This strategy, employed by dictators and autocrats, is as ancient as history. Caligula did it, as did Nero. Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orbán achieved and exercised power using fear
They just cry out for mom or dad, and when Republicans can throw them into that state of fear, part two of the classic authoritarian playbook kicks in: offer a powerful-seeming parental figure (almost always male) who can reassure frightened Republicans that he’ll take care of them, he’ll hold the threats at bay, he’ll keep them safe if they just surrender their agency and power to him.
Donald Trump has been playing this game ever since he came down the escalator in 2015 ranting about dark-skinned “rapists and murderers pouring across our border” from Mexico. His first inaugural address, his infamous “American Carnage” speech, referred to our “inner cities,” “crime and the gangs” and “radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.”
But fear as a GOP political weapon goes back much farther than Trump.
As the brilliant Amanda Marcotte noted for Salon:
“The last thing MAGA stands for, in fact, is making America great, much less ‘great again.’ These are people caught up in a dark fantasy that they live in a zombie movie.”
She goes so far as to speculate that Republicans refuse to do anything about gun violence because mass- and school-shootings increase the fear of Americans, and Republicans live on fear the way vampires live on blood (my metaphor, not hers).
While Republican politicians will blithely tell you there’s “nothing that can be done” about high-velocity bullets from assault weapons tearing our schoolchildren’s bodies into mangled and sometimes unidentifiable masses of bloody meat, they’ll go to the mat for fetuses.
Why? Because defending innocence and purity is the other face of attacking sinfulness and danger.