If the summer of 2024 is teaching us anything, it is that there is a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of fear—and emotions more generally—in Western politics.
Because the expression “fear campaign” is well known, and its connotation is certainly pejorative. However, we cannot understand the historic victory of the left in the French legislative elections or the last-minute withdrawal of Joe Biden’s candidacy from the American presidential elections without admitting that fear, in politics, does not necessarily lead to action that opposes rationality.
When a politician uses “scarecrows” to mount a “scare campaign,” he is mobilizing the timeless tactic of scapegoating. Scapegoats are recognized by their lack of real power in society. In the Middle Ages, aristocrats faced with popular anger over famine or epidemics always had the option of accusing the local Jewish community of poisoning wells or organizing rituals that would provoke divine wrath. In this sense, the pogrom could be described as a European terrorist tradition that sought to provide an outlet for popular fears and anger over poverty, while also providing the powers that be with an opportunity to feign control, authority, and concern for the people’s well-being.
The faces of scapegoats have diversified throughout Western history. Today, a populist movement might focus on sexual minorities as threats to the “family,” or on immigrants as a source of lack of housing, services, and decent wages. But the political utility of scapegoating has remained the same: to mask the incompetence, indifference, and even opposition of big business to a more equitable distribution of resources and to redirect popular frustrations toward a class of individuals with no real access to the corridors of power.
In our globalized economy, we regularly see our ministers begging, sorry, negotiating with multinationals likely to “create jobs” by boasting about how they will be better established than in the neighboring state that would make too many regulatory or tax fuss. The GAFAM, meanwhile, have taken control of our spaces of socialization and information. The more the real power of States over our daily lives tends to crumble, the more we see political figures emerging and gaining popularity who feign control, authority and paternalistic concern for the people.
This is hardly surprising. The current resurgence of fascist rhetoric is part of a period in which statesmen and women increasingly resemble frogs trying to make themselves as big as oxen. Taking away rights from minorities is a low-cost demonstration of “power,” an opportunity to make oneself a “man of action” without offering any concrete solutions to the threats that really hang over the material conditions of ordinary people—multinational and climatic threats in the face of which each state reveals its limitations.
When we denounce the role of fear and fear campaigns in politics, this is most often what we are talking about. We denounce the fear of those weaker than us, which comes to legitimize violence, first discursive, then political, then physical and material, against the social margins.
But by relegating fear to the rank of propaganda tools and major manipulations, we forget how healthy and completely rational it is to be afraid of what is stronger than us and which clearly has the potential to crush us. By describing anger as the prerogative of right-wing populism, we lose sight of the fundamental usefulness of this emotion for the human brain. Anger tells us that something is wrong in our environment. Most often, it signals an element that we perceive as an injustice. It is in a way the needle of our internal moral compass. Fear, for its part, alerts us to danger. And we can always distinguish real dangers from false ones by evaluating — through analysis, reliable information, studies; in short, reason — which ones are located on the side of power.
It is profoundly dangerous to elect elected officials who base their illusion of strength on an obsession with scapegoats. It is dangerous not only for their chosen scapegoats, but also for the very possibility of rational debate, for the rule of law, for democracy—and especially for our ability to stand together as a human species in the face of the multinational and climate threats that are wrecking our societies. By focusing public debate on scapegoats, these populist leaders distract from real problems that require urgent global attention. When we see these kinds of public dangers at the doorstep of power, fear becomes a force that blurs predictions and shatters political traditions.
The second round of the French legislative elections, with its “Republican barrage”, is a political coup de théâtre that will have been made possible only under the influence of an unprecedented fear. The fear of a new Donald Trump presidency has, for its part, overcome part of the culture of loyalty within the Democratic elites. In the coming months, the emotional resources that progressive America will draw on will make electoral politics difficult to predict.
I write all this, of course, north of the border. While Justin Trudeau has never been more unpopular, I am not sure that the various factions in power in Ottawa have yet fully grasped the role of fear as a mobilizing force that is not necessarily devoid of rationality.
An anthropologist, Emilie Nicolas is a columnist for Le Devoir and Libération. She hosts the podcast Détours pour Canadaland.