Terrorism fear serves politicians because it resists policy refutation and quick fixes

Evidence

Richard Jackson describes how states deliberately construct extreme threats from the outside in order to justify disciplining the domestic populace. Moral panics and folk devils provide a ready means to achieve this construction. Moreover, “some fears are better than others for politicians, because some fears-such as the fear of being without health care or employment-are not amenable to quick-fix solutions and carry the risk of policy failure. The fear of terrorism, on the other hand, is perfect for the authorities because it is ubiquitous, catastrophic, opaque (reliant on government control of secret information) and rooted in deep cultural anxieties” (Writing the War on Terrorism, 117). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 854

Categorization

• XREF: The four properties making terror fear politically ideal mirror the anti-immodesty and moral-panic machinery in your existing corpus — connects to Cohen’s moral panic framework.
• CANDY: The crisp four-part account of why terror fear is politically ‘perfect’ — ubiquitous, catastrophic, opaque, culturally rooted — is a quotable elevator line.
• SEED: Angle: why structural fears (healthcare, jobs) fail as political tools while terrorism succeeds — a framework for comparing which anxieties fiction can productively contest.