“Fear and Foreboding” is excerpted from chapter five of Lisa Wedeen’s new book project, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria. In this presentation, she considers the workings of ideology in times of tumult—analyzing the hardening of sectarian identifications in the context of neoliberal autocracy’s unraveling and retrenchment in Syria. Drawing on rumors circulating at the beginning of the uprising, the presentation pursues four main objectives: 1) to interrogate temporality in conditions of affective excess, in which the present is displaced by anticipatory fears—a hypothetical reaching for worst-case scenarios in advance of catastrophe; 2) to examine the violence at the heart of in-group solidarity; 3) to argue that a politics of what Octave Mannoni calls disavowal—je sais bien mais quand même (I know very well and yet nevertheless…)—can be crucial to the maintenance of status quo conventionality, perhaps particularly in moments when order is profoundly threatened; and 4) to raise questions about the nature of factual credibility and its salience for ideological uptake. Part one unpacks these points. Part two considers the cultivation of communal loyalties in excess of material incentives as a way of understanding how distinct political imaginaries proved crucial to regime survival. Part three discusses what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling,” a concept associated for him with two others— “residual” and “emergent” forms of sociality—that together help us theorize how sectarian identifications can displace emancipatory possibilities for political solidarity.