Republicans and Democrats united by their fears of each other

Photo: Stefani Reynolds Archives Associated Press Fears gripped both sides, facing the potential victory of the other.

Fabien Deglise

Published at 0:00

• United States

With the November 5 presidential election in the United States just a week away, it is not just the uncertainty of the outcome that is dominating. Fears have also taken hold of both camps, faced with the potential victory of the other. Fears that are more or less rational, more or less based on tangible realities, but which, in the end, could guide the steps of millions of Republicans and Democrats to the polls.

In the Democratic camp

Fear of authoritarianism…

Last week, Donald Trump’s former Secretary of Homeland Security John F. Kelly warned Americans about his former boss’s dictatorial tendencies. Behind closed doors, Kelly claimed, the former president praised the loyalty that Nazi military generals had to Adolf Hitler in earlier times.

The revelation comes as no surprise. For months, the Republican candidate has been making comments illustrating his fascination with authoritarianism and even outlining his plans for it. Last December, he assured his Fox News friend Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator only on “day one” of his second presidency, if he were reelected, and then, before a Christian assembly this summer, he promised the audience that they would no longer have to worry about voting in four years if he won.

A few days ago, he added to the hype by portraying his political opponents, including Democratic congressmen, as “enemies within” against whom he would be prepared to deploy the military and use executive powers. Remarks that sent shivers down the spines of even his own troops.

“We managed to prevent this kind of thing in 2020, and we must continue to do so in 2024,” summarized in an interview with Devoir Democrat Tom Countryman, former assistant secretary of state for arms control and international security. “I was a diplomat for 36 years and I lived in countries that installed autocratic regimes. I know what that looks like and I don’t want that to happen in our country.” »

The fear of losing individual and collective freedoms…

Upon entering the race, Vice President Kamala Harris made defending the right to abortion one of the fuels of her campaign. And for good reason…

The invalidation of the decision Roe v. Wadeby the U.S. Supreme Court, which strengthened abortion bans in 22 states, could go even further under a new Republican regime.

Yes, Donald Trump reiterated in early October that he would veto a nationwide abortion ban as president, sending the issue back to the states. But his critics fear the implementation of a measure proposed by Project 2025, the highly controversial policy playbook for a future conservative administration. One member of the group, from which Donald Trump is trying to distance himself as the campaign draws to a close, is calling for the use of an 1873 law, the Comstock Act, to ban the mailing of abortion pills that currently account for two-thirds of abortions in the United States. These conservatives also dream of criminalizing the possession of the equipment that clinics need to do their work.

Another fear: After building a hateful discourse toward the media that critically scrutinizes his policies, Donald Trump seems ready to take action by attacking freedom of the press in the country, and this, by depriving the television networks in his crosshairs of their ability to broadcast information that he does not like. A few days ago, he indicated that CBS “should lose its license” because of the interview that Kamala Harris offered to the network and that he did not appreciate. On October 20, dissatisfied with the network’s treatment of him during his televised debate with the Democrat, he threatened to cut ABC’s broadcast capacity to nothing.

Fear of seeing the environment destroyed…

As Hurricane Helene struck Florida last month before continuing its devastating path through several other states, Donald Trump repeated his skepticism about the ongoing climate crisis, calling it “one of the greatest scams” ​​in history. He subsequently took part in two fundraising campaigns in Texas alongside wealthy oil businessmen, to whom he reiterated his unwavering support.

Faced with a Biden administration that has advanced legislation to combat global warming and a Democratic candidate who has promised to continue this momentum by implementing new tax credits for emerging industries, particularly in the manufacturing of clean energy, Donald Trump remains fixed on the policies of his first term by promising to offer more land for drilling.

During his first term, he withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement while minimizing, as he continues to do, the dangers of climate change.

In 2023, 3.4 million Americans have obtained $8.4 billion in tax credits to improve the energy performance of their homes. The decarbonization promoted by the current administration includes, among other things, financial assistance to acquire electric vehicles, install heat pumps or solar panels. If elected, Trump has pledged to cancel remaining funding for this aid.

The Republican candidate also denigrated electric vehicles, suggesting that government incentives to make them easier to access could dry up in a second term. And last June, his campaign team indicated that he intended to pull the country out of the Paris Agreement a second time.

