Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Glenn Greenwald, as usual, hits the nail right on the head with this post about how fear, and the exploitation of that fear, undermines the constitution. It's a long quote, so I'll put it below the fold.
The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe. Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw this week -- is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever happens. Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe.This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years. It regresses into pure childhood. The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and Safe, is the same as a citizenry planted in front of the television, petrified by endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then collectively crawl to Government and demand that they take more power and control in order to keep them Protected and Safe. A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be degraded and depraved...
For a variety of reasons, nobody aids this process more than our establishment media, motivated by their own interests in ratcheting up fear and Terrorism melodrama as high as possible. The result is a citizenry far more terrorized by our own institutions than foreign Terrorists could ever dream of achieving on their own. For that reason, a risk that is completely dwarfed by numerous others -- the risk of death from Islamic Terrorism -- dominates our discourse, paralyzes us with fear, leads us to destroy our economic security and eradicate countless lives in more and more foreign wars, and causes us to beg and plead and demand that our political leaders invade more of our privacy, seize more of our freedom, and radically alter the system of government we were supposed to have. The one thing we don't do is ask whether we ourselves are doing anything to fuel this problem and whether we should stop doing it. As Adams said: fear "renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable."...
These are the calculations that are now virtually impossible to find in our political discourse. It is fear, and only fear, that predominates. No other competing values are recognized. We have Chris Matthews running around shrieking that he's scared of kung-fu-wielding Terrorists. Michael Chertoff is demanding that we stop listening to "privacy ideologues" -- i.e., that there should be no limits on Government's power to invade and monitor and scrutinize. Republican leaders have spent the decade preaching that only Government-provided Safety, not the Constitution, matters. All in response to this week's single failed terrorist attack, there are -- as always -- hysterical calls that we start more wars, initiate racial profiling, imprison innocent people indefinitely, and torture even more indiscriminately. These are the by-products of the weakness and panic and paralyzing fear that Americans have been fed in the name of Terrorism, continuously for a full decade now.
None of this is new, of course. It's the same thing that made us lock up Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II and create blacklists during the great Red Scare of the 50s. Because fear is a powerful currency in politics and demagogues feed on it.
Politics
Comments
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
Posted by: DingoJack | January 7, 2010 9:21 AM
Mr. Greenwald is way too wordy for me to follow myself. However I think he's an under-appreciated national treasure and am grateful for Ed and Andrew Sullivan monitoring his publications.
We'd be a far better country if journalists with access to power framed their questions within the light of what Ed, Sullivan, and Greenwald argue. This is one reason I'm a fan of Rachel Maddow, she does - though without much access to power or millions of viewers. But it is a start given I believe the mainstream media is increasingly reporting within the framework of what respected thinkers who primarily leverage the Internet are promoting. Time is on our side.
Posted by: Michael Heath | January 7, 2010 9:29 AM
Then there are those groups who to some look like the terrorist, that have to put up with the shit from those who think they don't.
Posted by: Hathor | January 7, 2010 9:35 AM
Here is the plan.
1. be afraid
2. be angry
3. whatever you do, don't think
4. find someone to hate
Posted by: Jim Ramsey | January 7, 2010 9:43 AM
@DJ 1
I’ve always liked that quote. But my favorite on fear and politics is:
A close second is:
Posted by: Abby Normal | January 7, 2010 10:12 AM
That Benjamin Franklin guy - what a pussy! Why does he hate America so much?
Posted by: jws | January 7, 2010 10:14 AM
"...He is interested in two things, and two things only, making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections..." = "An American President". (@ 2:37)
Posted by: DingoJack | January 7, 2010 10:32 AM
One thing I really hated - almost everyone on the news keeps on talking about how Obama is "downplaying" the terrorist threat.
He's not. This is like Fox News calling him a socialist. He's still right of center compared to the rest of the world, and he's still giving terrorism far more attention than it deserves. He's just not trumpeting it quite as loudly as Bush did.
I really wish someone in our media would have the balls to say this, though I realize it would be suicide among a certain set of viewers.
Posted by: Tacroy | January 7, 2010 10:35 AM
This is what Oasma bin Laden and his followers were after when they pulled off the September 11 attacks. A nation in fear that would begin to dismantle itself, the 3000+ people they killed were the icing on tha cake
Posted by: Clark Ketchum | January 7, 2010 10:42 AM
Posted by: James Hanley | January 7, 2010 10:52 AM
Nothing surprising about this sentence, except that it was written by the rather-wordy-himself Michael Heath ;p :D
Just teasing, I love your comments. Sometimes they are the only ones I read in a long thread.
