A thousand years ago, I wrote a book called Fear: The History of a Political Idea. A big part of that book was struggling to figure out how political intimidation and fear work in America. At the time (this was the 1990s), it seemed to many like a somewhat exotic, if not quixotic, project. “No one cares about fear,” a political scientist told me. Well, time passes, as Virginia Woolf wrote in To the Lighthouse. The United States styles itself the land of the free, home of the brave. Yet, as every observer from Tocqueville to W.E.B. Du Bois has remarked, this country has often been a society of intense fear. And what has been the most persistent, common source […]