WASHINGTON — A presidential election pits one nominee against another, one agenda and ideology against another. But to an extraordinary degree, the two parties used their conventions to frame the 2020 election as a choice between what you should fear the most.

Mob rule, socialism and weakness, or an unstable and incompetent bully who cozies up to dictators?

Pick your poison.

Democrats spent four nights warning that America would face yet more chaos under President Donald Trump, widespread death through incompetence on the pandemic, environmental degradation, unchecked gun violence, an end to the social safety net, a slide into authoritarianism and a destabilizing retreat from leadership on the world stage.

“If he’s given four more years, he will be what he’s been the last four years,” said Joe Biden. “A president who takes no responsibility, refuses to lead, blames others, cozies up to dictators, and fans the flames of hate and division.”

When Republicans’ turn came, they spun a tale of looting and rioting unchecked under the Democrat: suburbs overrun and destroyed by poor people, guns confiscated, immigrants pouring across the border to steal jobs and commit crimes, police budgets slashed, religion quashed, prosperity and job growth choked by taxes and regulation, abortion legal until the moment of birth, and an America transformed into a Venezuela-style socialist failure.

“No one will be safe in Biden’s America,” Trump warned in his acceptance speech.

“Biden’s America,” in fact, was a recurring theme — a hypothetical dystopia that Trump alone could avert.

Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative student group Turning Point Action, kicked off the convention by calling Trump the “the bodyguard of Western civilization” — the dark implication being that civilization could crumble with Biden at the helm.

With Trump already in power, Democrats didn’t need to stretch the imagination quite so much to stir anxiety. They just had to cite data, then put faces on each category of malaise.

“The advantage the Democrats have in their description of how difficult times are is that we’re actually living through them,” said Michael Steele, a former national Republican Party chair who on Monday joined the Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans dedicated to defeating Trump. “You’ve got a flattened economy. You’ve got COVID-19 and civil unrest.”

Scare tactics work

Scare tactics do rev up the base.

“It has dramatic effect,” Steele said, “what you hear about the encroachment of socialism and the obvious go-to, [that] they’ll take away all your guns, et cetera — which is such a laughable thing to say, given that there are more guns in American households than there are people. I can’t imagine what that roundup process would look like.

“But no one’s thinking it all the way through. It’s just enough to say the hot-button line.”

For Trump, he added, the goal is to avoid a referendum on his record, and to make sure voters think of the election as “a choice between making America great again and the dystopian tragedies of socialism.”

Such is the power of the scare tactic, which both parties employed but which the GOP served up every few minutes.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, warned that Biden would eradicate freedom of thought, expression and religion.

“It’s almost like this election is shaping up to be church, work and school vs. rioting, looting and vandalism,” he said.

His girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News host and Trump campaign fundraiser, warned that Democrats “want to destroy this country,” starting by dismantling law enforcement. “Rioters must not be allowed to destroy our cities. Human, sex, drug traffickers should not be allowed to cross our border.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., warned that in the name of public health, “they close our churches … but encourage protests, riots and looting in the streets.”

“If the Democrats had their way,” she said, “they would keep you locked in your house until you become dependent on the government for everything. That sounds a lot like Communist China to me. Maybe that’s why Joe Biden is so soft on them.”

On day one of his convention, Trump himself claimed that Democrats were trying to use the pandemic as a pretext to expand mail-in balloting “to steal the election,” and that Biden and Democrats “want no oil and gas. No God. … They will take your guns away, as sure as you’re sitting there.”

None of that reflects Biden’s actual positions.