Columnists

Fear doesn't win many elections

Donald Trump offered a funhouse mirror version of one of the greatest speeches in American history: Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address, in 1933.

Amid a genuine crisis, the Great Depression, FDR began by emphasizing his "firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror."

Trump sought to foster exactly that. For Trump, "America is a more dangerous environment for everyone than frankly I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen."

Behavioral scientists distinguish between fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is represented in the mind's System 1; it is automatic, intuitive, and often emotional. Slow thinking, reflected in System 2, is deliberative and reflective; it likes statistics. It's hard to think of a purer System 1 candidate than Trump. (Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is all System 2.)

But System 1 candidates come in radically different forms, and with his effort to trigger unreasoning fear, a sense of situations spiraling out of control, and his constant projection of rage and outrage, Trump is something unprecedented.

John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were System 1 candidates too, in the sense that they were able to appeal directly to people's intuitions and emotions. But like Roosevelt, they induced a smile and a laugh, and they exuded a sense of comfort and calm, not hysteria.

Both Kennedy and Reagan were alert to genuine dangers, domestic and international, and they were hardly reluctant to call attention to them. Reagan's depictions of the Soviet Union occasionally alarmed Democrats. But he was raised on Roosevelt, and he liked to quote him, and he exuded optimism and good cheer. In his entire life, he never gave a speech like Trump's on Thursday night.

If we are looking for a predecessor, it's Richard Nixon. But the comparison misses important differences. Nixon practiced the dark arts, but he was mostly a System 2 candidate. Trained as a lawyer and with a sharp eye for detail, he lacked visceral appeal. He was also a complicated figure. For all his talk of order, he could be gentle and open, and he was able to capture in his 1968 acceptance speech the characteristic buoyancy of his fellow citizens: "Just to be alive in America, just to be alive at this time is an experience unparalleled in history."

The U.S. is an optimistic nation. No candidate has ever won the American presidency by speaking primarily to people's deepest fears and by manufacturing a sense of apocalypse.

As the actual vote comes closer, System 2 usually kicks in; unless System 1 candidates make substantive arguments, they start to look like the one you might date but won't marry. Kennedy and Reagan were able to meet that challenge. It will be a real struggle for Trump.

But the electorate is uneasy about both of the major candidates, and sometimes the past isn't prologue. This time might be different.

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Cass Sunstein is a Bloomberg View columnist.

Editorial on 07/23/2016

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