Fear is a poor substitute for cooperation
Fear and disinformation dominated the 2024 election. Most Americans have little faith there will be moral integrity or practical reason in the new administration. Freedom needs a cooperative defense.
On January 20, 2025, we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., even as the country is gripped by pangs of deep division and many worry that his dream is as far from reality as ever. The sad fact of the moment is that fear is gaining ground and blinding millions of people to the possibility of emergence into a life with more freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing.
Fear has led millions to put their faith in a man so corrupt, he created a special cryptocurrency to allow wealthy supporters to enrich his family—possibly in exchange for favors.
Donald Trump has returned to office partly through cynical manipulation and overt threats to Republican partisans, in service of a desperate effort to avoid being imprisoned after dozens of felony indictments.
He also enjoyed the benefit of an unprecedented campaign of pervasive disinformation on social media. In both of these areas, fear, menace, and confusion were dominant factors.
His return is also partly the result of nagging fears related to the country’s worsening income inequality, in which far more new income goes to the already wealthy, while the poor, working, and middle classes find themselves with modest or negligible wage gains or with declining wages in real dollar terms (adjusting for inflation). The Biden administration took more direct action to counter this generational trend than any in decades, but the 50-year trend is still hurting Americans’ sense of security and opportunity.
More than 77 million people gave Trump their vote in 2024, accepting his implausible claims that he will favor not himself and his wealthy benefactors but those marginalized and excluded. That number represents just under 32% of eligible voters and around 22% of the population. It is not the “sweeping mandate” Trump and his supporters claim.
Roughly 68% of eligible voters chose not to cast a vote for Donald Trump. Tens of millions, however, withheld their vote entirely. This disengagement is known, through polling and socio-economic analysis, to represent a sense of disenchantment with the levers of democracy.
This gap between economic data and the way people feel about their own economic position relative to the expanding universe of financial wealth is not only an economic story. It also reflects what public health experts describe as a long-running epidemic of “deaths of despair”. Not only has the nation not properly addressed the reality of more than 1.2 million lives lost to COVID-19. Since the year 2000, at least 8 million lives have been lost in the United States to drugs, guns, motor vehicles, and preventable diseases.
Many places also have little protection against unforeseen health risks, and many counties have no hospital at all, let alone one that can provide intensive care when needed. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, life in underserved areas is getting riskier:
“The gap in all-cause mortality between rural (nonmetropolitan) and urban (metropolitan) areas of the United States continues to widen. In 1999, the death rate in rural areas was 7% higher than in urban areas; by 2019, it was 20% higher.”
What many perceive as fear and a sense of helplessness and despair is actually a loud, energetic frustration people of all backgrounds are feeling about the levers that control their relationship to power.
Too often, decisions with sweeping consequence are made by small groups of people in office suites far away, and those disadvantaged by flaws in those decisions find themselves with little real-world recourse.
People don’t want government or business to decide against their wishes; they want difficulty, harm, and injustice dissolved by those who hold power and influence.
For tens of millions of Americans, there are too many examples of that not happening.
The First Amendment guarantees the right to seek “redress for grievances”, but increasing numbers of people believe justice is not attainable.
And yet, fear is a poor substitute for cooperation. Intimidation is not persuasive; it works like a sedative for the moral spirit, cajoling innate human decency and independence of mind to stand aside and avoid taking risks, but it does not persuade.
Fear may succeed in blinding many, or diffusing our sense of urgency about resisting what is morally inexcusable, but it cannot persuade any honest person that our values should be shredded or that our most decent and humanizing aspirations had no legitimate foundation and no worthy way forward.
What we need is a civic space where partisan politics, ideological exclusion, and informational bias have less influence. We need a political process that builds opportunity and wellbeing across all circumstances and geographies. The Biden administration started that process in a way not seen in generations, investing more in underserved rural areas, but it was not yet enough to reverse the sense of peril many Americans feel.
As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called us to, we must "adjourn the councils of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism". Pessimism is a very real and debilitating force that can define the civic space, if allowed to. It operates on the premise that good outcomes cannot be achieved, and therefore flawed actors should be accepted as necessary and bullying tactics embraced.
Pessimism is the hidden undercurrent in all authoritarian ideologies. In the American context, pessimism has in the past allowed division to stifle reforms needed by the vast majority of people, to allow small groups to effect their will with relative impunity.
Dr. King also urged us to remember that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. He clearly meant for us to treat justice as a cosmic moral imperative, toward which events and souls will eventually move, but he did not mean that the shape of the arc and its position in any given moment is prescripted and unmovable. We have a role to play in bringing decency into our shared experience of being human.
Yesterday, thousands braved record cold temperatures in Washington, DC, to protest Trump’s return to high office. They demanded the defense of individual rights, the protection of a clean and healthy environment, and at the most basic, a committed adherence to the rule of law.
Today, President Joe Biden issued “preemptive pardons” to a number of people who have been singled out for “retribution” by Donald Trump, for having served the Constitution in good faith. In doing so, he noted the importance of public servants remaining free from intimidation.
The weight of economic inequality and pervasive unfairness leads tens of millions to search for a solution brought by others—to either break the status quo or create some new possibility by sheer force of will. Many people, tragically, surrender their conscience to bigotry and other modes of dehumanizing despair. None of that will get us anywhere.
On this frigid January morning at the opening of the 2nd quarter of the 21st century, we must recognize that the new light will only come into our civic space if we use it to solve problems together. The next four years will see greed, lies, and menace distract the republic from its course; every American has a role to play in refocusing our collective energy on progress.