From the Heart

Even since Election Day, I've been more and more impressed with the brilliance of Roosevelt's words soon after Pearl Harbor: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." His statement, of course, was logically ridiculous – Americans had a great deal to fear as Hitler's armies threatened to destroy Europe, its people, and its culture, and as attackers from Japan exploded the illusion of invulnerability that geography had provided. Emotionally, though, he was right on target. He countered the fear directly, inspiring Americans to courage. Fear had its victories (witness the internment of Japanese Americans), but in many ways the country pulled together bravely in a spirit of shared effort and sacrifice. Children planted Victory Gardens and collected newspapers; women went to work; everyone conserved nylon, rubber, metal, and other raw materials. Virtually the entire nation could legitimately feel they had a part in the country's defense.

Bush took the extreme opposite tack after 9/11. He encouraged Americans' fear, his minions enflamed their mutual distrust, and the most he did to inspire national effort was to ask us, a few days after the attacks, to start shopping again. Yes, he took us to war, and sent soldiers to die in Afghanistan and Iraq, but apart from the soldiers and their families he has required no sacrifices, financial or otherwise, from the nation as a whole. Unlike Roosevelt, he never enlisted Americans' courage, tenacity, generosity, or resourcefulness to help us work together to make ourselves safer. (Well, he did ask us to maintain a wary eye and report anything suspicious to the authorities. But that's not exactly the kind of activity that makes people feel stronger and more unified.) Instead, he encouraged the nation to depend passively on him and his administration for protection.

Passivity breeds fear. People who feel they can contribute something, anything, to combating a danger feel less anxious than those who believe they can do nothing but wait for whatever will happen next. Bush's post-9/11 strategy thus cultivated America's sense of alarm not just directly, by repeatedly reminding us of real and imagined lurking dangers, but indirectly, by failing to call upon our strengths for our mutual protection.

A few weeks ago, I ran across a description by the academic Janet Sayers of an early discovery by Wilfred Bion, a pioneer in examining group dynamics. Bion noted that when fearful, a group's wish for a powerful protector can work directly against its ability to work together to solve its problems. Such a group feels both disappointed in and absolutely faithful to its leader, simultaneously and paradoxically. As Sayers explains, the group "is hostile to learning from experience. It does not want science or knowledge. It dismisses the leader's attempts at understanding as cold or heartless abstraction."

Sometimes a group like this splits into two factions. One side "agrees on depending on the leader, and the other is so exacting in its pursuit of knowledge that it fails to recruit others to its cause." For obvious reasons, I thought of the then-upcoming election as I read. In its aftermath, I believe that Bion's description offers a partial explanation for what went wrong – too many facts, too much policy, not enough empathy and compassion.

On Nov. 2, Bush won the white vote as a whole by a margin of 15 points, according to AP exit polls. In less populated areas, he beat Kerry by 13 points, while in cities of more than 50,000, Kerry dominated by an identical margin – 56-43 percent. Bush won the Protestant vote by 17 points, the Catholic vote by 3 points, and he took the vote of those who attend religious services weekly by 21 points, 60-39 percent. Even worse, he won over people who said they voted according to moral values by 61 staggering points: 79-18 percent.