Last week, US Senator Rick Scott of Florida proclaimed that garlic imports from China constituted a “national security threat” to the United States. While reactions to these comments largely consisted of ridicule, it is well known to all but the most myopic of commentators right now that they are hardly unusual in America’s domestic political environment, where various politicians and officials at large continue to denounce various goods, individuals, services and technologies from China as a threat to the US in one way or another.

Never are these wanton accusations ever backed with evidence, and in some cases they are even devoid of logic, such as the claims that Chinese-made cranes, coffee machines, subway cars, weather balloons and even Chinese-language classes, among other things, are all used for spying on the US and exist purely for nefarious purposes, twisting every single commercial item into a malevolent plot to undermine America in one way or another. These highly opportunistic claims are routinely pushed, without scrutiny, by the mainstream media.

The modern political and institutional culture of the US has developed by harnessing an appeal to fearmongering and smear campaigns in order to sustain centralized authority. The US is a vast geographic and socially diverse country that is organized under a federal constitutional system designed to limit the power of the central government and grant considerable authority to the states themselves. As shown by the legacy of its civil war in the mid-19th century, America faces a bitterly divided political culture, and therefore extraordinary means are employed by the central government in order to sustain unity.

Beginning in the 20th century, and in order to uphold support for America’s participation in two world wars and then more critically the Cold War, politicians learned to utilize the power of mass media in order to invoke widespread fear and paranoia in order to sustain central loyalty to the state and its foreign policy objectives. In every instance, the central theme of this fearmongering has been to proclaim that a given overseas issue constitutes a “threat” to the “freedom and democracy” of the US, and that this given adversary is always infiltrating, subverting, and seeking to undermine the country in some way.

This culture is best associated with 1950s McCarthyism, which represents the defining characteristic of baselessly accusing individuals and groups of having a malign agenda against the country, and therefore forcing your “loyalty” to the US, as well as discrediting any ideologies deemed to challenge the interests of the state and controlling political debate. The recent blockbuster film Oppenheimer explored these themes in how unsubstantiated accusations of treachery are often thrown about as a means of opportunism in discrediting one’s opponents.

Yet it does not end with the Cold War. The US’ fearmongering and mudslinging culture has become a defining characteristic of its institutional practice, and thus it was carried over into the “War on Terror”, but also as US political rifts intensified, was used to try and discredit Donald Trump by pushing the “Russian collusion” narrative. In each incidence, one may note that the weaponization of allegations and paranoid rhetoric is always dramatic, exaggerated, and never built on actual evidence. The Trump-Russia narrative in particular represented a new watershed in Western political culture as a whole whereby the weaponization of the “foreign adversary” was used to enforce the views of the elite and the center ground, and thus all inconvenient narratives are also dismissed as “misinformation”.

The US’ fearmongering and mudslinging culture has become a defining characteristic of its institutional practice, and thus it was carried over into the “War on Terror”, but also as US political rifts intensified, was used to try and discredit Donald Trump by pushing the “Russian collusion” narrative

However, since 2018, China has become the primary target of the US’ fearmongering culture. US politicians constantly accuse Beijing of using almost everything to undermine, subvert and spy on America, which is given wholesale support by the mainstream media. In doing this, not only do the political classes seek to enable US competition against China, but also fundamentally discredit any Chinese products or technologies that they deem to contravene the national interest. For example, the very first thing they utilized such paranoia against was Huawei and its participation in 5G networks, but it has since extended to many more things, usually with the opportunistic pretense of excluding them from the US market and from allied countries. The US ultimately does not deal in reason — it deals in fear and smearing its opponents, which has the psychological effect of demanding conformity and then framing everyone who challenges the narrative as being suspect or compromised in some particular way, therefore making it impossible to debate the actual reasoning behind the policy proposal. Ordinary people likewise follow the given narrative at large rather than questioning it. The US thus maintains unity on cycles of fear because there is little else keeping the country together save the presence of a bogeyman waiting to “take your freedom away”.

The author is a British political and international relations analyst.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.