The Enemy Within: How Fear Became America’s Favorite Addiction

By Nancy O’Brien Simpson

Photo: freepik.com is licensed under public domain

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It seems that America always needs an enemy. Our national story is told in cycles of fear—each generation handed a new scapegoat to despise, a new “other” to blame for our anxieties. First, it was the Native Americans who had to be “tamed.” Then the enslaved Africans who had to be “controlled.” After that came segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Scare, the Vietcong, the “homosexual menace,” the “radical Islamic terrorist.”

And now, as New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, takes office, Islamophobia has been reborn and repackaged for the digital age.

Scroll through social media and you’ll see it: Did you forget who did 9/11? Look at London now with its Muslim mayor! The insinuations are familiar, the hate recycled. Mamdani’s real offense, it seems, is not extremism—it’s existence. His election threatens the illusion that power in America must always look, sound, and pray the same.

This new wave of fear arrives right on schedule. When one enemy loses its potency, America simply auditions another. The fear industry must stay in business. And so, while Mamdani becomes the convenient “threat within,” our attention abroad shifts to the “threats without”: China and Russia.

The script is ancient. If we can convince ourselves that someone out there is evil, we never have to confront the inequalities, greed, and moral decay festering here at home. We bomb the people we don’t understand, then call it liberation. We punish nations into democracy, starve them into submission, and tell ourselves it’s because we’re “exceptional.” Exceptionalism has become our national religion, a faith that sanctifies violence and excuses hypocrisy.

But fear has always been a more reliable glue than truth. It sells elections, weapons, and cable news ads. Fear unites people faster than love ever could—because love asks something of us. Love requires humility, listening, and the bravery to say we were wrong.

What would it look like if America gave up its addiction to enemies? If we stopped defining ourselves by who we hate, and began defining ourselves by what we heal?

Imagine if our foreign policy were driven not by the pursuit of dominance but by the pursuit of understanding. If our politics valued compassion over cruelty, and empathy over outrage. Imagine if we measured our greatness not by the number of bombs we can drop, but by the number of children we can feed, the number of lives we can lift, the number of bridges we can build.

Hate has been America’s most enduring export. But it doesn’t have to be our legacy. Every time someone like Mamdani steps into public office, it cracks the mirror of fear just a little further. It reveals a country that could still evolve—one capable of living without an enemy, one brave enough to lead with love.

The question is whether we’ll keep inventing new monsters to slay—or whether, at long last, we’ll find the courage to stop fighting shadows and start healing ourselves.