Right-wing populist rage is in the news. Shout-downs of supporters of health care reform have been heard from local town halls to the halls of Congress, together with the more restrained commentaries of conservative pundits and congressmen expressing weak disapproval of the public outbursts, but insisting that the anger is real, justified, and politically potent.
Watching all this, you can't help being reminded of earlier "days of rage" in the late 1960s, another watershed period in our political history. Then the anger came from the left instead of right, from radical opponents of the Vietnam War.
In October 1969, protesters organized by the Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) fought the police in the streets of Chicago. This was more serious and violent stuff than what we've seen this summer and fall from the right. But the depth of feeling is similar and the gun-toting patriots who have shown up at anti-Obama rallies have not been subtle about what use they would like to make of their right to bear arms. The Oklahoma City bombing in the '90s, as well as the violent attempts to suppress the civil right movement earlier, demonstrated that anger from the right can bear fruit just as crazy and deadly as anger from the left.
The apologists for the current ugliness cite the million of "murdered babies" lost to abortion and more the tenuous threats posed by Obama's "government power grab." The point they end up making is remarkably similar to that made 40 years ago by apologists for radical, anti-war violence: "We agree with their goals but not their tactics."
I don't know if that's a valid moral stance in either case, but I do know that politically it is very difficult to draw a line between goals and tactics. What matters politically in these arguments between left and right is the people in the middle, the 40 percent or so of the electorate who define themselves as independents, and who decide elections.
Confronted by extreme tactics by either the left or the right, the people in the middle tend to forget the goals that seem so moral to those who feel driven to do anything to achieve them. If you act crazy, the people in the middle think you are crazy, you and your goals both, and they want nothing to do with you.
That's why Martin Luther King's nonviolence ultimately trumped George Wallace's ugly defiance in civil rights. That's why the "revolution" of the '60s radicals resulted in 40 years of dominance by the right.
Obama is right about one thing, this really is a watershed moment in American politics. What happens in the next couple of years could tell us who will be running things for the next couple of decades.
Whatever happens to health care reform, and however genuinely outraged the right may be, it needs to take some courses in anger management. The conservatives might take as an exemplar their Great Hero, and how he came to power.
After all, the defining moment of the 1980 presidential debate and of that whole election, when Carter said Reagan was going to wreck Social Security and Medicare, was not an image of Reagan turning purple and shouting, "You lie!"
It was Reagan's simple, politically masterful grin and shrug, and the genial, "There you go again."
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