For all the invocations of American history at the protest, there was a striking lack of perspective. However disenfranchised conservatives felt, we are a world away from “taxation without representation”—the closer truth might be found in one woman’s hand-painted sign: “taxation with crappy representation.” Rolling back the Bush tax cuts to Clinton-era rates—however unwise in a recession—does not put us inexorably on the road to socialism, let alone communism. It reminded me of a Stephen Colbert line: “I love the truth; it’s facts I’m not a fan of.”
Conservatives were playing the mirror image of the liberals they mocked after 2000, portraying a popular election as an unconstitutional usurpation of power. But liberals who wanted to dismiss the Tea Parties did so at their peril: Never forget that America was founded in part by a tax revolt.
And this was only the eighty-sixth day of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Right-Wing Rules for Radicals
By summer, politics had gotten even more heated over President Obama’s proposed health-care plan—the Holy Grail and third rail of Democratic presidents since Harry Truman.
The Tea Party protesters now focused their energies on the town halls hosted by congressmen every August for their constituents. Normally, these were sleepy affairs, but by the end of the summer they looked more like a collective crystal meth binge than a Norman Rock-well painting.
The roots of the town hall protests were the same as the Tea Parties—anger at the growth of government and the unprecedented spending. The fact that the president had called for the health-care legislation to pass before the August recess felt to many citizens like liberal arrogance and overreach. When liberal Democratic leaders like House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers mocked the idea of actually reading the health-care bill—telling the National Press Club, “What good is reading the bill when it’s a thousand pages? And you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you’ve read the bill?”9—protesters went ballistic.
“Obama was elected to unify the nation,” a plaidshirted baby boomer named Dan Cochran told me at a town hall in Windsor, Colorado. “And what we’ve got with health care is the most divisive debate I’ve seen since Vietnam. They attempted to cram it down our throat overnight with no consideration to We the Taxpayer.”
When nervous aides told Dan and the rest of the Colorado crowd that Democratic Congresswoman Betsy Markey would not be appearing at the town hall as advertised (due to a death threat, her press officer quietly told me on the side), the natives went from restless to revolt—they were going to have their hearing with or without the congresswoman. One local farmer rose out of the crowd and offered a laundry list of grievances written out on a pad of paper: “Loss of individual rights; the Deficit; Health Care Cost/Limitation of Choice; Stimulus Plan; Government Bailouts that were not read but passed; Card Check; Fairness Doctrine; CIA investigation; Cap & Trade. Stop the spending. Listen to the people.”
These citizens were angry, but they were far from uninformed—they had just gotten their information from partisan sources, professional polarizers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who pump up outrage to pump up ratings. Policy debates now felt like referendums on the future of the republic, with nothing short of tyranny and genocide ahead. But with Democrats in control of Congress and the White House, they felt unheard. And so the screaming started.
Maryland Congressman Frank Kratovil was hanged in effigy outside his office. New York Congressman Tim Bishop had to be escorted to his car by police after one town hall to protect him from the protesters. North Carolina Congressman Brad Miller decided to cancel his August town halls after receiving a death threat. “They’re inciting people to riot with just total distortions of facts,” said freshman Virginia Representative Gerry Connolly. “They think we’re going to euthanize Grandma and the government is going to take over.”10
The fringe was starting to blur with the base. The curtain was pulled back on this shift in the form of a memo titled “Rocking the Town Halls—Best Practices.” Written by a Connecticut grassroots conservative activist named Bob MacGuffie under the banner of his group, Right Principles, the memo tried to teach people how to disrupt the town halls held in support of what was called “the socialist agenda of the Democrat leadership in Washington.” In a perfect Wingnut irony, the memo counseled conservatives to “Use the [Saul] Alinsky playbook of which the left is so proud: freeze it, attack it, personalize it and polarize it.”
Saul Alinsky was a Chicago community organizer and the author of Rules for Radicals, a bible for post-1960s leftist protesters. The book laid out a strategy for creating the conditions to achieve revolutionary social change. As Alinsky explained in the first chapter, “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.” His rules included aphorisms like, “In war the end justifies almost any means,” and he advised adherents to obscure their ultimate goals in general, unobjectionable terms like “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” “Of the Common Welfare” and “Pursuit of Happiness.”11
Vilified by conservatives and idolized by liberals, Alinsky’s impact endured after his death in 1972. Hillary Clinton wrote her ninety-two-page undergraduate thesis at Wellesley on Alinsky, earnestly titled “‘There Is Only the Fight . . .’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” As a young Chicago community organizer, Barack Obama reportedly studied and taught Alinsky’s techniques, seeding conservative distrust of his centrist rhetoric. MacGuffie’s memo was a minor screed, but it applied the liberal protesters’ confrontational approach to conservative goals: “The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive . . . you need to rock the boat early. Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early. If he blames Bush for something or offers other excuses—call him on it, yell back and have someone else follow up with a shout-out. . . . Look for these opportunities even before he takes questions.”
Beyond barraging the congressmen, the goal was to intimidate the undecided:
“We want the independent thinkers to leave the hall with some doubts about the Democrat solutions continually proposed by the national leadership.”12
This was the decisive shift in conservative opposition tactics in 2009—a decision to mimic the confrontational street theater of the far left they had spent decades despising. Extremes end up resembling each other. Now conservative activists were manning the ramparts, seeing themselves as patriots protesting the president. Civility was the first calculated casualty.
In Connecticut, protesters against Senator Chris Dodd suggested that he commit suicide with whiskey and painkillers as a treatment for his newly diagnosed prostate cancer.13 One sign summed up their sentiments: “universal health care = medical genocide.” Screaming matches became a regular feature of Senator Arlen Specter’s town hall meetings in Pennsylvania after he switched parties and became a Democrat in April ’09. Choice cuts include: “You are trampling on our Constitution” and “This is the Soviet Union, this is Maoist China. The people in this room want their country back.”14 In Missouri, Senator Claire McCaskill was shouted down repeatedly at a health-care town hall attended by 1,500 people. “I don’t understand this rudeness,” McCaskill told the crowd. “I honestly don’t get it.”15 In Washington State, a retired Marine Corps veteran accused Representative Brian Baird of trying to “indoctrinate” his children and said that Nazis also took over finance and health care: “I’ve kept my oath. Do you ever intend to keep yours?”
Doctored photos of President Obama as Hitler began popping up at town halls courtesy of longtime political fringe magnet Lyndon LaRouche alongside pamphlets offering details about “Obama’s Nazi Health Plan.”
Sarah Palin, newly resigned from her position as Alaska’s governor, picked up the LaRouche-ite riff and doubled down on the crazy talk with a Facebook post: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in
front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”16
Soon the talk of “death panels” and “killing granny” seemed to be everywhere. At a “Patients First” healthcare protest in Pueblo, Colorado, the featured speaker expanded the death-panel argument to genocidal dictators. “Stalin in the 1920s issued about 20 million end of life orders for his fellow Russians. Pol Pot did it in the Vietnam War. He issued about 2 million end of life orders. It’s being done in Africa today. Mugabe is doing it every day. Adolf Hitler issued 6 million end of life orders. He called his program the final solution. I kind of wonder what we’re going to call ours.”17
A swastika was spray-painted outside the office of Representative David Scott’s office in Georgia. Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s aides called the cops after one town-hall attendee dropped a gun at the event. After Washington Representative Brian Baird was faxed a death threat addressed to President Obama, he declared, “What we’re seeing right now is close to Brown Shirt tactics.” At a Republican town hall, John McCain received a chorus of angry boos and jeers for simply stating that “Obama respects the Constitution of the United States.”18
The Tea Party Express was also winding its way through the country. A thirty-four-city tour backed by the conservative political action committee (PAC) Our Country Deserves Better was one of several that sought to carry the banner of the Tea Parties forward, raising $1.9 million in the process.19 The lead speakers at their rallies were former radio talk show hosts Mark Williams and Deborah Johns. Williams’s signature crowd-pleasing line was ripped from the National Rifle Association (NRA): “You can have our country when you pry it from our . . . cold . . . dead . . . fingers!”20
Johns aimed a little lower: “The men and women in our military didn’t fight and die for this country for a communist in the White House!” The Louisville, Kentucky, crowd chanted their approval: “U-S-A, U-S-A!”21
Down in the crowd, two men in fatigues were trying to recruit new members for their militia, the Ohio Valley Freedom Fighters, by carrying signs that read: “AK-47s: today’s pitchfork” and “Quit worrying. Start your militia training today.”22
With all the violent rhetoric, it was perhaps inevitable that actual violence would start breaking out. There were fistfights in Florida town halls alongside senior citizen scuffles.23 In Missouri, a brawl between Tea Party activists and counter-protesting Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members got one man hospitalized and six arrested.24 In California, health-care reform opponent Bill Rice had his finger bitten off at a rally sponsored by MoveOn.org. As Rice gamely recounted, “A scuffle ensued and he ate my finger in the process.”25 Things were getting ugly and weird.
The 9/12 March on Washington
After Representative Joe Wilson screamed, “You lie!” at President Obama during his health-care speech in front of a joint session of Congress, Wilson said it was just an extension of the angry outbursts he’d been hearing at town halls back home in South Carolina. It was a feedback loop of anger and alienation.
Wilson was censured by the House for his outburst, becoming the first congressman in 221 years to earn the dishonor, but in return he became an overnight folk hero on the far right. Soon he was raising more than a million dollars by playing the victim card online: “Joe Wilson is Under Attack,” the ads read. “Help him fight back.” His opponent also raised a million.
Five days after his scream, I saw signs of support dot-ting the Washington Mall—“Joe Wilson told the Truth,” “Joe Wilson speaks for me” and “Palin/Wilson 2012.”
