Neither did the administration have any scruples about using fear of terrorists as a means to punch holes in the basic protections of the Constitution: to create a class of permanent prisoners; to make it possible to imprison Americans without due process; to totally sequester information not just from the people, but from the Congress and the courts -- all justified by recourse to fear.

Our nation has gone through other periods in our history when the misuse of fear resulted in abuses of civil liberties:

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare after World War I, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, and the McCarthy abuses of the Cold War.

After each of these periods of excess we have felt ashamed and have tried to make up for the abuses.

And although we have not yet entered the period of regret and atonement this time around, it is already obvious that we are now in a period of regrettable excess.

The administration did not hesitate to use economic fear of recession as a means to put in place its tax cuts, massively benefiting the wealthiest while loading debt on the rest of the country for generations to come.

It used fear of energy shortage to build an energy policy made to order for the oil industry at the expense of the rest of us.

It used the fear that we would lose competitiveness to block responsible action to deal with global warming, and has by that action mortgaged not only us but our children and their children to consequences unmitigated by any acts of foresight in this generation.

Meanwhile, even the Chinese have passed us in fuel-economy standards for new automobiles.

It uses fear of the problems of old age to contrive an illusory drug bill that essentially transfers billions from the people to the pockets of vast pharmaceutical interests.

It does not hesitate to use fear even of God not only to pronounce its views on marriage but to impose them on the nation as a constitutional amendment.

At the level of our relations with the rest of the world, the administration has willingly traded in respect for the United States in favor of fear: that is the real meaning of "shock and awe."

It is this administration's theory that American "dominance" -- coupled with a doctrine of preemptive strikes (regardless of whether the threat is imminent or not; today George Tenet made it clear that the CIA never said Iraq was an imminent threat) will be sufficient to persuade our rivals and enemies to leave the field.

But there is another question that I believe urgently needs attention: how could our nation have become so vulnerable to such an effective use of fear to manipulate our politics?

After all, it is a serious indictment of our political discourse that almost three-quarters of all Americans were so easily led to believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks of 9/11 -- that nearly half of all Americans still believe that most of the hijackers were Iraqis -- and that more than 40 percent were so easily convinced that Iraq did in fact have nuclear weapons.

A free press is supposed to function as our democracy's immune system against such gross errors of fact and understanding.

What happened?

Well, for one thing, there has been a dramatic change in what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas describes as the structure of the public forum.

It is simply no longer as accessible to the free exchange of ideas, which flowed during the Enlightenment.

The age of print effectively ended in the 1960s when television overtook newspapers -- and the gap has grown dramatically since then.

The ownership of the media companies has also changed.

The leadership of the Republican Party is augmented by its links to the corporate ownership of the conglomerates that control most of our media: a process already so far advanced that it alarmed even conservative members of Congress and caused them to join to oppose the FCC's efforts to make the world of information safe for monopoly.

Though the president is still outmaneuvering them.

And this after all, includes a growing part of the media characterized by paranoia presented as entertainment -- the part that allows drug-addled hypocrites, compulsive gamblers, and assorted religious bigots to masquerade as moral guides for the nation.

What are the consequences?

Fear drives out reason.

It suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction.

It also requires us to pay more attention to the new discoveries about the way fear affects our brains...

The root word for democracy -- "demos" -- meant the masses of common people, who were an object of fear in the minds of many of our country's founders.

What they wanted was an orderly society in which property would be safe from arbitrary confiscation (remember the Revolutionary War was in significant measure about taxation).

What they believed was that a too pure democracy would expose that society to the ungoverned passions of what today we call "the street": of people with little to lose, whose angers could be all too easily aroused by demagogues (note the root, again) and turned against those with wealth.

So the Constitution of which we are so proud is really an effort -- based at least as much on fear as on hope -- to compromise and balance out the conflicting agendas of two kinds of Americans: those who already have achieved material success, and those who aspire to it; those who are happy with the status quo, and those who can only accept the status quo if it is the jumping-off place to something better for themselves.

That tension can never be fully resolved, and it is perfectly clear at the present moment in the profoundly differing agendas of our two major parties.

Neither has the fear that underlies these differences gone away, however well it may be camouflaged.

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