Between October 21 and 25, House and Senate candidates ran 734 ads citing the threat of Ebola. Some candidates charged that by failing to secure the border with Mexico, Democrats were allowing cases of Ebola into the United States. North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis, who is running for Senate, warned, "We've got an Ebola outbreak, we have bad actors that can come across the border; we need to seal the border and secure it.” Other candidates have linked border immigration to ISIS, suggesting that Islamist terrorists would be crossing the border to threaten Americans. The Republican National Committee ran an ad that concluded, “Vote to keep terrorists off U.S. soil.” Several candidates, including Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, included video from ISIS in their ads.

These ads may or may not sway voters, but they are responding to widespread fear of Ebola and ISIS. Voters regard the American response to these threats as being among the most important issues in this election. In an extensive AP poll taken in mid-October, 73 percent of likely voters ranked the threat ISIS and 74 percent the danger of Ebola as “extremely or very important.” A Harvard School of Public Health poll found that 39 percent of Americans believe that there will be a large-scale Ebola epidemic, and 26 percent believe that someone in their immediate family will get it.

Not all fears are irrational, but there is a sheer element of nuttiness in these current fears. There has been and is no epidemic in the United States. There have now been only four cases of Ebola in the United States, one of which resulted in a fatality. Several hundred people died last winter from the swine flu without causing a similar panic. ISIS is clearly an evil outfit, and there may be good foreign policy grounds for attempting to contain or defeat it. But it appears to have far less ability to directly threaten the United States than Al Qaeda and its various affiliates. Yet, according to an NBC poll, 47 percent of Americans think the United States is “less safe” than it was before September 11.

Why, then, have these irrational fears arisen? The easy answer is to blame the media for publicizing ISIS’s exploits or the spread of Ebola in Africa or to point the finger at politicians for exploiting these fears, but that seems to me to be too easy. Americans had these kind of irrational panics—notably about drugs in the late 1980s—well before the internet and the 24-hour-news cycle. And Republicans (and some Democrats who wanted to blame Republican funding cuts for the threat of Ebola) were exploiting or heightening fears that already existed. They magnified these fears, but they didn’t create them. I don’t have a final, and clear, explanation for these fears, but I want to offer some possible explanations for what appears to be a case of mass hysteria.

1. Mortality Cues



In the wake of September 11, and of the anthrax letters, Americans feared new terrorist attacks, and credited George W. Bush and the Republicans with warding them off. These fears lingered, however, well after there were reasonable grounds for expecting an attack, and were more prevalent in a state like West Virginia or Idaho than in a state like New York that might have been a more obvious target for a terrorist group. In trying to explain how these fears had affected the election of 2004, I discovered the work done by three psychologists, Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, who, inspired by the late anthropologist Ernest Becker, developed a theory they called “terror management.” They devised ingenious experiments to show that the mere thought of one's mortality—delivered even through subliminal cues—can trigger a range of emotions, from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores.