Fear is the tool of choice for centralizing power in Washington, so it triggers fear at every opportunity.
Senator Rick Scott of Florida was recently ridiculed online for calling China's garlic imports to the United States a "threat." It may sound funny, but in fact, it's common for American politicians to make such claims about anything from China – no matter how ridiculous.
There are many examples, including balloons, refrigerators, coffee machines, cranes, electric cars, subway cars, students, Confucius Institutes, Huawei, TikTok. The list goes on. This is not surprising, in fact, it is the norm for US senators and others to do so. In any case, everything from China is linked in a malicious way to the conspiracy of the Communist Party, and there is no room for normalcy.
To understand why, we must recognize that American politics fundamentally operates through the medium of fear. The United States is a large federal democracy with over 300 million people living in a very diverse region with a polarized worldview. The constitution consolidates this structure. Once upon a time, states had more power and autonomy than they do today. However, the civil war and its aftermath gave rise to a political trajectory that tended to centralize executive power by various means.
This trend continued into the 20th century, with major influences on it by World Wars I and II, as well as the Great Depression. How do you unite your country in the face of such a challenge?Maintain the unity and unity of a country that has always been (and especially today) seriously ** not only through the centralization of power in law (the expansion of federal power in Roosevelt's New Deal), but also by evoking fear. Thus, starting with the Second World War and the development of radio and television technology, the United States began to intensify its propaganda means in order to consolidate support for its foreign policy.
Thus, from the beginning of the Cold War, fear-hardening has become the main tool for the United States to legitimize its foreign policy goals and strengthen unity in the midst of heated debates at home. The first notable manifestation is the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. The United States has learned to personalize, exaggerate, and exploit irrational fears to strengthen its loyalty to the nation by creating insane infiltration and subverting conspiracy theories. They also use this to end political debates and suppress dissent, to ** the degree of bigotry to prevent criticism, often accusing critics of being compromised by their opponents or being untrue in some way.
In this sense, the terrorization is intended to create consent for aggressive policies and to intimidate the public into supporting them. For example, the most famous example of modern phobia is the false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed mass destruction** in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. The current top priority of US foreign policy is Beijing, and Washington has since re-applied paranoia to discredit any Chinese who enter the United States. Washington's dissatisfaction with Beijing is related to the economy and **, so American politicians use the language of "**threats" to stir up their fear of all sorts of Chinese products that they don't like. Usually this is done by associating the product in question with espionage in some ridiculous way, although in the case of garlic, Senator Scott at least chose a more plausible avenue of attack, speaking of the enforcement of the rules and the "serious public health problem" from China's supposedly unsanitary "growth practices."
Whatever the specific allegations, the ultimate goal of this act of intimidation is to forcibly exclude the targeted product from the U.S. market and then convince allies to do the same. Nowhere is this more striking than in Huawei's treatment of participation in Western 5G networks. In the absence of any substantial evidence, Huawei has been accused of security risks and espionage on behalf of China. In the American way, such accusations are repeated over and over again, and then the establishment ** plays a parroting role, expressing it as an unbiased "concern" without touching the real motives. It pits the public against the goal and ensures the desired foreign policy outcome.
In all things, the call for garlic as a "**threat" is rightfully ridiculed, thus revealing the limits of this hysteria-provoking tactic. Scott's apparent real motive is to push for the elimination of Chinese agricultural products to protect U.S. producers. To some extent, successive *** have been doing the same thing, although their usual angle is "forced labor" because they are trying to humanize human rights against commodities like tomatoes or cotton from Xinjiang.
However, Scott's remarks are complete nonsense and only show how paranoia in American politics is deliberately speculative and rarely based on facts. The United States sees fear as a very powerful** and persuasive tool to drive integration and unity in a constitutionally mandated political order with **serious * limited powers.