Masked Vigilante

Masked Vigilante

I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great Democracy, but its betrayer, and does more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of right than the words of her statesman or the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the trenches can do to make suffering peoples believe her to be their savior.

– Woodrow Wilson, "A Statement to the American People," July 26, 1918

When elite institutions – a cable television network or a medical corporation, for instance – intentionally incite extra-legal or illegal mob action and even violence, what should we call it? And what should be done about it?

This is, without question, what FOX News is doing, mobilizing some sad and ill-informed viewers to attend and disrupt the summer health care forums of Democrats. The disgraced health care fraudster Rick Scott, a guy protecting his storefront quack clinics behind a fake grassroots group, "Conservatives for Patients’ Rights," is doing the same thing. And Scott’s bragging about it. The national Republican Party is helping.

This is Corporate Vigilantism. It’s different than corporations’ long established practice of hiring private corporate armies and police (Pinkerton; Blackwater) to murder union members or rape those bothersome to a company’s bottom line. And, while some of the steam seems to be going out of this fake movement, it sets a terrible and dangerous precedent. The vigilante sponsors must be called to account.

Here’s how a famous 1974 paper, "An Analysis of Establishment Violence" defined "vigilantism":

"It consists of acts or threats of coercion in violation of the formal boundaries of an established sociopolitical order which, however, are intended by the violators to defend that order from some form of subversion."

Vigilantism is all about preserving the status quo, and it’s more likely to erupt in a time of declining resources, even if the blossoming vigilantes current expectations are being met. You don’t have to buy a shotgun or a noose to be a vigilante. I think "threats" and "coercion" are key words in the above definition, and they certainly fit the activities of the anti-healthcare reform vigilantes.

And notice the ugly paradox. Vigilantes violate the moral and legal foundations of a community in order to protect those moral and legal foundations. Now, this is not the motivation of the corporate backers of this new vigilantism. They simply want to make more money off the death and suffering of Americans who can’t afford adequate health care or insurance. But these corporations are mobilizing roving mobs of vigilantes to hide behind, and these misguided Americans, who have been scared witless by corporate lies, do believe they are defending something dear and precious to them.

That precious something might be the supremacy of whites threatened by a non-white president. It might be privileged access to health care or insurance. It might just be the conviction that everything Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh says is true and patriotic and worth acting upon.

I attended U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett’s health care town hall on Saturday. There were vigilantes present, though self-described insurance company executives circulated among them. Doggett did a good job, but there was something of the unreal to the noontime gathering. Maybe it was the 100-degree heat.

There were 150 or so people gathered in the street outside the CommunityCare Rundberg Health Center in near northeast Austin. A healthy majority were Doggett backers and supporters of reform. Maybe there were 40 protestors. There was a childhood health screening underway, inside and outside the facility. That was one of the peculiar things: wide-eyed children and their parents, waiting for health care, watching sometimes heated and abstract arguments about health care.

And the arguments were only "sometimes" and even less-often heated. It was like the vigil- was disappearing from the -antes.

These vigilantes were, for the most part, 50-plus-year-old white men. Their many life grievances were etched in their faces. But, as Cynthia Kouril wrote at FDL yesterday, some steam has gone out of this fake movement. What was left in the Doggett event were just hot and sweaty people standing in the August heat in the middle of the one of the worst droughts in Texas history.

The sponsors forgot to bring water, so some friends and I bought cases of bottled water at a nearby store and fanned out through the crowd, handing out water to health care reformers and vigilantes alike. I even gave a bottle to Sen. John Cornyn, who walked by me on the way to his car.

That was another odd thing. Cornyn, the Republican junior senator from Texas, crashed Doggett’s party. But, near as I could tell, he stayed hidden indoors, talked to a couple of reporters, and left before Doggett arrived. Can we say, not senatorial?

I listened to some of the arguments among the attendees. There were simply no arguments to refute from the vigilantes. It was weird. They booed, they shouted, they got red in the face, they mumbled knowingly to one another. Life has been unfair to them, I guess. So they’ve come out to make sure it’s unfair to everyone else.

Despite their ineffectiveness, the vigilantes’ corporate backers need to be called out for what is extraordinarily anti-democratic and unpatriotic behavior. As Woodrow Wilson said of his era’s vigilantes, they are betrayers of Democracy.

It is no small thing to encourage violence – by direct recommendation or implication – in our shared political sphere. For corporations to engage in such behavior simply to make another buck takes national betrayal to a whole other level. It can’t get any more un-American than that. 

Related posts:

  1. Corporate Supremacy and the Rape of a Human Girl
  2. Why You Might Never Get Quality Affordable Health Insurance: The Dangerous Lack of Robust Risk Adjustment
  3. Come Saturday Morning: Right-Wing Corporate Lies about Water
  4. Lloyd Doggett Takes the Pledge — 11 Down, 29 to Go
  5. David Brooks Weeps/Shills for America’s Tortured Corporate Titans