No question about it, the press release pronounced: Our health care system is “broken.” To fix it, an enlightened reformer, President Barack Obama, is doing his best to fulfill a solemn promise of Change: a dramatic overhaul to provide guaranteed, irrevocable health insurance coverage for every person in America (while cutting costs!) to lift the United States—“the only developed nation in the world which does not offer some type of viable health care solution to its citizens”—from its lowly thirty-seventh-place showing in the World Health Organization’s survey of 191 countries. The president is being undone, however, by “intimidation” tactics and the “politics of fear,” practiced by forces opposed to basic social justice.

Saddest of all in this spectacle, the release elaborated, is what has happened to that cherished backbone of participatory democracy: the “congressional town-hall meeting.” Historically, this communal coming together has purportedly been “a forum … for civil discourse between elected officials and their constituents.” In recent times, though, such assemblages have been hijacked—“turned into mob style mêlées where blatantly false accusations and fear-inducing tactics have been used to attempt to coerce elected officials.” Our beleaguered representatives have been compared to Nazis. Dazed seniors have been duped “into believing that ‘death-panels’ are part of a real plan.” In fact, at one “presidential town-hall”—a communal gathering of even richer pedigree in the Age of Obama—dissenters were allegedly “brandishing firearms.”

Alas, these “tactics” are not confined to the hot-button issue of health care “reform.” They have spread,