Posted by: James Sweet | January 7, 2010 10:53 AM
Something I've wondered about...do conservatives like being afraid? There seem to be so many things that scare them. Do they feel alive only if they're frightened by something? Are they adrenaline junkies?
Posted by: athena | January 7, 2010 11:20 AM
5. Profit?
Posted by: Bruce H | January 7, 2010 11:36 AM
Athena,
The rank and file of the conservative movement may need/want something to be afraid of, but the leadership are acting out of cold calculation. Keep the body politic in a reactive state from fear of something and it is more easily controlled. People aren't thinking when they are overcome by fear.
Posted by: The Other Lance | January 7, 2010 11:41 AM
True, politicians love to push fear onto people for reasons of control, etc. However, this is only half the equation - people still have to listen and believe what they are told.
This is the real heart of the problem. It's not (just) that there will always be people who want to take advantage of people credulousness it's that people just don't have the critical thinking skills to know when they are being lied to.
Lack of critical thinking skills (of which risk assessment of things like terrorist attacks vs things like automobile accidents is just a sub-set) is really crippling the world at the moment. If I had any influence I would make teaching critical thinking the core of every child's education - of course many many people would resist this as the last thing they want is to be questioned.
See Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan especially chapter 8 - Baloney Detection Kit (http://www.carlsagan.com/index_ideascontent.htm#baloney).
Posted by: David Durant | January 7, 2010 12:05 PM
@DingoJack That's one of my favorite quotes ever. Aaron Sorkin doesn't always get his due as a political philosopher.
Posted by: katydid13 | January 7, 2010 12:42 PM
...do conservatives like being afraid?
They like it a lot better than thinking for themselves, questioning their most basic beliefs, and taking responsibility for their own betterment. Fear is just one of the emotions that people will wallow in to protect themselves from frightening realities. And in a time when so many of our most basic beliefs are proving ever more obvious failures, there's a lot to protect ourselves against.
Posted by: Raging Bee | January 7, 2010 12:57 PM
I never paid much attention to fear mongering by media. Maybe it is because I realize what it actually is. It's nothing but a means of control.
And as David Durant points out, I'm more likely to die being hit by a bus than I am in a terrorist attack.
Posted by: Tony P | January 7, 2010 1:24 PM
And yet somehow liberals are the ones who are "weak."
Posted by: Sadie Morrison | January 7, 2010 5:53 PM
I'm afraid that it's true. About manipulating apprehensions and prejudices to instill in people a sense of impending disaster. I suppose that's a reasonable fear for me to have given the other, similar fears I was raised with.
My father was afraid of Negros and Asians.
My step-father was afraid of Communists.
Ol' Unk worried constantly about the Rooskies.
My mother still thinks that packaged, prepared foods are designed to undermine health.
My ex-wife is afraid of herself.
I fear a population abdicating its rightful seat of power because absolute security isn't a daily guarantee and they just know it could be if only we made everybody (insert ridiculous security strategy here). They know because they are told over and over that the danger is getting worse!
*facepalm*
Last time I looked, my own Overall Security Poll of Life in This Great Land showed a slowly growing trend upward, continuing a trend that has been evidenced for about fifty years or better. Near as I can reckon.
Posted by: Crudely Wrott | January 7, 2010 6:23 PM
Tonight on the news I was watching the video of the incident in New Jersey that caused much of the airport to be closed down after a guy slipped into the concourse through the exit. Turns out a TSA guard had walked away from his post for about a minute and the guy slipped in so he could walk with his girlfriend to the gate.
What occurred to me is that since so much of what passes for airport "security" is little more than theater, and since most people realize that it is only theater, there is a lot of cynicism about the roles we are being asked to play. The guard didn't take his role very seriously -- hey, it's just for show, right? And the guy (and his girlfriend) just figured they were getting away with a harmless prank.
That seems to be a weakness of pretend security.
On a related note: some years back when they were doing secondary random searches at the boarding gate, the jolly folks at Southwest Airlines were picking out people to search by calling out "Who wants to volunteer for a random search?" No joke.
Posted by: Gerry L | January 7, 2010 11:14 PM
(automatic)Patriotism is (almost) never criticized even by the thoughtful, because it's just not patriotic! It is no different than any other baseless, arbitrary religion that you may be born into. It is instigated by schools encouraging physical contact "team" sports, continued by media's, sanitized, fairy tale versions of history and strongly supported by all the religions.
It is one of the rocks that irrational fear is built on.
International travel is the cure, however Americans with 2 weeks vacation per year and instilled insecurities are reluctant.
German aggression was solved partly by longer vacations.
(I jest slightly.)
Posted by: ecstatist | September 15, 2011 1:43 PM