Scared yet? From George W. Bush's ad with the big terrorist wolves, to John Kerry's drumbeat about the return of the draft; from Dick Cheney's vision of whole cities vaporizing under the new JFK, to John Edwards's warning to New Jerseyans about the looming container-ship threat, it's all coming down to fear.

And now, Election Day itself is slouching toward us like a psychotic, flesh-eating monster. "Some Fear Ohio Will Be the Florida of 2004," The Washington Post reported a few days ago. "Be Very Afraid," headlined The Boston Globe's editorial page, over a piece about the risk of electoral disaster.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Fear ebbs and flows, but it's been at the high-water mark for several years now. Since 9/11, terror has become a kind of currency, and everybody's throwing it around.

Still, there's something different about this fear, a shift that's occurred not so much in what we fear but in how. Look back to the last extended period of mass terror, the Atomic Age, and it practically leaps out at you. There's a Web site called CONOELRAAD.com where artifacts of that era—bomb shelters, duck-and-cover drills, Armageddon movies with such titles as The Day the World Ended—are celebrated with nostalgic exuberance.

Why such fondness for a time of dread? Partly, it's just that those worries are behind us now. The story had a happy ending. America didn't vanish in a towering mushroom cloud. No Strangelovian madman sent our missiles to Moscow.

But there's another powerful reason why that fearful age now looks so warm and cozy: The fear brought us together. True, then as now, politicians exploited anxiety about mass destruction to serve their partisan purposes; LBJ's famous "daisy ad," for example, stoked worries about Barry Goldwater and nukes.

But, by and large, atomic-age fear was a fear that united. We experienced it collectively, in effect as one big family. The most beloved kitsch images of the time are about domestic preparations for the big blast, and the families depicted always have a generic Norman Rockwell look.

In a way that today seems funny and sweet, atomic fear was a kind of glue. Vestiges are still with us in reruns of TV shows that delved into the dark side of post-Hiroshima experience: The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and even The Munsters, a Father-Knows-Best sitcom about the mutants down the street.

In the classic Twilight Zone episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," William Shatner is riding in an airplane when he spots an insane gremlin out on the wing, apparently about to destroy the engine and take the aircraft down. Everyone living under the atomic cloud could plug into Shatner's horror: Civilization as we knew it could be brought down at any moment, by nightmarish, incomprehensible forces. Those shows weren't just entertaining. They were a kind of group therapy for the spooked masses.

What's different about today's fear—and palpable right now—is that it doesn't bring us together at all. It divides us. There are a few reasons for this. First, while the fear of atomic annihilation was real, it was free-floating and abstract. Nobody, except the residents of two Japanese cities, had ever lived through that sort of attack or could concretely imagine what it was like.

By contrast, the great fear haunting this country today, Islamist terrorism, stems from something that happened here quite recently. As a result, the anxiety is more immediate, the anger more intense. We want somebody to blame, and the chief perpetrator, Osama bin Laden, has been unavailable.

But since 9/11 occurred in the wake of the election of 2000, in an already divided country, everyone had a natural villain at their disposal: the other political team. One reason this election is so ugly is that many Americans have taken their worst fears and anxieties and attached them to a particular person. Depending on your orientation, his name is either Bush or Kerry. It's the political version of what Freud, in another context, called "negative transference."

A lot of people in this country really do believe that if Kerry—or alternately, Bush—is elected, it will truly be the End of Life as We Know It. Each of these candidates has become, in the minds of his opponents, The Bomb. And each side is simply terrified that it is going to explode on Tuesday, annihilating everything.

This fear is behind the end-of-the-world tone that the Michael Moores and the Rush Limbaughs of our world have given to this election. It's behind the William Rehnquist panic and the wolves. The parties themselves have played a huge role in creating this invidious atmosphere of fear, but we're all part of it.

It's fine and healthy to have passionate political convictions. Most of us go into this vote feeling pretty certain that one candidate will be a lot better for the country than the other. But is American civilization really about to go down in flames if your side doesn't win?

The surest way to guarantee that outcome is to keep the divisive fear alive, to think and act as if the gremlin out on the wing is all those other Americans you simply can't bear.

We're in this plane together. And history doesn't end on Tuesday.