“No passion,” Edmund Burke wrote, “so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” The opposite of fear is hope, defined as the expectation of good fortune not only for ourselves but for the group to which we belong. “Fear, Aristotle observed, does not strike those who are “in the midst of great prosperity.” Those who are frightened of losing what they have are the most vulnerable, and it is difficult to be clear-headed when you believe that you are teetering on a precipice. The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels Because he said he’s going to take our country back. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said in Charlottesville. Now, in the second decade of the new century, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the alienated are being mobilized afresh by changing demography, by broadening conceptions of identity, and by an economy that prizes Information Age brains over manufacturing brawn. The fires of fear in America have long found oxygen when broad, seemingly threatening change is afoot. Americans today have little trust in government household incomes lag behind our usual middle-class expectations. “Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress-a period like our own.
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