Oct
23
The risky business of fear
Posted in: Uncategorized
If you think of soaring political oratory as a particularly fine-tuned form of marketing, then you have to hand it to Franklin Delano Roosevelt for his famous “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” line from his 1933 inaugural address. It feels reductive to call it a tagline or slogan, but that’s what it was: an indelible, catchy phrase meant to sell weary Americans on the idea of overcoming their grave suspicions that things would never get better.
It’s a brilliant line. It’s also wrong.
OK, to be fair, in FDR’s time, it (eventually) proved right: America did emerge from the Great Depression.
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