What we fear when we fear terrorism

In addition to the inevitable abortion politicking, the murderous rampage of Robert Dear at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado has inspired a number of writers to contrast the stiff upper lip with which many Americans seem to handle the general prevalence of gun violence on our shores with the highly-politicized anxiety surrounding the acts that we decide to call “terrorism.” This contrast is widely invoked as evidence of American xenophobia: We fear attacks from a nebulous or specifically-Islamic “Other” more than we fear violence by angry white men, it’s alleged, even if the Other isn’t likely to hurt us nearly as much as a bunch of heavily-armed heartlanders, because Americans still identify with whiteness/maleness/Christianity too closely to fully imagine “white Christian terrorism” as something to be feared.

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This is a mostly left-wing argument. But even as evenhanded an observer of our politics as Tyler Cowen basically comes around to the conclusion that the public’s distinctive fear of terrorism — as opposed to a fear of violent death in all its varied forms — is a mixture of dubious foreign policy reasoning (in which vulnerability to Paris-style attacks is seen as a proxy for general weakness) and, well, deeply-rooted xenophobia: “Due to our heritage as African primates, we are programmed to fear violent attacks by outsiders more than we actually need to today.”

Now I too think that Westerners and Americans have a somewhat exaggerated fear of terrorism, and there’s no doubt that a certain kind of xenophobia enters into that equation somewhere. But there’s also something important missing in the comparison between a lot of the highly individual cases (Dear’s included, it would seem) that people want to label “right-wing domestic terrorism” these days and the kind of cases that involve an organized conspiracy (whether foreign or domestic) to commit mass murder for political ends.

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