The use of a boogieman is alive and well in politics today. Every politician uses scapegoats as a way of passing off people's problems and giving themselves a whipping boy for the public to be mad. For the left, its usually Wall Street, rich people, oil companies, super crazy religious people, and foreigners. For the right, its usually teacher's unions, dark-skinned minorities, socialists, those immoral secular people, and foreigners. Notice how much Barack Obama is depicted as a Muslim-Socialist who hates America and how we're all going to stand in a Soviet-style bread line in the near future.
Even the noblest of causes have used this ugly strategy. During the women's suffrage movement, there was rampant hatred towards blacks. At this time, black males in the north could vote while white females could not. Many of the propaganda pamphlets for women's suffrage predictably said a bunch of racist things. In the South, pro-women's suffrage framed giving a white woman the ability to vote as a way of maintaining white supremacy.
In the black-white equality sphere, Justice John Harlan used the Chinese as a boogieman in his dissent in the famous segregation case, Plessy v. Ferguson. Justice Harlan remarked that the Constitution was color-blind and that segregation was unconstitutional. However, in order to garner support Justice Harlan reasoned that we should not be segregated since white people and black people were here to stay on this continent and were destined to live together. He contrasted blacks with the Chinese who he viewed as simply temporary workers here to build the railroad. Then he made a bunch of remarks about the Chinese could never assimilate into America, didn't even want to learn English, etc.....
The reason you probably haven't heard about these stories is because both black-white and gender equality are noble causes that the writers of history didn't want to taint by describing some of the ugly means. Also, proponents of these movements have "won" and the winners get to write the history books.
Now you might be asking why?: Well, it is because we have psychological bias towards loss prevention rather than acquisition of gains. For examples, humans on average would take more action and risk to prevent themselves from losing 10 dollars rather than gain 10 dollars. Marketers know this well, which is why you see a lot of commercials saying "once in a lifetime sale" or "don't miss out". The bottom line, if you want people to pay attention...make it seem to these people that if they don't take action, they'll lose something important to them.
The boogieman represents the source of potential loss and is thus, a stimulus toward action for many people who would otherwise be apathetic. In the political arena, the boogieman generally is framed as the threat to "your way of life". This is particularly powerful since a way of life is very general, hard to define, but we all have a good sense of what it means to us individually. For example, "the Christian right is against science and the use of contraception" or "the left is trying to teach our kids about sex". My favorite political boogieman is "They" as in "They took his job" or "They hate our freedom". Given the adversarial nature of our conflict resolution system (law), us v. them politics is usually pretty good at getting people's emotions boiling. Sometimes "They" isn't even defined, those times are the best.
A helpful tip for your job using this psychological bias: Lets say you have a brilliant idea that will make your company lots of money. Frame it this way: "If we don't do my plan, think about how much profit we'll lose." If you simply pitch your idea as a way to make money, your boss may think this: "This person's plan represents a risk. I could get fired if this shit goes badly. Let me just pretend like I didn't hear idea and go on with my life." When you frame it as a potential to lose potential profit, your boss will think that he/she will be taking a risk if he/she doesn't follow your idea and that the risk of him/her getting fired runs both ways. Therefore, your idea will have a decreased likelihood of getting rejected. You can use this strategy in a variety of other situations. For example, when wooing a potential mate -- constantly enforce the perception that if that person lost you in their life, they would really miss out. This can be done by constantly doing something that the other person enjoys until he/she expects it (like always spending 7pm-8pm sharing feelings) and then saying your busy for a day. If you do, try to only do good and not evil.
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