The New York Times explores what they call the "Roots of Rage" at townhall meetings.
Many said the Obama administration’s plans for a new health care system were just another example of a federal government that had again gone too far, just as it had, they said, with the economic stimulus, the auto industry bail-out and the cap-and-trade program.
“This is about the dismantling of this country,” Katy Abram, 35, shouted at Mr. Specter, drawing one of the most prolonged rounds of applause. “We don’t want this country to turn into Russia.”
Ms. Abram described herself as a stay-at-home mother from Lebanon, and in many ways she was representative of the almost entirely white and irritable crowd [...]
Who are these people? Aside from being almost entirely white and irritable?. The picture they paint seems to be in line with everyone else's, and yet it's notable because most of the rest of the media isn't grasping the rather obvious point -- most of these townhall protestors aren't protesting healthcare, but a far more nebulous concept.
John Stahl, chairman of Berks Tea Party, a local branch of conservatives, was one of those who helped recruit opponents of change to the event. [...] Since May, his group has organized four protests throughout the state opposing taxes and the stimulus plan but none have attracted the crowds like health care, he said.
“We believe there are several issues out there that leave the existence of the Republic at risk,” he added, “not the least of which is this Obamacare.” [...]
Standing two feet from the senator, Craig Anthony Miller, 59, shouted into his face, “You are trampling on our Constitution!”
You might ask yourself why, of all possibilities, reforming America's healthcare system is the thing that "tramples on the Constitution" or "leaves the existence of the Republic at risk." You might ask this, because you're probably not insane. But again, this matches what we've been seeing in every "deather" protest so far --people angrily denouncing government intervention and "socialized medicine" -- but they all love Medicare. They don't want government to supposedly decide who's too expensive to keep alive, with visions of "death panels" and the like -- but insurance companies are doing that now, all the time, and there's nary a peep about that. The opposition, in other words, doesn't know the first damn thing about the thing they're supposedly protesting.
The hostility goes back to what I was pondering in my Sunday essay: that the aggressive, furious attempts to even shut down the possibility of a political discussion is reminiscent of the anti-desegregation movement, a point that becomes noteworthy when you aggregate the motives of the "birthers", who loudly deny Obama's citizenship, the "teabaggers", who loudly declare that the same taxes they paid under Bush are tyrannical under Obama, the "deathers", who loudly assert that healthcare reform is secret plot to euthanize seniors and others that the government deems unproductive. None of these positions makes a lick of sense or has any evidence to back it up, but in large part it is the same group of hard-right, almost entirely white conservatives that believes all three at once. If you believe the shouters themselves, in their own words, the healthcare debate isn't about healthcare but about a conspiratorial government and the end of the Republic.
This is, by definition, a far-right position, and less charitably a batshit insane one, and that it has managed to make it so far and be featured so prominently is testament to just how completely the farthest of the far right has captured the Republican party.