Fear is the Fuel that Feeds Conservative Power
Last week, Katie Britt, one of Alabama’s two Christian nationalist senators, provided a now-notorious rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. If nothing else it was compelling television (and it even inspired a widely shared Saturday Night Live parody featuring Scarlett Johansson).
Speaking from her family’s luxurious-but-barren kitchen, and carefully staged as “America’s mom,” the Republican senator wasted no time diving into her worries about “the future of the nation.” Using an exaggerated voice and melodramatic body language, she lied about sex trafficking in an attempt to discredit Biden’s border policies, a narrative contradicted by the victim herself. As if that weren’t enough, Britt blamed spending by the Biden administration for inflation, a claim rejected by most economists, and indulged conspiracy theories about the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions for the U.S.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson placed Britt’s appearance in the context of social conservatism’s long reactionary project, commenting that Britt “represented the outcome of the longstanding opposition to women’s equal rights in the United States.”
Britt was more than a representative, though. She was an active marketing agent, selling both opposition and the fear that fuels it.
It’s almost universal today to find social conservatives clinging to a rigidly hierarchical vision of family and society out of fear of difference, cultural change, or anything or anyone who challenges those hierarchies. Nearly 30 years ago, George Lakoff posited that, at the core of the conservative mindset is the “strict father” model of the family, in which people respond to a fallen and dangerous world with the authority of a strong and virtuous male head.
Fear is the glue that holds the strict father family together, and so fear must be forever sustained. It demands a constant rehearsal of the reasons to be afraid of the outside world, and why those reasons require obedience to one’s betters. Social conservatism is a perpetual sales job to convince both insiders and outsiders of its own worthiness.