One of Erin's and my favorite new hobbies since moving to D.C. is protest watching. We love to get immersed in the crowds and feel the passion and intensity of the moment. So last weekend we took the opportunity to spend a few hours on Saturday and Sunday to experience the Tea Party health care reform protests at the Capitol.
I went in expecting craziness, expecting that people who hated a relatively middle-of-the-road health care reform bill enough to travel to D.C. and protest it all weekend were going to be a little extreme. But I admit I did not expect to be as affected by the experience as I was.
The signs and chants were what you might expect: "Hands Off My Medicare!," "USA:
Under
Socialist
Attack," "Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire," "Obama Lies, Grandma Dies," "Spreading the Wealth Since 1917: Lenin, Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, and Obama," and "I Drove My Pickup Truck." What you might not expect is that some of them were signed by U.S. Representatives:
At one point a crowd of hundreds took to their knees to say the Lord's Prayer, while a guy in the front held up a copy of the U.S. Constitution. The utter sacrilege in that theocratic moment appalled me. At another point a Representative from Indiana stood on the hood of a car and warned the crowd about the poisonous contents of the bill, about the dangers of a President chiding the Supreme Court (an action, I may note, that President Reagan took as well), about Nancy Pelosi addressing her fellow Democrats as "comrades." I could almost hear the lines from my high school performance in
The Music Man running in the background ("Heed that warning before it's too late! Watch for the tell-tale signs of corruption!").
As I walked through the crowd, the question that kept burning in my gut was where these passionate small-government folks were two years ago? Where was their concern for fiscal responsibility when Bush set fire to our balanced budget with two wars, a Medicare expansion, an expensive education reform program, and a huge tax cut—all of which were individually much more expensive than this health care legislation? Where was their respect for civil liberties when the Bush Administration tapped phones without a warrant, created the Patriot Act, and tortured prisoners of war? Where was their love of limited government when Bush launched an interventionist war and increased the size of government more than any other president since LBJ? After a while I couldn't take it any longer, and I started asking the protesters.
The first few either had no answer, or claimed that the problem wasn't as big as it is now, which is just blatantly false. But then I struck up a conversation with a quiet mother who gave me an answer which had some weight to it: the recession. The recession has put 10% of the country out of work, and it has served as a wakeup call for those who hold the government responsible.
I think she's right. The recession has left millions wondering where they will find a job, how to provide for their families, and for some, where their next meal will come from. It doesn't take a PhD in Psychology to walk through crowds like these and sense that they are largely motivated by fear. Fanatical distrust, as I have
called it in the past, in the face of an unsure future.
So I'm tempted to do what I have in the past, and explain away this irrational fear as an understandable reaction to the unfortunate economic conditions in our country. I'm tempted to assume that the extremist manifestations of this fear are held by a very small portion of America. That their extreme libertarian tendencies had
little impact on the 2008 election, that this is simply my generation's round of populism, and that historically populism has had
little impact on policy.
But these protests provoked me to feel that the fear we face today might be just a little bit deeper than that. Fox News is now the number one cable news channel in the country, with
more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined, and in my opinion it is a menacing source of blatant fear mongering, the greatest fountain of unbridled
propaganda in the United States today. The top five TV and radio news programs in the country include The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Glenn Beck—men who are all hell-bent on portraying Obama and the left as an evil, racist, socialist, communist, moronic group of tyrants. Glenn Beck's incoherent conspiracy theories about the slightest hints of progressivism leading us on a death trail to fascism and socialism are so laughable that I try my best to ignore him, but can I when he sells fear so well that it reaches into the homes of three million Americans every weeknight?
There is no question that the vitriol created by this group has derailed our national political conversation—the recent health care legislation is a perfect example. I took pains to
analyze the ideas of both parties over the last year, and consequently I believe there are a lot of problems with the bill. But there are no death panels in it. No plans to euthanize seniors. No government takeovers. No epic spending increases. Nothing that will increase cancer rates. No federal funding for abortion. There are, however, Republican ideas in the bill. But you'd never know any of this listening to the right. Legitimate concerns about the legislation have been pushed aside by whining and screaming and outright lies.
Three years ago the Republican party claimed that a president sending soldiers into a very unpopular war was a sign of conviction and integrity. Now they're claiming that a president signing a bill which 48% of the public does not support (many because they don't think the legislation is liberal enough) is a sign of tyranny. Can that kind of insincerity be reconciled with real debate?
Yet the Tea Party grows even darker. I've
written here before that I feel they are motivated by an aversion to President Obama himself. At one point during our time at the protest, a young black counter-protester whose mother had been diagnosed with cancer in November appeared and started chanting, "Save the bill!" After a while an argument ensued, which was broken up by the police after a protester yelled back, "You should like this bill, 'cause your kind are the ones that get all the abortions!" Later
I learned that the group had yelled racial slurs at some black Congressmen, including Georgia Representative John Lewis—who still has the scars on his head from the fractured skull he suffered at the hands of the Alabama Police in the marches on Selma and Montgomery during the Civil Rights era.
I know I should not answer fear with fear. I know I should not let actions like these overwhelm my perception of the party of Lincoln, TR, and Eisenhower. But good grief they have the nation's most popular news channel, most popular news and radio programs, a former Vice Presidential candidate, and the ability to convince 100% of the Republicans on the hill to avoid every opportunity of bipartisanship from a center-left administration and vote in one giant block against major legislation while screaming about their newfound love of liberty in the face of tyrannical straw men. At times it is hard to feel the Tea Party has no influence.
It was especially hard to feel this at dusk on Saturday evening, when five Republican representatives from rural Midwestern districts stood on the Capitol steps grinning, leading prayers, and giving prom-queen waves while shouting compliments into a megaphone to the "true Americans" on the ground. It was a spectacle ripped from the pages of every classic political
novel—the greasy Congressmen trading fear and flattery for some political capital to spend in November as the sun set behind the dome. A dark scene—dark enough to make a guy feel that despite my concerns about the bill, there is some comfort to be had in the knowledge that this madding crowd went home disappointed.