The posters were all part of the latest Wingnut Woodstock—the 9/12 march on Washington. The date had been selected by the guru of the growing Tea Party movement, Fox News host Glenn Beck. He pitched it as a day to return to the unity, patriotism and sense of national purpose we felt the day after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
What emerged was something precisely the opposite: a protest that celebrated the deepest domestic political divisions we’ve seen since 9/11, with unhinged accusations of traitors and despots in the White House and talk of resistance and revolution.
As I walked out of Union Station that morning, I folded into the waves of white people who descended on the Washington Mall. As more than one T-shirt put it, they were exercising their First Amendment rights so they don’t have to exercise their Second Amendment rights—yet.
They had the giddy glow of those who feel they are speaking truth to power, a reversal of fortune that had left conservatives recycling some of the Dems’ favorite lines from the Bush era: “Obama is a domestic terrorist,” “Dissent is patriotic” and the ever proliferating Obama-as-Hitler.
“It’s wonderful to see so many patriots here!” shouted one speaker from the podium on the steps of Capitol Hill to a chorus of cheers—and he started to list U.S. battles from Guadalcanal on, won by courageous patriots, not the government, to defend a freedom that he said is now under threat from inside the White House. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and Indiana Congressman Mike Pence were among the few elected officials who addressed the crowd.
But the homemade signs on the ground spoke more clearly than many of the speakers. There were appropriations of Obama’s red, white and blue “O” symbol inserted into the words “Treason” and “Destroyer.” A man dressed as George Washington approvingly nodded at a collage featuring Obama’s “best friends”—Karl Marx, Hugo Chávez and Mohammed.
Here is a selection of signs, chosen more or less at random: “Don’t Make the U.S. a Third World Country—Go Back to Kenya,” “We Came Unarmed (This Time),” “Christians Unite,” “Muslim Marxist,” “Mugabe-Pelosi in ’12,” “If you are a liberal or progressive Democrat or Republican you are a communist. Impeach Obama!” “Obama the Exterminator: Killing Our Jobs, Killing Our Future, Killing Our Freedom,” “Radical Socialists are Damaged Hate-Filled Power Hungry Destroyers,” “Bury ObamaCare with Kennedy,” “King George Didn’t Listen Either,” “God Bless Glenn Beck and Fox News,” “Preserve Mom, Apple Pie and the American Way,” “Barack Obama Supports Abortion, Sodomy, Socialism and the New World Order,” “An Obamanation of Taxation! The Lifeblood of Tyranny!” “Obama Lied, Granny Died,” “NObama Healthcare is America’s Nightmare” and finally, inevitably, seriously, “Don’t Touch My Medicare.”
One man sat with his family on the rim of a reflecting pool, brandishing a homemade red Soviet-style flag complete with hammer and sickle, with the words “United States Socialist Republic” on it. He was a Vietnam vet from the Shenandoah Valley who gave his name only as Bob. “I was always afraid of my country being attacked from the outside by bombs and rockets and missiles,” Bob told me. “Now I’m watching it being destroyed from right here. I’m scared for my country.” But did he think Obama is a communist? “I think he’s a direct threat to my country, but it’s not just him. It’s the Congress. I think this is all part of a plan. I don’t know what he is. I do believe he has socialist tendencies.”
Among the crowd were a few scattered Confederate flags flapping in the wind. I went up to one auburn-haired middle-aged woman named Becky and asked why she was carrying the Stars and Bars to the rally. “Because I’m from the South,” Becky said. “It has nothing to do with slavery. People think it means slavery. That’s not what it stood for. It stood for the Union.”
Somewhere, Lincoln just threw up.
A guy named Norm decided to step in and help her out: “I don’t think it’s so much that anybody would advocate any secession-like movement, or that anybody wants to remove a star from the flag. I think if anything, the Confederate flag serves to remind me of where we’ve been and where we would not like to go again.”
There is a “Don’t make me shoot this dog” aspect to this logic: an angry, divisive protest designed to stop the divisions they feel erupting from Washington’s policies. It echoed wh
at one young man at the Tea Party Express stop in Jackson, Michigan, told a reporter who asked why he was carrying a loaded AK-47 and two loaded handguns. “I don’t want a revolution. I don’t want a civil war,” he said. “But it is a possibility. It’s there as an option, as a last resort.”26
Liberals who want to ignore the populist anger of the Tea Parties and town halls do so at their political peril—the frustration at Washington overspending is real, a reflection of bailout backlash. People are angry because they are expected to pay their bills and balance their budgets, but both big business and big government seem arrogantly exempt while passing the buck to the next generation.
But Republicans are playing a dangerous game. They are benefiting from all this anger in the short term, but they have tapped into something they can’t control. Calling the president a Nazi or communist is something far beyond simple incivility or street theater—it is an accusation that intentionally stirs the crazy pot. It is ultimately an incitement to violence.
Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America Page 4
