Warning to Republican Legislators: It is your turn now.

The Left has Decided to Copy the Tea Party.   Disrupt and Embarrass your Republican Legislator.

There is a reason for it.  It works.

Warning to Republican legislators:  it is your turn now.

Figuring out this is the wrong approach

Mass demonstrations are a mixed bag for optics.  It energizes the base and it gives visual evidence of widespread disagreement.  It gives the media something to look at.  

But there are problems:

   1.   It disrupts innocent bystanders.  People miss flights.  People are stuck in traffic.  People are inconvenienced.   It costs support.

   2.  It requires police to monitor the gathering.   This creates a dangerous image:  unruly people being corralled by police.  At the very best the crowd is quiet and orderly so it looks like a friendly interaction but the very nature of crowds, especially large crowds, is that some amount of coercion and channeling is necessary.  And if one person in a thousand in a crowd becomes angry or very loud or violent or moves a barricade or throws a ham sandwich then that becomes the scene on the nightly news.

  3.  Mass demonstrations disrupt the wrong people.  They don't frustrate decision makers; they frustrate the public.

The Tea Party did not do mass demonstrations.  They disrupted the lives of legislators.  They hit the soft target: legislators.

2009 Tea Party moved from mass demonstrations to Town Halls

I watched it in person back in 2009.  After the Rick Santelli rant on CNBC where he raised his voice and sounded angry and outraged in a venue--a market trading floor--where that kind of political anger was unexpected, Tea Party activists copied him.  Sound angry.  Shout.  Show up where you aren't expected.

It worked.

The media covered it as "the people" versus the "office holder."  This is a much, much better frame than "the protesting crowd" versus the police.   A good political movement wants the police to be your friend and the incumbent politician to the the enemy, not the other way around.   Democrats are slow to understand this.  The 2009 Tea Party got it right.

2009 Headline

I watched Town Meetings of legislators where people showed up, often with signs or bright tee shirts signifying their position, and they asked loud, angry questions after making loud angry statements.   The tone was anger.  They were outraged.  

Ostensibly they were there just like any other member of the public, to meet their State or Federal legislator but in reality they were there to disrupt by using the form of a Town Meeting--legislator meet constituent--as a place to disrupt and embarrass the officeholder.

I watched people shouting angry denunciations of Obama and financial bailouts and  health insurance expansion then under consideration as questions of Senator Wyden here in my community and saw that similar things were going on nationwide.   The optics and big message visible to TV viewers was:

2009 Headline

   1.  The public is up in arms at my legislator.  He must have done something to set them all off.

   2.  His Town Meetings are a mess.  He should be fixing whatever is making people angry so the disruption stops.

   3.  He sure looks helpless and ineffective.  Maybe someone else could do something better.

Do a thought experiment.   Imagine a scene.

Maybe someone else can quiet her.

Imagine you are in line at a supermarket and a young father has a two year old screaming and thrashing around and trying to get out of the shopping cart, making a scene, and shouting "no!  Let me go! No!  No!"

You see him attempt to quiet the child but it doesn't work.  He hugs, he cajoles, the tries to reason.   You watch and see it is ineffective.  You are simultaneously sympathetic but also impatient that he cannot s get control.  You wonder if the child's mother might do a better job.  You wonder what set the child off and if maybe the parent neglected something important, like to feed the child or give the child the regular nap.

Tantrum in a public space

Notice what you are doing?   You are questioning the parent, not the child.   After all, the parent is the responsible one.  The optics and the big message are very favorable in this instance: the elected official has lost control of his constituents.  He or she is helpless, and if the official cannot fix things then maybe the official is doing something wrong.  Maybe we need someone else in there.

Office holders don't want to be blamed for what they cannot control.  They don't want voters wondering what they did wrong.   They don't want you thinking maybe someone else could control the situation.  It is miserable for the office holder.  The tactic is ugly and manipulative and unfair and undemocratic but it worked perfectly for the Tea Party.  Now Democrats are trying it out  for themselves.

Be angry.  Make Trump look like a failure

There is one more advantage:  after about two or three such disruptive meetings the official stops showing up in public for events.  It is just too painful.  He does the same thing any parent would do if a two year old had a tantrum every time the child is brought to a supermarket.  The parent would stop taking the child to the supermarket.   The politician starts looking insular and out of touch.   Time to replace that person.

That is a loss for democracy but it is a win for the Tea Party style disrupters.  Democrats are figuring this out.