Town Hall Backlash: Real? Good?

Not for the first time, a Republican member of Congress has had a nasty reception at a town hall meeting, the latest being Mike Flood of Nebraska.

I know little about Flood, but he's MAGA, at least according to The New Republic, which reports:

Flood faced a barrage of excoriating questions during the jam-packed town hall, in which voters demanded to understand why their local lawmaker would vote in favor of the president's tax bill and his immigration policies, accusing him of supporting a "fascist machine." At one point, the crowd broke into a furious chant: "Tax the rich."

"My question is fiscal. With 450 million FEMA dollars being reallocated to open Alligator Alcatraz, and 600 million taxpayer FEMA dollars being used to now open more concentration camps, and ICE burning through 8.4 million dollars a day to illegally detain people -- how much does it cost for fascism?" one woman pressed Flood as the crowd behind her cheered. "How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?"

Tax the rich?

At first glance, chants like this, and some of the questions, lend credence to an explanation former Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) would (obviously) like us to dismiss:

Some Republicans will use what happened to Flood to rationalize their decision not to engage directly with their voters. They'll say the events would be flooded with people from outside their district, or they'll write off anyone with complaints as members of the opposite party. I think they're going to make a mistake by doing that.

It may well be the case that McCaskill is wrong, but either or both of two other things can be true simultaneously.

(1) Independents and traditional Republicans are indeed there in numbers and voicing frustration.

(2) Even the lefty-sounding questions could be from impatient MAGA types. Consider that today's "post-liberal" MAGA Republicans admire and form common cause with the likes of Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Note further that the President himself uses radical left tactics and assumes leftist positions, and does leftist-looking things. On the grassroots level, a favorite MAGA song sounds like a socialist anthem.

MAGA is, after all, a populist movement, and free market ideas are not exactly known or popular these days: Central planning is. This is especially true among those most angry with "the left."

"Real"-ness aside, these protests could be a good sign or a bad one. That someone is unhappy with current conditions matters much less than why, and what he wants done about it.

-- CAV