France’s socialist presidential candidate, Segolene Royal, prophesized violence if right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy wins:
“On the last day of official campaigning, opinion polls showed Sarkozy enjoyed a commanding lead over Royal, who accused the former interior minister of lying and polarizing France.
“Choosing Nicolas Sarkozy would be a dangerous choice,” Royal told RTL radio. “It is my responsibility today to alert people to the risk of (his) candidature with regards to the violence and brutality that would be unleashed in the country (if he won),” she said. Pressed on whether there would be actual violence, Royal said: “I think so, I think so,” referring specifically to France’s volatile suburbs hit by widespread rioting in 2005.”
This sounds very much like the U.S. Republican tactic of 2004, when Vice President Cheney prophesized that a vote for Democrats would make terrorist attacks in America more likely:
“Vice President Dick Cheney says the United States will risk another terrorist attack if voters make the wrong choice on Election Day, suggesting Sen. John Kerry would follow a pre-Sept. 11 policy of reacting defensively.
“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,” Cheney told supporters at a town-hall meeting Tuesday.”
And politicians wonder why the citizenry gets disgusted with politics. Royal’s and Cheney’s scare tactics are the worst politics has to offer. And, please note, that the use of these scare tactics are NOT the domain of any particular political ideology: both left and right are capable.
Giulianianan whatever his name is made the same claim the other day didn’t he? He said something like “If a democrat wins, there will be another attack” or something like that.
There is a significant difference, however, in the dire warnings of Cheney and Giuliani and the veiled threat that Madamoiselle Segolene was making. The French Socialist chic candidate was saying that the mere election of French moderate conservative Nicolas Sarkozy would provoke riots from the hard Left and Arab immigrants in violent protest. Her constituency, or at least the radical element, has a problem with the results of an election and feel they have the right to burn cars and assault people to show their displeasure.
Dick Cheney, a partisan Republican to be sure, was warning the electorate about the probable result of policy decisions that John Kerry was promising to make, the repeal of the Patriot Act for example. That is not what I regard as scare tactics, and even if it is, maybe the voters sometimes need to be scared. He was not urging or inciting Republicans and conservatives to take to the streets and burn the limousines of prominent liberals in the event of a Democratic victory. Cheney was undoubtedly prepared to accept the election results, but he also happened to believe that the Democrats were fundamentally wrong and would put the country at risk with their policies.
Rudy Giuliani is saying exactly the same thing. Democrats do not understand the concept of national security and will, if elected, adopt policies that we think will endanger the nation’s national security. That is absolutely no different from a Democrat, say John Edwards, warning that if you elect a Republican, school kids, minorities and the elderly will be short-changed by their policies. Is Al Gore practicing scare tactics when he warns about the effects of Global Warming? Is John McCain using scare tactics when he warns that we are headed for economic bankruptcy unless we reform Social Security and Medicare and control spending?
These are attacks on bad policy by the other party and that is perfectly legitimate fare in a political campaign. Indeed what else is there to debate. The French Socialists and lawless immigrants simply do not accept the results of an election and are full of anger because the French people had the temerity to vote for someone who might demand that they obey civil laws and go to work. What an outrage!
Many of the points are good and well put (some, like the one about Democrats not understanding terrorism is very debatable). I want to address a specific point about the use of fear-mongering by politicians.
There is a problem of equivalence, I believe, between foretelling violence and terrorism if the other side wins versus foretelling the short-changing of minorities and other vulnerable groups. The difference is not necessarily of objective impact and I make no claims as to the real effects of violence and terrorism on one side and the economic deprivation faced by vulnerable minorities on the other.
Instead, I argue here that scare tactics differ in the type of “scary thing,” for lack of a better term. There are two scary things facing voters (well, there are more than two, but for now, let’s say there are two): (1) Violence and terrorism and (2) economic deprivation. Despite that people’s vote behavior is primarily dependent upon how well the economy is doing, fear of economic deprivation cannot be reasonably said to be the pre-eminent scary thing of now; that mantle belongs to violence and terrorism.
I think this is because most people think that they are a potential target for violence and terrorism, while most only see economic deprivation as some vague and less acute fear. Only the poor, including the 6 million working poor in America, feel this sense of economic deprivation everyday. For the working and middle classes (often one and the same), the fear of economic deprivation is there like a dull ache; but the fear of being killed by terrorist is an acute pain. Following this medical analogy, it is the acute pain that sends people to the doctor. Likewise, it is the acute fear of violence and terrorism that sends people to the folks who claim to have the cure.
What makes fear-mongering so disgusting is that it attempts to manipulate hearts and minds by evoking these scary things. What makes fear-mongering based on violence and terrorism so disgusting is that it attempts to manipulate hearts and minds by evoking the most acute scary thing.