This was an important and even revelatory week in American politics, and we should take note of it. Contrary to what I’d argue has been the single most firmly-held conviction about this campaign by observers left and right, a terrorist attack did not help the Republican candidate in the race for president. Indeed, it seems to have weakened him.
It’s a development worth dwelling on, not only for its own sake, but because it forces a broader reassessment of some of America’s major shared assumptions about politics and the American people. We — pundits, commentators, insiders — think we get them, know their collective mind, believe we speak for them. Do we? And if we got this so wrong, what else are we missing?
But first let’s go back in time. Republicans have owned the “we’ll protect you” narrative for decades, arguably going back to the early years of the Cold War, but certainly since Ronald Reagan. They talked tougher than Democrats, and they were more willing to whip the electorate into a state of frenzy about this or that threat — and more often than not, it worked. This we know.
After September 11, our understanding of all this deepened. We started to figure out why it worked. We learned that fear made voters embrace more conservative positions than they might otherwise have. Social science came along to confirm the belief — a terrorist event evokes intimations of mortality, researchers found, and people who start imagining their own death begin to sanction extreme measures to prevent it from happening. It was around this time that I first started reading about the amygdala, the part of the brain that plays a key role in processing our emotional responses, including fear.
I doubt they were reading this social science in the George W. Bush White House, but they clearly got it. After 9/11 made people fearful to begin with, they spiked the punch with talk of weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds, and now the public was ready to embrace all manner of responses, including a war on a country that, as awful as its leaders may have been, had never done anything to us directly and had nothing to do with 9/11.
So it became conventional wisdom then, and has been ever since: Fear helps advance the conservative argument. Throughout the 2000s, it worked. It wasn’t just supposition to believe that Donald Trump would benefit by going full Jack Bauer. It was based on evidence.
And with each passing week for the past year, the evidence of a pro-Republican effect mounted, in the person of Trump. He stoked fear of Mexicans and shot up in the polls. He added in Muslims, and he held pretty steady. After the attacks in Paris in November, he said, “We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule.” And even still, all but vowing to suspend civil liberties, he held on tight.
And this is when the media started saying ad infinitum: Well, obviously, a terror attack helps Donald Trump. It was a reasonable thing to say. I undoubtedly said it myself. But a small part of me began to wonder, as the primaries wound down: Well, soon enough, Trump’s situation is going to change. Right now, he’s talking only to Republicans — and at that, mostly quite conservative Republicans, who are more likely to caucus and vote in primaries. So of course they’re going to respond to these eruptions. They have active amygdalae. But what about everyone else: What about a general-election audience?
Just under 30 million people voted in the Republican primaries. About 130 million, or more, will vote in November. That’s a big difference. And those new 100 million or so voters — starting to tune in, perhaps, these last couple of weeks — may not respond to fear in quite the same way as the 30 million.
As it happens, there is social science on this question, too, and it finds that conservatives are more alert to threats than liberals are. One 2012 study by researchers at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, showed liberals and conservatives a collage of photographs, and conservatives lingered longer on dangerous or repulsive images — car crashes, excrement — than liberals did.
Which brings us to Orlando, Florida. Let’s acknowledge two plain and straightforward truths. One, Trump handled the situation shockingly, embarrassingly. From that tweet in which he accepted “congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism” to his big post-attack speech, which was somehow at once offensive and plodding, he made it about him. When he did try to sound vaguely like a leader, spooning out kind words for the LGBT community (which he of course cherishes), he sounded ridiculous, about as genuine as some of those Southern congressmen did expressing their solidarity with New Jerseyans after Hurricane Sandy before they voted against the emergency funding.
Two — and this is important — the Orlando tragedy wasn’t just a straightforward terrorist attack. It was also a hate crime, since it was directed at one community (or two — Latino and LGBT). According to a CBS News poll, 57 per cent of Americans thought it was both, but among those who chose one or the other, more saw it as a hate crime (25 per cent) than an act of terror (14 per cent). That the act didn’t “read” to people as a strictly terrorist act may mean it didn’t fire the same set of synapses in most people that an attack that just killed Americans randomly might have. And the fact that Congress is preparing to take a couple of ritualistic gun-control votes nudges the psychic needle even further in the hate-crime direction.
But acknowledging those caveats, I want to advance a theory: Americans in 2016 may have a less reactive response to terrorism than they had 15 years ago. When 9/11 happened, it was so shocking and new; most people had simply thought that something like that could never happen in the United States. A decade and a half later, we have joined the world, the weary and beleaguered world, and learned that anything can happen anywhere, anytime.
We may also have figured out, or most of us may have, that the bluster and gasconade of the fear-mongers hasn’t really done us much good. George W. Bush said “bring ‘em on”; and bring it on they did, pitching us into hell. Maybe after these last 15 years of war, a lot of Americans hear Trump’s rhetoric and plans and think, “That’s the last thing we need.”
It’s also the case that Hillary Clinton, by contrast, looked and sounded like a president ought to. The reputation for hawkishness that she spent her Senate years cultivating didn’t hurt, as backdrop. And while she may not have said anything terribly memorable, in a week such as the one past, maybe that’s the point: Just say the obvious and comforting things a president is supposed to say. Observing her comportment last week, one could easily picture her representing the nation at grave moments. The same could hardly be said of Trump.
And so, while it’s too early to see the full impact in the polls, there’s no question that Trump’s post-Orlando fear-mongering hurt him. This doesn’t mean we’ve entered a golden age when inducing fear will never work. A depressingly large number of the public still supports Trump’s temporary ban on Muslim immigration. And a different kind of terrorist attack this autumn — one actually orchestrated by Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), say, or spreading death more randomly — could produce a more traditional fallout than Orlando.
But it does, I think, mean this: You can’t stoke fear if you can’t also reassure. It won’t work. If you want to make people scared and force them to turn to you as their protector, you have to demonstrate that you are worthy of being that protector. The far-right base that made him the putative Republican nominee grants Trump that status. But beyond that base, he fails this test every time he starts talking.
And I also hope that Trump’s very bad week means something else. To return to the media’s role: Many of the media’s assumptions about how people will react are, perhaps, outdated. They often think they know what “real Americans” are going to think. But I say we need to rethink our idea of who real Americans are. They aren’t just Trump supporters. Forty-nine of them were murdered in Orlando. It behoves us all to remember that.
— New York Times News Service
Michael Tomasky is a columnist for the Daily Beast and editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
