October 9, 2017Mexico, the footage cut back to Trump. His anti-immi-
grant solutions, he shouted out to an enthusiastic crowd,
would “make America great again!”
Throughout the primary season and the general-elec-
tion campaign, Trump ginned up his crowds by calling for
the mass execution of terrorism suspects, by advocating
collective punishment and “the torture,” and by mocking
Muslims for their dietary rituals and religious beliefs.
These words aren’t just empty slogans. They come
with consequences, and they legitimize bigotries and
hatreds long harbored by many but, for the most part,
kept under wraps by the broader society. They give the
imprimatur of a major political party to criminal violence.
In the five days following Trump’s December 7, 2015,
announcement that he would seek to ban all Muslims
from entering the country, hate crimes against Muslims
surged. When researchers at California State Univer-
sity, San Bernardino, analyzed crime data from the pe-
riod, they found a shocking 87.5 percent increase in such
crimes against Muslims in that five-day period compared
with the same week in 2014. Taken as a whole, in the 20
states that the researchers looked at, anti-Muslim crimes
increased by 78 percent in 2015 over the previous year.
A demagogue such as Trump connects best with a
scared audience, with people so addled by fear that they
cease to think rationally. Trump’s appeal, as he mowed
down his Republican primary opponents and contested
the general election, wasn’t based on how he hewed to
facts but on how he played to emotions. That many of
his statements were spun out of thin air was far less im-
portant to his cheering crowds than that he seemed to
connect with their anxieties about a world run amok.
It was the same playbook used by a slew of Tea Par-
ty figures in the years leading up to Trump’s eruption
onto the national political stage. In mid-February 2016,
Maine Governor Paul LePage, a self-made businessman
who’d won election as part of the Tea Party sweep of
2010, addressed a town-hall meeting in which he urged
stringent restrictions on the admission of Syrian refu-
gees into Maine. LePage—whose political résumé was
full of such controversial acts as ordering officials to
destroy a mural on the Department of Labor building
showing striking trade unionists in a positive light, talk-
ing about African-American drug dealers coming north TOP: AP PHOTO / KATHY WILLENS
from New York to seduce young white Maine women,
and calling for drug dealers to be guillotined—told the
crowd that asylum seekers were the carriers of all sorts of
diseases, including something he referred to as the “ziki
fly.” This was presumably a reference to the Zika virus,
carried by mosquitoes and at that moment striking fear
not throughout the Middle East but in Latin America,
the Caribbean, and the southernmost reaches of the
United States.T
here are, in modern america, friction
zones, spaces both physical and psychological,
where our dreams coexist with our nightmares,
where opportunity and despair intermingle,
where innocence and depredation collide. In
these zones—along the US-Mexican border, where fears
of invasion and terrorism loom like grotesque caricatures;
in our terrors about children being abducted, raped, or
killed; in neighborhoods that serve as buffers between
decayed and desperate ghettos and wealthy suburbs; in
the anxiety we feel at airport security lines, as the conve-
nience of interconnected travel clashes with our fear of
terrorists—in all of these places, different rules apply.
Out of these nightmares, demagogues like LePage and
Trump can rise: would-be leaders who promise quick and
violent fixes to deep and intractable problems. In the fric-
tion zones, anything goes—up to and including torture.
It is on the border, for example, that undocumented
migrants caught by the Border Patrol frequently have
their faces pushed into cactus spikes. It is in our suburbs
that parents who allow their children to play outside, or
single moms who leave their kids unattended while they
head off to job interviews, can find their lives uprooted
by hostile personnel from Child Protective Services.
It is in poor neighborhoods that men—and it’s usually
men, although, as the Sandra Bland case shows, poor
women aren’t immune from this treatment—can be
yanked from cars and savagely beaten or killed by the
police on nothing more than a hunch or a whim. It is in
these friction zones that our sense of decency is most ag-
gressively undermined and our willingness to embrace
unsavory policies and law-enforcement practices is most
viscerally displayed.
In an age of anxiety, it is too easy to assume that
everyone has fallen into the fear trap, that the choice
isn’t whether to fear but simply what to fear. This was
Trump’s demagogic gamble—and, in the short term, it
paid off for him hugely. It is also too easy to assume that
the most debased style of political rhetoric will always
work; that political speech that sows discord will drown
out that which seeks unity; that race- and religion-bait-
ing will beat the language of universalism.
Yet even in a season of rage, there are people ev-
erywhere who insist on bucking the trend—people who
understand that the language of fear and hatred is often
simply a manifestation, in mutated form, of deeply un-
fair power relationships. Theirs are the stories that we
must nurture: Their more optimistic understanding of
community is the one that offers a way forward in an
age too often paralyzed by anxiety and rendered brutal
by our epidemic of fear. QSasha Abramsky
is a frequent con-
tributor to The
Nation. This
article is adapted
from Jumping at
Shadows: The
Triumph of Fear
and the End of
the American
Dream, published
in September by
Nation Books,
an imprint of
the Hachette
Book Group.Travel-ban protest:
Members of the
Yemeni community
and others wave US
and Yemeni flags at
Brooklyn’s Borough
Hall, February 2.