No one has a problem with right-wingers marching in protest of the health-care plans. That's certainly their right. And no one minds that they choose to participate in these forums. But town halls were never designed to be vehicles for protest. They have always been about enabling real democratic discourse in a civil setting.
When someone's entire purpose in coming out to a town-hall forum is to chant and shout and protest and disrupt, they aren't just expressing their opinions -- they are actively shutting down democracy.
And that, folks, is a classically fascist thing to do.
The corporate role in orchestrating this thuggery is not just an allegation, or an observation. It's been confirmed by the perpetrators themselves, as Greg Sargent reports:
Anti-Reform Group Takes Credit For Helping Gin Up Town Hall Rallies
Conservatives for Patients' Rights, the operation that's running a national campaign against a public health care option, is now publicly taking credit for helping gin up the sometimes-rowdy outbursts targeting House Dems at town hall meetings around the country, raising questions about their spontaneity.
CPR is the group headed by controversial former hospitals exec Rick Scott that's spending millions on ads attacking reform in all sorts of lurid ways, a campaign that's being handled by the same P.R. mavens behind the Swift Boat Vets.
In response to my questions, a spokesman for the group confirmed that it has undertaken a concerted effort to get people out to the town hall meetings to protest reform. The spokesperson, Brian Burgess, confirmed that CPR is emailing out "town hall alert" flyers, and schedules of town hall meetings, to its mailing list.
These efforts - combined with CPR's effort to enlist Tea Party-ers, as reported yesterday by TPM - provide a glimpse into the ways anti-reform groups are trying to create a sense of public momentum in their favor.
CPR spokesman Burgess confirmed that the group had set up a list serv designed to reach out to "third party groups" involved in the health care fight, including the Tea Party activists. And in a statement emailed to me, Scott, who was ousted as a health-care exec amid a 1990s fraud probe, took credit for the town hall showings.
"We have invested a lot of time, energy and resources into educating Americans over the past several months about the dangers of government-run health care and I think we're seeing some of the fruits of that campaign," Scott said, though he claimed outrage was spontaneous.
Similarly, America's Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, the insurance industry group, has stationed employees in 30 states to track local town hall events.
And, in a scathing article posted just yesterday, Frank Schaeffer, an apostate co-founder of the religious right, writes:
The Republican Old Guard are in the fix an atheist would be in if Jesus showed up and raised his mother from the dead: Their world view has just been shattered. Obama's election has driven them over the edge. Consider Former Congressman Dick Armey. Several far right foundations and the multitrillion dollar health-insurance industry have teamed up with him to organize the far right foot soldiers of the Republican Party to intimidate people speaking on behalf of health-care reform. They are using my old shock troops -- given many of these folks were first energized by the Evangelical pro-life movement that my late father and I started in the 1970s. What we did to clinics they are now doing to congressmen and others speaking out for health care reform.
Having failed at the ballot box, having watched their Fox News-organized "tea parties" fizzle the intimidation tactics which the Republicans have embraced are being used in a well-financed, top-down orchestrated fake grass roots campaign by corporate interests to try and protect the profits of the insurance business. Armey's FreedomWorks is organizing against health care reform. Armey's lobbying firm represents pharmaceutical companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb. Armey's lobbying firm also represents the trade group for the life insurance industry. FreedomWorks is supporting the status quo at all costs. ....
I used to know Dick Armey quite well....Armey was once a decent guy, whatever his political views. How could he stoop so low as to be organizing what amounts to America's Brown Shirts today?
I think I know what happened to him, Gingrich and the rest: They can't compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can't reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don't run the country any more -- and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the "other" into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court... for them this is the Apocalypse.
The last presidential election (to paraphrase Bart Simpson) "broke their brains." What else could explain their embrace of intimidation -- rather than discourse -- over the health care debate and such unsavory moments of madness as the Republicans accusing Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor of racism, knowing full well that they'd just destroyed their chances with the Hispanic community forever?
The "Scorched Earth Policy"
Dick Army and company have been driven mad by their reversal, not just of political fortunes but of seeing that they've wasted their lives. They now know they were wrong: about the country, the free market, war for fun and profit, and what the American people really want. They made their best case and were rejected by the American people -- and by history. Bush was their man and he turned out to be a fool. So now all the the Republican gurus have left is what the defeated Germans of World War Two had: a scorched earth policy. If they can't win then everyone must go down. Obama must fail! The country must fail!
....
There is no daylight between the Republican Party, the health-care insurance industry, far right leaders like Dick Armey, the legion of insurance lobbyists, and now, a small army of thugs. All we're missing is actual uniforms, otherwise we now have a full blown American version of the Nazi Brown Shirts.
No, I don't believe that these people are about to take over the country. No, the sky is not falling. But the Republican Party is. It is now profoundly anti-American....
Conclusion: the Fascist Formula
Here's the emerging American version of the fascist's formula: combine millions of dollars of lobbyists' money with embittered troublemakers who have a small army of not terribly bright white angry people (collected over decades through pro-life mass mailing networks) at their beck and call, ever ready to believe any myth or lie circulated by the semi literate and completely and routinely misinformed right wing -- Evangelical religious underground. Then put his little mob together with the insurance companies' big bucks. That's how it works -- American Brown Shirts at the ready....
As Schaeffer's article makes eminently clear, there are multiple parallels between what's behind the town hall thuggery and the classical manifestations of fascism/Nazism. But to make the point about projection blindingly clear, consider these final two points:
(1) Nazism was fundamentally founded on projection: It aimed to take over the world, and did so based on the claim that this is what the Jews had already done. It practiced mass-extermination, based on fantasies about what Jews had done and were planning to do that had absolutely no basis in fact.
(2) When the new brownshirts today--and those who egg them on--claim that the rest of us are fascists, what they are doing is practicing the "big lie", which is, of course, pure Hitler.
What Is To Be Done?
America is in a very perilous place right now. The parallels to Germany and Nazism are bone-chillingly real. American conservatism has crashed and burned, just as German conservatism had done by the end of WWI. The question now is if we will see another two decades of rightwing rage tearing our country apart, and threatening the safety, perhaps even the survival of the rest of the world.
While there are many different things that can and should be done to counter what is happening--I am a great believer in pluralism, and a diversity of forms of activism--I believe that one of the most crucial, and most powerful things that can be done is to call on official leaders of the Republican Party to renounce the violence and the anti-democratic tactics that are being empoloyed to shut down debate at town halls across the country.
This is the bottom line: Stiffling debate is anti-democratic. It is un-American. Are Republican officeholders going to defend mass un-American activity? Or are they going to denounce it? Are they pro-American? Or anti-American?
It's really just that simple.
And they should be willing to take a stand. For America. Or against it.
The choice is theirs. But it's up to us to put it to them, and demand an answer. |
