Costs of War: Paranoid Populism

Source: ISN

The loud, occasionally violent protests at public meetings held by US lawmakers to discuss health care reform highlight a deep, powerful and rather ugly current of angry, paranoid populism in American politics, Shaun Waterman writes for ISN Security Watch.

By Shaun Waterman in Washington, DC for ISN Security Watch


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The angry scenes - by now familiar to anyone who watches TV news - of lawmakers being heckled or shouted down by chanting protestors in their own districts, have spilled over into violence at only a handful of events, but passions are running high enough that some observers are dubbing the congressional recess 'The Summer of Hate.'

One of those jeered, Arlen Spector, the Pennsylvania senator who recently defected from the Republicans to the Democrats, echoed the views of many commentators when he blamed the anger on the fear the horrendous state of the economy is inducing in blue collar America. “Millions of people have lost their jobs,” Politico quoted him as saying, “and millions of others are afraid of losing theirs."

Whatever its cause, the outrage is real - and it is being deliberately stoked by misinformation from opponents of the president’s plan for health-care reform.

Even a respected senior Republican senator like Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, who has declared himself committed to a bipartisan reform bill, told an audience last week that a proposal to get the government to pay for voluntary consultation with a doctor about living wills and end-of-life care is a mandate for Washington bureaucrats to “pull the plug on grandma.”


Read more: http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch/Detail/?lng=en&id=104744