One of Trump’s spokespeople derided the Biden event as “an episode of Mister Rodgers Neighborhood.” (In authentic Trump style, she misspelled the name.) If this was meant to suggest that the evening was all smiles and saccharine—well, it only showed that the spokesperson had never watched the classic children’s program hosted by Fred Rogers.
Rogers well understood the darkness in the world. The maker of a documentary about him explained: “What he’s doing is not just providing joy for children but really trying to allay fear.” But of course, in Trump world, allaying fear is the last thing you want to do. What you want to do in Trump world is incite fear, stoke fear, manipulate fear, and exploit fear. That can apparently work—at least with some people, and at least for a limited time. But only for some people, and only for a limited time.
We cannot help what we feel; what matters is how we respond to it. When in the grip of fear, it can be difficult to see and think clearly. Fear makes us stupid, not in the sense of unintelligent, but rather in the sense putting us in a kind of disorienting stupor in which we have lost our capacity to understand and do what the situation calls for.
There's a difference between experiencing a threat that comes out of nowhere and needing to respond immediately--the adrenaline kicks in and with it our instinctual fight or flight response. But it's different when one lives in a situation of chronic fear or anxiety in which one has the time to understand it. When we have the time, we have also the responsibility to get to the bottom of it, to understand the cause and source of the fear so that it can be faced and overcome. The latter was Fred Rogers' approach with kids.
Prudence, like courage, is a virtue. For a virtue to be a virtue, there has to be something counter instinctual about it. Battle rage, for instance, masquerades as a courage, but it is not the virtue of courage because it's just doing what instinct compels. If the adrenal response is fight or flight, battle rage is the fight response. Courage, on the other hand, requires feeling the fear and wanting to run away, but staying and facing the threat and doing what is called for. The greater the fear, the greater the courage called for.
Pusillanimity, on the other hand, masquerades as prudence. Pusillanimity is the instinct to run away, to procrastinate, to refuse to face the threat. Prudence is a virtue to the degree that it is counter instinctual, to the degree that it finds a way of feeling the fear but searches for a mood of detachment in the face of it. Prudence is the virtue that enables one to see clearly and assess the risks, so that one might develop a strategy to confront the threat that has the best chance of success.
The Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an example of gross imprudence fueled by battle rage. It never had a chance of success.
The Gospel tells us that we must be guileless as doves, but also shrewd as serpents. That's another way to understand the essence of prudence. People ruled by fear, whether in the fight or flight mode, are unbalanced in the serpent direction; people oblivious of the world's dangers and trusting in everyone's innate goodness are unbalanced in the dove direction. Neither are prudent, because prudence requires the counter-instinctual effort to live consciously in the tension between trust and fear.
So prudence requires the courage to face the world as it is, not as we fear or wish it to be, to assess risk and to develop a practical approach in navigating in it. This is a world where we can be certain about nothing, but where we can also learn to trust that the worst is not the only or even the most likely possibility.
To compare Biden with Fred Rogers, as Frum rightly points out, is a huge compliment, and it might be exactly why Biden, despite my misgivings about his weathervane conventionality as a politician, might be the right person for this moment. He's a mediocre politician, but he's a people person in the best sense. He's something of a tool, and not the sharpest one in the shed to say the least, but he just might have that Mr. Rogers ability to help us face our fears and deal with them prudently.