4 Quotes & Sayings By Barry Glassner

Barry Glassner is the best-selling author of Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, The Culture of Fear Revisited: Why Americans Still Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, and The Twenty: Leading America Through the Next Twenty Years. He is a senior associate dean and professor in the Department of Sociology and director of the Social Psychology Program at George Mason University. A leading authority on American culture, he is a regular columnist for USA Today and is a popular speaker at conferences around the world.

1
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was right when he claimed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.' Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: 'People react to fear, not love. They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true.' That principle, which guided the late president's political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Marketers of products and services ranging from car alarms to TV news programs have taken it to heart as well. The short answer to why Americans harbor so many misbegotten fears is that immense power and money await those who tap into our moral insecurities and supply us with symbolic substitutes. . Barry Glassner
2
Criminologists have documented that the amount of coverage a crime victim receives affects how much attention police devote to the case and the willingness of prosecutors to accept plea bargains. Barry Glassner
3
In addition, when a neighborhood's crime victims are portrayed as victims-sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics-people living in other parts of the city are more inclined to support social services for the area, which in turn can reduce the crime rate. Barry Glassner