Beyond the appeals to anti-Muslim xenophobia that have defined the Republican Party’s post-Paris consensus, the most recent GOP primary debate was an elaborate group sermon on the importance of being afraid.

As Jeet Heer wrote in his after-analysis of the debate, the candidates “spoke of an America under siege, no longer respected in the world, with a weakened military, threatened by both homegrown terrorists as well as immigrants and refugees who might be terrorists,” and the transcript bears this out.

Before opening statements gave way to the meat of the debate, Chris Christie had cited a bomb hoax in Los Angeles as a symptom of the way President Obama had betrayed the country. Jeb Bush asserted that ISIS had the potential to “destroy us.” Marco Rubio claimed Obama had “destroyed our military,” Ted Cruz claimed the current president doesn’t understand that “the first obligation of the commander-in-chief is to keep America safe,” Ben Carson explained that “our very existence” is at stake in the election, and Donald Trump added “radical Islamic terrorism” to his overriding focus on “building up our military, building up our strength, building up our borders, making sure that China, Japan, Mexico…no longer take advantage of our country.” Before the main-stage debaters even got started, Lindsey Graham had warned on the also-ran stage that terrorists “are trying to come here to kill us all.”

The putative remedies to the mortal dangers we face are a hodgepodge of reactionary policies that go beyond xenophobia: greater police power, “carpet bombing” campaigns, much less immigration, and even the willingness to start a war with Russia. But the real remedy—the one that matters most to the candidates playing this game, is of course the accretion of political power to them.

That poses a critical challenge to Democrats. When Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley debate on Saturday night, there will be few differences left to air between them—and the DNC’s willful decision to schedule the debates when few people are watching limits the size of the Democratic bully pulpit. But notwithstanding these challenges, the three Democrats would be doing the country a service by placing the right wing appeal to paranoia in its proper context—and then rejecting it forcefully.