Let’s Get Something Straight: These Town Hall Protesters are Dangerous — They are Killing the Very Idea of a Public Forum

Okay, I’ll admit it: the title of my last post was perhaps overly sensationalist, but I stand by its fundamental assertion: the Obama Administration would be facing less outrage surrounding health care reform if it had explicitly prioritized economic recovery and employment before pushing health care to the top of its agenda.

But let’s get something straight: these town hall protesters are dangerous. Not because I think they are all violent thugs–though frankly, if you watch this montage of terse town hall moments from The Daily Show it’s hard to think otherwise–but because they are killing the very idea of a public forum.

For all of the complexities of public policy, politics is ultimately a fairly simple game: politicians like to do things that make them look good and they want to avoid things that make them look bad. While the people who come out looking the worst in these town halls are certainly the protesters, there’s not a politician alive who wants to have clips of him being booed and harassed become a You Tube/cable news sensation.

For better or for worse, we live in a world where a piece of news or a video clip never dies–it’s circulated endlessly around the news media, blogs, social networking sites, and all the rest. Politicians and officials have very little control over the way media is captured, distributed, consumed, and interpreted. In such an environment, the best way to make sure that you don’t look like a chump forever in the blogosphere is to make sure that compromising moments never come to pass–which, in a town hall setting, means filling the audience with ringers. As it stands today, some town halls are screened, some aren’t, but the political argument for very stringently screened town halls in the long-term–and thus a less robust democratic debate–just got a whole lot stronger, at least from the perspective of elected officials. That’s not good.

The town hall does something that the Internet doesn’t do very well: it pulls politician and citizen from the echo chamber that has become political media and plops them in front of each other, forcing both to be (at least in theory) civil and forthright in their concerns and positions. It’s become so rare to see politicians fly by the seat of their pants nowadays, away from consultants and scripts and talking points; and similarly, it’s getting harder and harder to follow political issues free of the vitriol and intellectual homogeneity of partisan news sources.

The ideal town hall counters both these phenomenon, if only temporarily–but that ideal just became a lot less politically attractive. Sure, if town hall screening becomes more uniformly rigorous in the future, there will always be people who game the system, pretend to be a supporter, then lash out unexpectedly at the meeting. But the people who are most likely to pull such a move are the ideological radicals that are already poisoning public debate. It’s the middle-of-the-road voter who is most likely to either back away or be dismissed from the process.

The last thing this country needs is more political polarization and less enlightened public debate. So, when you watch these town hall protesters at work, weep not just for health care, but also for democracy.

Photo by ProgressOhio