The Long, Lame Tradition of Reactionary Astroturfing

by Emily Gertz

categories: Astroturf, Imagining the Future, Politics, Popcult, Security Theatre

Published August 18, 2009 @ 06:47AM PT

Political reactionaries and some sectors of the health care industry have allied against health care reform. A collaboration with very similar characteristics will, according to reports, soon be turning out crowds at fake grassroots rallies to stop energy policy reform and action on global warming, as well.

For an entertaining preview of what's coming down the pike for climate and energy, consider this flashback to 1961. In this ad, "Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine," the Gipper encourages citizens to write their legislators in opposition to the creation of Medicare:

The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally di vided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. . .

All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.

... [If Medicare is enacted], one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

"During the 1960s, conservatives regularly claimed that Medicare would destroy the doctor-patient relationship, interject government into every-day decisions and undermine personal freedoms," writes Wonkroom. The media and politics accountability blog created this video to demonstrate how Sarah Palin evoked these simply-not-truths from Reagan during the presidential campaign last fall.

Reactionaries are echoing them now, to try and derail health care reform.

When it came to imagining the future, Ronald Reagan and his conservative allies were zero for zero on accuracy. Medicare was enacted. Free market capitalism survived and flourished (and crashed, and flourished, and crashed, and...). World socialism has near-totally disintegrated, while Western democracy has, with some bruising, continued steadily to this very day.

The predictions, as well as the effort to evoke fear in the public, are not new -- and they're not improved with age.