Martha C. Nussbaum Interviewed on Fear and Democracy

The Monarchy of Fear

3:AM:  You’ve written about the emotion of fear in US politics today. First can you sketch for us what you take this fear to be about, both on the left and the right?

Martha Nussbaum: On the right, fear is about the “American Dream,” the idea that your children will do better than you did. Lower middle-class income stagnation and the way that automation and technological change have changed the nature of employment — while college education is ever more costly — lead to a sense of helplessness in that group, manifest in declining health status. On the left, people had a sense that we were moving in the right direction under Obama, but were still very worried about economic inequality. Now, under Trump, people are much more worried about that, and worried anew about race and gender issues that seemed to be doing better before.

3:AM:  So why do you say that fear is particularly bad for democratic government rather than all forms of government? Is it because you see it as eroding trust, and democracies need trust more than other forms of government?

MN: Exactly. In an absolute monarchy, the monarch thrives on fear, and usually finds many ways to engineer fear. But in a democracy we need to look one another in the eye as equals and to work together for common goals. This requires trust, the willingness to be vulnerable to what other people do. If I’m always defending myself against you I do not trust you. Trust breeds deceit and defensiveness rather than common efforts to solve problems. So the infantile reflex of running for comfort to an all-powerful figure is a great danger to democracy, as is the flip side of that fear, also infantile, the need to control other people. Babies can’t work with other people, they can only enforce their will by yelling. That is why Freud referred to the infant as “His Majesty the Baby.” Not a good model for democratic citizenship.

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