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Politics of Fear
...United in the conservatism of fear, left and right are often indistinguishable, except for the politician they support and the innovation they want to ban: 'For example, sections of the right would like to ban stem-cell research while many on the left want to rid the world of genetically modified products.' (1)

With both sides of the political spectrum practising the politics of fear, we are left with neither an orientation towards the future nor a defence of society's historic gains. Instead, we have presentism - a conformist sensibility that seeks to manage society in the here and now, against a backdrop of fear about the future and discomfort with the past....

...Just look, he says, at the 'self-conscious way the nanny state is promoted - the way government ministers continually argue that the nanny state has been seen before as a very bad thing, but now we know that the nanny state is exactly what we need'. Or, in the words of prime minister Tony Blair, recently promoting a number of new parenting initiatives: 'Now some of it means changing the way the law operates in a way that frankly a few years ago people would not have found acceptable.'...