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Introduction
H. L. Mencken once said, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."1 Fear is a popular tool for political actors, who maintain power by convincing the voting public that they are best suited to protect citizens from dangers stemming from everything from polluted water and defective products to high taxes and foreign threats. Managing these threats is particularly complex in a country like America, with its diverse landscape, rich variety of ecosystems, large nuclear arsenal, and top economy.2 Those who govern and shape policy in the United States do so on a world stage. Because the stakes are so often high, and because American lawmakers are watched so closely, those who hold office spend as much time shaping impressions as they do shaping policy. In so doing, lawmakers design communication to maximize effect, using tactics that have been designed to evoke emotions such as fear or dread or other techniques to take advantage of cognitive heuristics or biases that have been shown to influence decision-making.3 As political actors employ strategies to influence impressions and attitudes of those they seek to persuade, they fall prey to their own biases. Ironically, the very act of engaging in repeated, effortful impression management and persuasion serves to further entrench and polarize these groups.4 Moreover, social sci- ence research suggests that the more strident their efforts are, the more ideologically extreme they become.5
Partisan one-upmanship is largely about using rhetoric to distort existing biases in order to influence perception of risk. Each of the modernday, hotly debated issues started with a question of how to maximize good and, most importantly, minimize harm from various sources and in a variety of contexts. The debate surrounding the Affordable Care Act is a prime example. On one side are those who see the rising cost of healthcare services as a ticking time bomb for individuals and families who, upon suffering an unforeseen illness or injury, will be thrust into financial ruin. On the other side are those who see mandatory coverage as a threat to individual freedom, or as risking the collapse of our democracy or the disintegration...