According to Niccolò Machiavelli, fear is better than love for getting people to do your bidding. This is because, at least in Niccolò’s view, we are basically all a pack of losers:
For of men it may generally be affirmed that they are thankless, fickle, false, studious to avoid danger, greedy of gain, devoted to you while you are able to confer benefits upon them…but in the hour of need they turn against you…Moreover, men are less careful how they offend him who makes himself loved than him who makes himself feared.
Niccolò Machiavelli: “You people suck.”
Ouch. But is Machiavelli right? Are we more effectively governed by fear than by benevolence? Well, Republicans clearly believe we are. Case in point, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who, on the day he was sworn in, signed a bunch of squirrelly executive orders including one that bans critical race theory and other “divisive concepts” in public schools. For the moment, I’ll leave aside the threat imposed by heavy-handed gubernatorial intrusion into domains where honest scholarship should prevail - even though that threat is a serious one. Instead, I want to focus on GOP fearmongering, the Machiavellian flavor of this election season.
Republicans detest democracy. We can see it in their flurry of state laws that stifle or undermine voters’ rights, their failure to thoroughly denounce and hold accountable the January 6 insurrectionists, and their enduring effort to divide us by stoking fear against harmless and innocent people. The harmless and innocent people in Youngkin’s case are the handful of legal scholars that teach critical race theory or CRT, in Virginia’s law schools. I’m pretty sure there are damn few, if any, CRT advocates in Virginia’s public high schools. But if there are any, why doesn’t Youngkin choose to debate them honestly? Because Republicans detest democracy.
They detest it because in honest, straight-up debate, they lose. Voters don’t want to keep siphoning off the nation’s wealth into the hands of a privileged few, they don’t want assault weapons to flood our streets and schools, and they don’t want women being subject to humiliating and painful entanglements when they have to consider the option of abortion. Since so many of their policies are unpopular, Republicans have decided to abandon democracy and go for Machiavellian fearmongering.
Some things are genuinely frightening and against them we should stand guard. In addition to Republicans, I would say genuinely dangerous entities include aggressive dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un as well as viruses that spread like wildfire and can kill millions. But Republicans don’t want us to worry about those genuinely worrisome bits of reality. They want us to fear people that are in no way scary – like Youngin’s mythical CRT teachers.
Florida’s own State Senator Joe Gruters has even managed to outdo Glenn Youngkin in the GOP’s “scare the voters” campaign. According to the Orlando Sentinel’s Scott Maxwell, Gruters has introduced a bill that threatens to cut off funding for sports stadiums where the national anthem isn’t sung before games.
Maxwell focuses on the very sensible question of why voters should be subsidizing sports stadiums anyway, when most sports enterprises are rolling in cash. A good question but not the one I’m going to ask here, which is, Who are these sports teams that refuse to sing the national anthem? Are they hanging out in some secret lair with Glenn Youngkin’s CRT teachers, or what?
Of course, there is no People’s Republic of Un-American Footballers refusing to sing the national anthem. But Senator Gruters wants voters to think there is, because snollygosters like him want us to believe that our very way of life is under threat. In response to these imaginary fears, voters - he hopes - will be distracted from thinking about why more of the nation’s wealth keeps going to the super-rich, why more schools keep having to go into lockdown, and why the government keeps closing in on a woman’s right to choose. It’s an old strategy for sure, but it can be an effective one, as evidenced by current GOP hopes of taking over Congress this year.
