U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, spoke with two groups in Juneau on Thursday. Neither were town hall meetings requested by progressive constituents in Juneau. On the other hand, the two Sen. Dan Sullivan held in Fairbanks and Anchorage didn’t help our cause. Instead, by following a Tea Party-like script, activists at those only satisfied their own cathartic needs.
Murkowski’s first appearance was at the Chamber of Commerce luncheon. That was an easy booking to her calendar since it pretty much guaranteed her a very friendly audience.
Agreeing to meet the “The ReSISTERS, Juneau” was different. It displayed a willingness to hear progressive’s concerns about health care and environmental protection. The women in that group began their conversation with Murkowski with an open letter that the Empire published in February. Written in a respectful tone, it led to a meeting one of the women described to me as “courteous and quite amicable.” And she found Murkowski to be “a good listener who responds to her audience.”
Courteousness wasn’t part of either of Sullivan’s town halls. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner described the meeting there as a “raucous barrage of boos that threatened to tip the meeting into the open hostility.”
And Alaska Dispatch Columnist Paul Jenkins referred to progressives at the Anchorage meeting as “useful idiots” who took their script from Indivisible’s “Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.” He concluded that the textbook ruckus they created was proof the entire left acts like a 5-year-old “with totalitarian tendencies.”
Although I doubt any progressives care what Jenkins thinks of them, there’s little benefit to, in David Frum’s words, empowering “the targets of their outrage.” The target being Trump and his defenders. We “may be up against something never before seen in American life” the former Bush speechwriter wrote in the Atlantic magazine last February. And that’s “a president and an administration determined to seize on unrest to legitimate repression.” It’s exactly why the rudeness at town halls may be counterproductive.
Indivisible’s Guide was developed by former progressive congressional staffers. They pirated the Tea Party’s game plan from 2010 because it was successful in blocking President Obama’s agenda by winning back the House and electing senators like Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida).
“Be polite but persistent, and demand real answers” the Guide states. But if you don’t agree with your representative’s responses, it advises group members around the room to dispense with the politeness and start booing just like Tea Party members did seven years ago.
Beyond contradictions like that, the Guide is a poor fit for Alaska’s political landscape. Its authors believe members of Congress think about “reelection, reelection, reelection” more than anything else. That doesn’t matter to our senators now because they aren’t up for reelection anytime soon. And our state isn’t remotely similar to the swing districts down south in which the Tea Party helped Republicans flip control of the House.
And seriously, that’s the limit to the Tea Party’s success. Putting Republicans in charge hasn’t translated into actionable legislation. Instead, they’ve given us an impotent government that’s little more than a mirror of the extreme polarization in our society.
That won’t get any better by following Indivisible’s game plan. Even if it does help Democrats take over Congress in 2018 and gain all the cards in 2020, they’ll be stymied by a retrenchment of the right. It’s a prescription for prolonging a vicious cycle. To think differently is to believe we’re immune from the false promise of self-declared exceptionalism.
I recognize the goal right now is resisting Trump’s agenda, including plans to gut the Affordable Care Act, roll back environmental relegations, and ignore the science of climate change. But before embracing Indivisible’s methods, consider Frum’s advice.
“You want to scare Trump” he asks us. “Be orderly, polite, and visibly patriotic.” That communication method may appear soft, but he suggests it’s the radical opposite to being motivated by anger or desperation.
That’s how the respectful communication initiated by ReSISTERS succeeded. While other groups are being dismissed as unruly fools, they got the attention of a powerful Republican Senator. And by genuinely listening to them, Murkowski is sending Trump a message that he’s on shaky ground.
