In my recent essay, I talked for a bit on political slogans and their effectiveness in gaining popularity for a candidate. This time, I'm in the mood to discuss another tactic that has been used to, sadly, great effect: fear mongering.

For over 150 years, fear mongering has been a part of US politics. It's so prevalent, that I'd say being able to peddle fear effectively is a base level requirement for becoming a US politician. Even at the local level, fear mongering is done. Just recently I got a piece of political mail that discussed an incident of a local business being raided by what I assume were supposed to be federal agents (the advertisement didn't claim that, but made it vague enough for one to assume that), who held the workers there for hours while they searched the place and took files. That campaign ad was for the local sheriff.

Fear mongering is meant to get people to turn against an opponents candidate, and embrace the fear mongerer. And it is quite effective. But there's another aspect to fear mongering: deflecting people's attention away from the fear mongerer's own awfulness, by making them focus on how bad the opposition is, whether that be true or not.

A perfect example is our current presidential election. There's been so much fear mongering regarding Trump, that it's almost sounding like a parody of what US elections are like. The fear mongering is meant to keep people focused on how scary Trump is, while keeping people from focusing on or remember how Hillary has supported a majority of the things in the past that we are meant to be scared of Trump for supporting right now.

What can we do about it? Nothing, sadly. It is so ingrained in our political system that at this point, there is no way to avoid fear mongering politicians. But what we can do is use fear mongering as a signal to look more closely at the politician doing the fear mongering, to see what they're trying to distract us from. Then, perhaps we can turn the fear mongering back on them.