“On every unauthoritative exercise of power by the legislature must the people rise in rebellion or their silence be construed into a surrender of that power to them? If so, how many rebellions should we have had already?” –Thomas Jefferson
RE: THE LEFT
“What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise [at the passions of the protesters] but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss — loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t. People are not automatons. They show up only if they care. What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of ‘carrying swastikas and symbols like that.’ (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a ‘no’ slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis. Then came the Democratic Party charge that the people at the meetings were suspiciously well-dressed, in jackets and ties from Brooks Brothers. They must be Republican rent-a-mobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer said on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball’ that people are ‘storming these town hall meetings,’ that they were ‘well dressed’, that ‘this is all organized,’ ‘all planned,’ to ‘hurt our president.’ Here she was projecting. For normal people, it’s not all about Barack Obama.” –columnist Peggy Noonan
Posted by Sercan on August 10, 2009 at 10:20 pm
The idea that people only, “show up only if they care,” is nonsense. Advertising and public relations campaigns are able to convince people to wait in lines for hours or even days in order to buy things. They can convince people to go into debt in order to buy the advertised product. The techniques for doing this are over a hundred years old; properly trained advertisers and public relations experts earn their livings by getting people who didn’t care about something in the first place to change their minds and start caring.
This assertion won’t win this comment any support since it suggests that the majority of the anti-health care reform protesters have been tricked by advertisers into supporting an anti-reform position that is actually against the protesters’ own interests. Unfortunately, this is the case.
Now, I have no doubt that the popular indignation is real. Advertising doesn’t implant feelings, after all. It simply tricks people into believing things that they otherwise wouldn’t. (People who wait for six hours in the dark, just to buy a video game the night it comes out rather than the next morning, do believe that playing the game that night will benefit them.) Similarly, if people really do believe that health care reform is a conspiracy to kill people, or impinge upon people’s freedoms, or ruin the care they have now, they will be truly angry.
The problem with advertising and public relations is that they are biased. They have to be; they need clients to stay in business, and clients have business aims. As a result, public relations officials claim that public health care is authoritarian. Then they claim it will never work and no one will get care. They point to the flaws in Canadian and European public health care systems, but they ignore the fact that Canada and Europe are not Bolshevik, totalitarian nightmares. Then they then point to totalitarian regimes and, ignoring these countries’ unique histories that led them to totalitarianism, public relations professionals will single out their health care systems for criticism.
And with people like Rush Limbaugh adding to all this, telling people that Hitler’s first step to power was national health care, it’s no wonder that people are freaked out.