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For Republicans

The fear of communism…

Since the beginning of the election campaign, the specter of a communist and collectivist regime led by Kamala Harris has been brandished by Donald Trump to mobilize his troops, even if the comparison is mostly absurd.

“It's a circus, a clown show,” said Samir Qaisar, a militant of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States, with a smile, whom we met on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention last August. “Kamala Harris is anything but communist. She is pro-capitalism, pro-Wall Street, pro-Israel — she is American imperialism incarnate.”

Still, by regularly calling Kamala Harris “comrade,” by accusing the vice president’s father — a prominent West Coast economics professor — of being a Marxist, by broadcasting doctored images associating the Democrat with the former USSR, Donald Trump has invented a threat that resonates with his base, particularly in rural areas where conservative voters have for years felt like they’re having progressive policies from big cities or Washington shoved down their throats. And they end up posing as victims of a regime that they perceive as authoritarian and serving values ​​that do not resemble them.

In Democratic states, this more conservative rurality does not hide its anxieties, even anticipating future or fantasized policies that will force them to abandon their gasoline-powered pickups and their firearms, dictate their clothing, control the education and even the gender of their child… This is what many seriously express.

An anxiety of political outvoting and constraint summed up by a strong image in the depths of Oregon, that of farmland and gun fairs, by Dennis, a Republican encountered last spring: “It puts us in this uncomfortable situation where 10 coyotes and 2 sheep are thinking together about what they're going to eat for dinner. And in the end, it's always the same ones who get eaten. »

The fear of “migrant flooding”…

Last Thursday, campaigning from Arizona, a state bordering Mexico, Donald Trump called Joe Biden’s United States the “dustbin of the world” being filled with hordes of illegal and undocumented migrants attracted by “open borders.”

The statement was in line with many others that, in recent weeks, have associated immigrants with drug traffickers, criminals, rapists and even pet eaters. A racist discourse that also evoked “the poisoning of the nation’s blood” by these people from outside and that maintains the conspiracy theory of the “great replacement” and its derivative, in the United States as elsewhere in the world, of invasion and “migratory submersion”.

And this fear of the other seems to be working very well to mobilize Republican troops. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 82% of these voters place immigration at the top of their concerns this year. Compared to 39% among Democrats. The theme also came up repeatedly during the four days of the Republican National Convention this summer, where Donald Trump and his guests reiterated a promise to launch a vast deportation campaign, once elected, to cleanse the country of the “bad genes” circulating there. Some 15 to 20 million migrants would thus find themselves in the line of fire, or 4 to 9 million more than the number of undocumented immigrants estimated by the Center for Immigration Studies.

The implementation of these mass deportations, which the Republican presents as “militarized” and “historic,” remains uncertain, however, and could be costly. In 2023, the escorting of 142,580 illegal immigrants by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection cost American taxpayers $420 million, according to agency data.

The fear of never reaching power again…

The change of political color in 2020 by Joe Biden of the very Republican Georgia, but also of Arizona, has stirred up a nagging anxiety since the 1990s within the American conservative movement: that of seeing an ever-strengthening majority of progressive minds invade all the key states of the country, passing through the cities and the suburbs, to the point of forever distancing conservatives from the places of power.

Since his first election campaign in 2016, Donald Trump has skillfully taunted this feeling through the culture war he launched against the Democrats. The concept was originally imagined by Republican Newt Gingrich in the last century. He was the one who brought American politics into the realm of division, resentment and insult, of which Trump has become the great helmsman.

The loss of control of the instruments of power, for the Republican camp, has become a strong theme for the populist who, faced with the growing heterogeneous coalition that brought Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to power in 2020, is issuing warnings about the loss of the country to the Others. A diversion which, he recalls without proof, will involve “electoral fraud”, a threat now repeated ad nauseam by his supporters during his political rallies.

In 2020, the Federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declared that the last presidential election had been “the most secure in American history”.

But the alternate reality woven by the former president is tenacious: “If we don't win this election, we'll never win again,” Woody Clendenen, a Republican who heads a paramilitary group in California, assured him last June.