The Nation: Required Reading for Health Care Town Halls

[marmar]

Required Reading for Health Care Town Halls
posted by Melissa Harris-Lacewell on 08/14/2009 @ 09:43am


I am frustrated with the deepening madness at health care reform town hall meetings. In an effort to contextualize these events I'm offering a short syllabus that may help us understand the current state of public discourse on health care reform.

James Madison's The Federalist #10

Now is a good time to revisit Federalist #10 where Madison takes up the issue of factions and the danger they pose to responsible policy making in a democracy. Madison surely would have reminded President Obama and congressional Democrats that town hall-style, direct democracy is a breeding ground for faction-led mischief.

Madison writes, "The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished."

Like most of the founding fathers, Madison was suspicious of popular control of policy making. He worried about the balance between responsive and responsible government. But despite his anxieties Madison insists that we cannot limit freedom, nor ignore multiple viewpoints. The goal is not to silence dissent, but to control the potentially tyrannical effects of factions. Madison believed that responsible representatives, held accountable by periodic elections were the best safeguards against the worst effects of factions. Members of Congress need to rely on Madison's vision rather than giving into pressure tactics of a rowdy faction.

Karen Stenner's The Authoritarian Dynamic

Professor Stenner was one of my dissertation advisers when I was earning my PhD at Duke University. I worked as a research assistant gathering data for this insightful text. Witnessing the fear and anger of health care reform opponents immediately reminded me of Stenner's work.

Building on research begun by Theodore Adorno and extended by Robert Altemeyer, Stenner's text offers a comprehensive and systematic examination of the link between authoritarian personalities and expressions of moral, political, and racial intolerance.

Fear of change and discomfort with divergent opinions tend to activate latent authoritarian impulses for some individuals. Uncomfortable with a world that is changing, diverse, and seemingly beyond their control, these citizens can become aggressively intolerant. Stenner's research is a crystal ball that predicts the town hall protests were a likely resulting from President Obama's trumpeting a theme of "Change."

Ida B. Wells' The Red Record

Ida B. Wells was one of America's first investigative journalists. In 1895 the young Wells asked a compelling and dangerous question: what is the cause of lynching?

Brutal violence against African Americans in the South was widely justified as acceptable punishment for black men's sexual aggression against white women. In 1892 three friends of Wells were lynched by a white mob. The mob was angry about the men's financial success as owners of a grocery store that successfully competed with one owned by white men. In A Red Record Wells painstakingly collects and presents evidence challenging the rhetoric of black male sexual violence. She discovers that rape was rarely the true motive for lynching. Instead, black men were tortured and murdered when they dared to seek economic, personal, or political equality.

Wells' work is a reminder that the highest calling of investigative journalism is to provide evidence against false justifications that underlie violent ideologies. The crowds at health care reform town hall meetings are enraged and armed. Many are spurred on by a belief that their families, their futures, and their way of life are being threatened. Many hold patently false beliefs about the facts of pending health care reform legislation.

We need our own Ida B. Wells with the moral courage to unflinchingly reveal these lies. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/462431/required_reading_for_health_care_town_halls

[joeybee12]

1. Esp. true about Ida Wells...the MSM is AWOL on reporting this story accurately...n/t

[marmar]

4. Agreed.

nt

[Overseas]

2. K&R. The Authoritarian Dynamic hit home with me.

Because it is very sad that we have hundreds of millions being spent on right wing PR campaigns to stir up fearful, angry, volatile sentiments and can direct people to go shout down their own best interests and despise one another.

Those well funded right wing PR campaigns, to support "grass roots groups" that "have been around for a long time," just coincidentally dormant during destructive authoritarian Republican regimes, somehow just happened to be absent from the hundreds of town halls our legislators have held before.

I am disturbed that calm PR professionals are ginning it all up for financial gain. To protect the billions in profits of an industry that failed miserably to prove its case on the merits since it last stomped out Democrats' attempt to give us national health insurance.

Their failures could have dominated the August recess discussion. We could have been talking about just how our current system is Sicko in painful detail. The industry needed "spontaneous protests" against reform to distract us all. They demonstrated the power of exploiting the authoritarian dynamic to their advantage. Got people on Medicare to go scream against government health insurance.

I don't like the way The Coldly Ingenious Political Strategy can be exercised so brazenly without wider discussion than on token liberal news broadcasts. The news-bytes flashing through our mainstream broadcasts are just talking about the "surprising angry protests against reform."

The squeaky clean dudes in suits who fund this stuff are smilingly pleased with their success. Rick Scott can defraud Medicare, go polish his head for a couple of years and jump right in to the new campaign to kill the public option, smiling broadly. Confident that it's only those pesky liberals that'll be talking about it on their special programs. He's got Fox and 80% of talk radio pushing his points and stirring up spontaneous/impulsive sentiments.

Hey it's still a cheap deal for them to win billions in profits by spending only a coupla hundred million. Never mind that people get a bit riled up. That militias are on the rise. It's okay as long as you don't say "Fire!" in a crowded theater. We've already allowed so much hate speech onto our public airwaves-- poisonous speakers like Coulter and Malkin have been regular guests here and there. Limbaugh and Savage have hours and hours to distort reality-- repeating disproved claims again and again-- they're just entertainers, you see.

But really-- are there no limits? When does The Public Interest roar back to the foreground?

Right now things are far too convenient for the right wing. Cash rules the roost.

They're planning a next wave of townhall shout-downs around cap & trade.

[marmar]

3. Great post.

:thumbsup:

[Overseas]

5. Thank you.

The under-reporting of the right wing PR orchestration of the "grass roots" shout-downs is really disturbing.