Scare tacticians.(The Week)(Viewpoint essay)

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AS we all know, the GOP is the party of fear. Republicans scare Americans out of voting their hopes, their dreams, their noblest aspirations--all of the things that, we are told, the Democrats appeal to. According to a recent Newsweek cover story, which breaks new proctological ground for the depth and breadth of its butt-kissing of the Obama campaign, "the Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities." Apparently Rick Perlstein's much-discussed new book, Nixonland, makes a similar argument.

Indeed, it seems few arguments are less controversial. Al Gore rails with vein-popping intensity about how George W. Bush has "played on our fears." If you Google "fear-mongering" and "Democrats," you'll get about 490,000 results, and nearly every hit for the first few pages (after which, pundits trying to confirm their theses are absolved from seeking more data) is about Republican fear-mongering.

There are at least three questions here. Are the historical claims accurate? Do Republicans continue to play on people's fears today? And, if so, what's wrong with that?

Well, history can be in the eye of the beholder. But if we're setting out to chronicle the politicization of fear in the modern era, it might strike some as odd to start with 1968 when, four years earlier, the Democratic party ran its infamous "daisy" ad suggesting that a vote for Au[H.sub.2]O might well render The Children into radioactive cinder.

As for today, sure it's true. The GOP uses fear. Chiefly, it uses fear of terrorists to focus voters on the differences ...