The following video is a campaign ad used by the Johnson campaign in the 1964 election bid against Barry Goldwater. It was subsequently pulled from the air after only a single airing. That, however, did not keep it from being credited as one of the major factors in Johnson’s notable win over Goldwater. It uses the fallacy of appeal to fear.
In my Critical Thinking class, we spend a fair amount of time on logical fallacies. The students are tasked with finding examples of several different types of fallacies. Almost without fail, a large number of the examples come from politics. We spend a fair amount of time, then, discussing what relationships there has been between politics and the fallacies that we learn. That is when I show this video.
It bears showing in its entirety, as it is quite short. The ad starts with a young girl counting as she plucks the petals off a flower in what is a serene scene. Her voice is then overlaid with the voice of an adult counting down to what reveals itself to be an atomic detonation. As the mushroom cloud expands, one can hear Lyndon Johnson say:
“These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”
Finally, the commercial tells us to vote for Johnson, and that “The stakes are too high to stay home.”
The ad does require a bit of background information for students unfamiliar with the 1964 election, but I find that the rhetoric of attack ads and fear-mongering are very familiar to them even without the context of this particular ad.
When I ask them to uncover the implicit claim in this ad, they can readily do so.
Further, when I ask them why this might count as an Appeal to Fear, they have no difficulty understanding how implied accusations that Goldwater would get the country involved in nuclear war might count as more of an attempt to scare people away from his campaign rather than to address his actual policies. This nearly always leads to great class discussion about the frequency of fear-mongering in politics and, indeed, the world of advertising.
Possible Readings: I have used this video in conjunction with Hurley, Patrick J. A Concise Introduction to Logic. However, it obviously does not require that text.
This section of the Blog of APA is designed to share pedagogical approaches to using humorous video clips for teaching philosophy. Humor, when used appropriately, has empirically been shown to correlate with higher retention rates. If you are interested in contributing to this series, please email the Series Editor, William A. B. Parkhurst, at parkhurst1@usf.edu.
Timothy McGarvey
Timothy McGarvey is a PhD student at the University of South Florida where he works primarily on Friedrich Nietzsche and Environmental Ethics.
