Crisis scapegoating of out-groups masks the true political and economic causes

Evidence

Building national unity at times of crisis by ascribing undesirable values to religious out-groups has been a pattern of governance in America’s democracy that has often obfuscated the political and economic sources of the crisis to the benefit of the state. Today’s explanations of 9/11 in terms of religion and our contemporary conceptualizations of anti-Muslim bigotry in terms of a social phobia of Islam continue this pattern at a significant cost to every American’s civil liberties. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 301

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism here — attribution error as state function — yokes psychological displacement to structural governance: misnaming the source of crisis serves state interests and erodes civil liberties, a dense two-layered causal claim.
• XREF: Directly answers the guiding question about the psychological function of fear: it reroutes attention away from economic sources of crisis toward a displaced enemy.

Related

• Crisis bigotry obscures real political and economic causes to aid the state. (similarity 0.92)
• Crisis-time scapegoating of religious out-groups masks political and economic causes (similarity 0.88)
• Attacks on out-groups divert attention from real crises and expand state power (similarity 0.84)
• Religious bigotry drives US national unity and governs diversity. (similarity 0.82)
• Crisis circumstances expose laïcité as a mask for Islamophobia (similarity 0.80)
• Bigotry functions in US history as governance to control diversity and build unity (similarity 0.80)
• The pandemic generated new Islamophobic scapegoating across countries (similarity 0.78)