The summer before last, Republican groups made huge political gains by showing up at Townhall meetings and acting atrociously. Now Democrats want to do the same thing.
They shouldn’t.
When I saw that MoveOn.org was organizing the same sort of events to target Republicans, I initially felt a certain glee. This will go well for the left. Then I remembered the August 2009 town halls meeting I attended. I am wholly in favor of constituents challenging their representatives—even if it makes the representatives uncomfortable. I have little use for any sense of propriety that gets in the way of a robust and honest political dialog—but what happened at that townhall meeting wasn’t political discourse.
It was base. It was incoherently mean, screamingly ugly. The same hateful energy responsible for every crime ever committed by a mob was on display. It was the sort of event that makes you wonder whether humanity was a mistake.
Now MoveOn.org will unleash the same sort of nastiness at the Republicans. It will capture a media narrative. It will be good for the Democrats in 2012. But it will be bad for the country. They shouldn’t do it.
Presumably it all depends on how it’s done. The reason the Tea Klan stuff was so ugly (to me, anyway) was the pure low-information spectacle of it all; the purest example of this being stuff like “keep your guvmint claws off my Medicare” and the like. If MoveOn shows up and just screams people attending and the House member running the thing down: then Squashed and I are in complete agreement, it will have been a bad idea and bad for long-term political discussion in the country.
But, if MoveOn shows up and states the case, calmly and upon a foundation of facts-based disagreement (e.g. the GOP plans to end Medicare in every meaningful way; however, a program called Medicare will still be there and here is a partial list of the reasons that move will be very, very bad deal for the elderly and infirmed…): then it is all for the good.
Lemkin 