I’ve been reading news reports about the heated town hall meetings and protests federal legislators have been facing, in the wake of the GOP’s move to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, with bemusement. People are talking about what’s happening like it’s something unusual or aberrant. It’s not. From Trump’s assertion that the people testifying at these events are just paid liberal plants to conservative complaints about “incivility,” it all seems terribly familiar.
Flash back to summer 2009: Tea Party activists are packing federal legislators’ home district town hall meetings across the country to express their displeasure with efforts by the Obama administration to create the Affordable Care Act. My own congressman at the time, Brian Baird, had to hold his town hall at the Clark County amphitheater because no other venue was big enough to contain that much organized outrage.
Not even eight years later, the very thing that sent Tea Partiers and other conservatives into paroxysms of rage is now being defended with the same zeal. The bottom line is this isn’t new. Tea Party activists wrote the playbook on this particular brand of aggressive dissent. Liberals are just taking pages from it. Whether you are conservative or liberal, we have all embraced incivility when it comes to communicating with our federal elected officials about things that matter to us (and often state and local, as well). It didn’t really work out the last time. Let’s see if works now.
