mongering encourages is hardly a good one. When you think that these shadowy terrorists are going to butcher you and your family – tomorrow, diplomacy, multilateralism and soft power aren’t going to see that appetizing. Instead, killing as many of these terrorists as possible – even if means doing something stupid like invading Iraq. It’s not so much that the policymakers themselves – Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz etc – were transfixed by fear, it’s that they were able to build up support for the Iraq war as well as the massive clamp down on civil liberties by appearing to fear.
So if we want to reverse the worse parts of the Bush foreign policy – unilateralism, instinctive hawkishness, disregard for civil liberties – then we have to change how we approach foreign policy. That means that wordless, analysis-free summonings of fear (like Hillary’s ad) should be banished from the Democratic party playbook.
Oh yeah, I totally disown this post.
