The 2024 presidential campaign has begun in earnest now that Joe Biden has officially announced he is running for re-election. This morning, both his campaign and his opponents at the Republican National Committee released their first ads: “Let’s Finish the Job” from Biden and “What if?” from the RNC.
Both ads are below. Oddly, they share a common theme — fear — but their use of fear is a study in contrasts.
The Biden announcement opens with a kind of alarm bell with a quick montage of three scenes: the January 6 insurrection, protests at the Supreme Court over abortion, and a grey-ish shot of the White House (effectively depicting the presidency in balance). It quickly moves to a single word: freedom. Freedom and democracy are still at risk, under a continued authoritarian threat to American politics.
Specific threats are identified — MAGA extremists, social benefit programs like Social Security, women’s rights, book banning, attacks on LGBTQ people, and disenfranchising voters. “This is not a time to be complacent,” Biden states. “Every generation of Americans has faced a moment where they have to defend democracy.”
The much shorter Republican ad imagines a post-2024 future of a second Biden presidency in a world riven by war (with China), economic collapse, out-of-control immigration, and crime. “Who’s in charge here?” a voice asks. “It feels like the train is coming off the tracks.”
When I saw it, I confess that it startled me — especially the crime footage from San Francisco. What? Where did they get those pictures? And then, I read a stories from Axios and Fortune. It isn’t real. The Republican ad is the first-ever AI-generated political ad. All of its visuals were created by a computer to appear as if they have some basis in reality. But nothing in it is real.
Fear is a powerful motivator in politics. There are real things that we need to be worried about — not just in the United States but around the world — the genuine threat of nationalist authoritarianism, the erosion of human rights, and metastasized corporate capitalism. The freedom for human beings and the earth itself to flourish is in the balance right now, and that should concern thoughtful citizens of every nation. Fear can motivate change.
But fear functions in unproductive ways, too. We humans have long feared military conflict, economic crisis, strangers, and random violence. Indeed, war, financial devastation, foreigners, and criminals might well be the “big four” of human history. The four are the stuff of humanity’s worst episodes and bring mass death. And they are also the archetypes of our nightmares, even to be listed in the New Testament as the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. They scare the crap out of us. Machiavellian rulers have always known that terrified people are easier to control — and will give up nearly anything to those who promise to keep them at bay.
The questions we need to ask: Is this a real fear or a manipulated one? Is the threat genuine or ginned up? Does my fear of this particular thing make me give up in despair or feel empowered to make a difference? Is my fear based in reality or not? Is fear real or faked?
Returning to the ads, the Biden announcement uses fear. But it pivots away from the angry, scary images (real images it must be added) to pictures of people hugging, touching one another, helping each other. The narrative moves from the fears that divide us toward solidarity in community — with the promise that together Americans can defeat the threats of our time.
Not surprisingly, the Republican ad has no pivot. Indeed, fear comes from mobs (there’s no good community in the piece) of foreigners, frightened people in front of failed banks, invading immigrants, and drugged-out San Franciscans. The solution to all these problems? A strongman. “Who’s in charge here?” No one, says the ad. And without such a leader, we are doomed. The promise isn’t that we the people can rise to face the challenges of the day. The promise is that only a strongman will save us. Fear puts us in a dependent position seeking a savior.
The Biden ad recognizes real fears and uses them to remind us of who we can be. The Republican ad exaggerates our fears to make feel we need a savior. As if to underscore the point, the Biden announcement uses real footage of real events while the Republican response is an AI-generated version of our most terrifying nightmares. Real fear or fake? In this case, the message is truly the medium.
Hold on to your hats, friends. This is only the beginning. There’s going to be fear in politics everywhere. Be prepared and be discerning. Real or fake? will be the question of the next twenty months. Live deeply into the one promise that is unchanging: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
INSPIRATION
A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH
by Maya Angelou
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
RUINING DINNER IS BACK!
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