It’s Shark Week on Discovery Channel, but that’s not what’s giving me nightmares.

It’s the scary people showing up at senators’ and representatives’ town hall meetings to holler and scream and generally disrupt the discussion.

These people are cattle being led around by the nose by Fox News. They simply repeat talking points fed to them by Rupert Murdoch and company. They have not come to any of their conclusions about health care through any kind of thoughtful consideration of their own. They simply shout as loudly as they can to drown out the opposing viewpoints to which they are incapable of responding because they not only don’t hear them, but because they don’t understand them. Ignorance on parade, being trotted out by Fox and Friends to support the network’s own bias.

As much as these people frighten and repel me, I do feel some pity for them. They don’t even realize that they are being used as pawns of large health insurance companies. I have personally witnessed some of the tactics one large health insurance company is using to mobilize opposition to President Obama’s health care plans. These companies will do anything to maintain their multi-billion dollar profits, including organizing confused, paranoid, ignorant people to protest against much-needed change. Of course, the insurance companies don’t want anyone to know they are writing the playbook, so they have “grassroots” organizations such as Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks.org publish it. Many of these people who are disrupting the town halls can barely put together a coherent sentence; some of them look like they could use a shower and decent meal. And they are essentially doing free lobbying for companies that can buy and sell the entire nation a couple times over. That’s just sick.

Of course these people are entitled to their opinions, and they have a right to free speech, but so does everyone else at these meetings. Shouting at people who are trying to talk at a public meeting is very much like gagging them altogether. How can we engage in any kind of effective civic discourse if one side refuses to listen or even let the other side speak? Democracy works best when we can hear everyone’s ideas, even if we don’t always accept them.
But democracy also means the majority rules. Sorry, conservatives, you lost the elections. Badly. And one of the reasons for those losses was that you scared away the folks in the middle with crazy stunts like this. Do you really think you are winning friends with this behavior? Believe me, you are further alienating most of the rest of your countrymen. In the past week, I have heard no less than three staunchly conservative friends talking about how horrified they are by this barely disguised racist extremism. Not only are you losing the moderates, you are even scaring away dyed-in-the-wool conservatives.

Now, I usually try to steer clear of comparisons to Nazi Germany. I think such metaphors are overused and often trivialize the horrors of that regime. But as a literature student, I have read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Sereny’s Into that Darkness, Elon’s The Pity of It All, and dozens of other works documenting the rise of the Nazis. And the first time I saw one of these town hall meetings, it reminded me of the Brown Shirts of the 1920’s and 30’s who would go to other political parties’ rallies and disrupt them. It also reminded me of the Nazis when they first won seats in the Weimar Parliament and spent their days disrupting debates with shouting and calls for points of order (Reiche, Eric G. The Development of the SA in Nürnberg, 1922–1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.; Rempel, Gerhard, Western New England College, 2000).

A democracy cannot function this way. But perhaps more importantly, a political party cannot function this way. Not permanently anyway. I guess Hitler’s strategy worked. If these conservative crackpots want to destroy their own party as well as the government created by our forefathers, lead us into a bloody civil war, only to be turned out in the end anyway, I guess this ploy is the right way to go. Or they could behave as Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and others taught us to with their examples. Use your right to free speech to speak your mind eloquently and support your arguments logically. We might actually listen to you.