One of the most powerful currencies in political life is fear. In the seven weeks since the London bombings, we can trace how fear is shaping our political culture — and distorting it. The danger is that the imperative to satisfy the emotional needs posed by fear and its close associate, anger, will end up crippling our capacity to respond effectively to the threat of terrorism. The “what works” British pragmatism is in danger of being junked for emotionally satisfying but irrelevant symbolism — a few individuals are banned or deported but the websites they run will penetrate just as deeply into the hearts and minds of some British Muslims.
There are three key ways in which fear shapes politics. The first is that politicians provide a narrative structure that can satisfy the “why” question: Why us, why now and why here? That involves a clear plot and a plausible cast of goodies and baddies.
The scale of the plot must be big enough to provide a large enough description of our fear, which usually means the threat, is greatly inflated. And the goodies, of course, must win. The aim of the narrative is to offer emotional reassurance on several levels. It has to say we’re on the side of good against evil; we will vanquish our enemies. Last week, David Cameron, the shadow education secretary and prospective Tory leader, duly framed his understanding of terrorism within the context of Nazism. He mentioned two points they have in common: Their use of violence and their hatred of cosmopolitan influences.
What he overlooks, along with many others who use the term Islamo-fascism, is how little relevance these mass political movements and their capture of the state have to terrorism — let alone the enormous exaggeration required to liken the threat of a few hundred potential terrorists in the UK with a sustained world war in which hundreds of thousands of Britons died fighting a hugely powerful, highly organized nation state. The real beauty of the Nazi analogy is that it provides a valuable political opportunity to define yourself and ensure a damaging definition of your opponent. Positioning in an argument is key, and the Islamo-fascism analogy enables the appeasement slur to be used against any “who try to explain jihadist violence”, as Cameron put it.
Fear is now shaping all political debate and redefining political allegiances. Throughout the British media, such references to appeasement, and similarly to the willful blindness of the “Auden generation” toward the atrocities of Stalin, have become common over the summer. On the right, it’s now an unquestioned chorus; on the left, the self-styled “hard” liberals have declared civil war on their former fellow political travelers.
This reflects the second way fear shapes political life: The desire for uncompromising clarity. When people are fearful, they want to know who’s on their side and who’s not — everyone has to be assigned as goodies or baddies, good or evil. Anyone who introduces complexity or context blurs that clarity and must be bullied into silence.
Finally, the third impact of fear is that it, understandably, prompts a great desire for solidarity. There has been much talk of standing together and uniting around shared values. But the quest for a meaningful national identity around which we can all rally is at risk of buckling under the weight of its contradictions. For example, there have been two parallel debates about national identity this summer. One has talked patriotically of British values of tolerance and fair play. The other is full of self-loathing due to our propensity for binge drinking and sexual debauchery — as appalled Greeks were pointing out last week. How do we convince skeptical Muslims that signing up to the first doesn’t involve the second? How do we explain which bit of “our way of life” we want everyone to rally around?
“Pulling together” is emotionally reassuring, but it is the most contested territory in this new politics of fear. For example, what does loyalty or patriotism mean when an increasing number of people across the globe live where they don’t want to belong? In a thought-provoking article in this month’s Prospect, the philosopher Bhikhu Parekh says it is incumbent on migrants to develop an emotional and moral commitment to their host country. But if they don’t, how is such a thing to be engineered? The politics of fear will drive a frenzied policy spree on community cohesion in coming months.
The most troubling aspect of how fear is distorting our political life is that it is crippling our grasp of two crucial truths: Terrorism is vicious but it will not destroy our country — it can kill hundreds but it will not take over our government and impose Shariah law. We need to be much calmer about the nature of the threat, and more sophisticated about the scale of risk. What’s happened to that British virtue of prosaic good sense so much in evidence on the evening of July 7 ?
Second, our biggest ally in tracking down the perpetrators and our only chance of defeating terrorism is the Muslim community itself. That’s why the willed ignorance is so dangerous. A sophisticated understanding is vital if we are to identify and nurture the processes of development and thinking among Muslims that are already struggling to defeat extremism and chart another future for the faith.
