With Obama now meeting friendly crowds as he tours the country and with other local town hall meetings becoming less confrontational, it is starting to look like the Dems may be regaining their balance and stabilizing the situation.
But it would be a major strategic mistake for Democrats to minimize or dismiss the setbacks of the last few weeks as just an unavoidable speed bump in the campaign for health care reform. The decline in public support for the current Democratic attempts to design a health care reform package — and more specifically of support for Obama’s handling of the issue — must be considered troubling – especially the drop in support among political independents. Moreover, in a deeper tactical sense the Dems temporarily lost control of the health care narrative – the national debate stopped being about the major elements of the proposed reforms and became a shouting match on the opponents’ issues and terrain
The increased opposition – which was particularly notable among the active town hall protesters but also visible among a significantly wider group of Americans – was not generally a response to the actual provisions of the various proposed bills. Rather, it has been about something else. At the town hall meetings the protesters generally raised much broader objections – against “the government taking over everything”, “the systematic dismantling of this country”, “the government playing God” or “turning us into Russia” or “undermining the constitution.” All these suspicions – which were deliberately stoked by the Astroturf firms but which were sincerely expressed by the individual protesters – reflected a deeply held fear that something was being foisted on average Americans that was far more than just a new social program. Their comments charged that the Democrats health care reform plans were actually a Trojan horse for something deeply and profoundly sinister.
It is easy to dismiss this as simply irrational, but it is important for Democrats to understand how this view became politically significant.
When he took office, Obama immediately had to manage massive government intervention in both Wall Street and the Auto industry – interventions almost entirely conducted in private, closed-door negotiations – and also to create a recovery program that vastly increased the federal deficit. Opinion polls revealed, however, that people basically blamed the Republicans and accepted that the government could not avoid taking significant actions.
Conservatives first tried to create opposition to Obama by calling his measures “socialist,” but this line of attack provided relatively little traction or resonance (Several polls actually demonstrated that “socialism” was no longer an effective “scare word” , particularly among the young, and focus groups conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce revealed that for many Americans the word “capitalism” actually had very negative connotations of greed and of the powerful dominating the vulnerable)
Conservatives then switched to the term “fascism” and particularly the German, “Nazi” version of fascism. The one superficial analogy they offered for this accusation was that the major fascist countries during the 1930’s had also included extensive government intervention in industry but to liberals the accusation seemed obviously absurd because the two central features of Nazi fascism — the creed of Arian racial superiority and the ethos of glorious national military conquest — seemed so utterly and self-evidently right wing rather than left-wing ideals.
But in fact, what the conservative propagandists like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Bill O’Reilly had done was essentially to redefine the word fascism to something entirely different from its original definition. In their vocabulary it has now essentially become a synonym for “coercive liberal social engineering” or “creeping liberal totalitarianism” – it is the image of pointy-headed Harvard liberals using the coercive power of the state to impose left-wing values and behavior on average Americans

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The Gallup poll that came out Thursday has been widely described as indicating that the health care protests are “working.” This is based on the fact that 34% say the protests make them more sympathetic to the protestors’ viewpoints while only 21% say the protests make them less sympathetic.
But both Nate Silver and David Axelrod point out that this particular question really doesn’t prove much of anything – people who are already in agreement with the protesters views will naturally tend to express sympathy for demonstrations that support their views. As Silver says:

Polls of this nature, however, are notoriously slippery. If there were some protest in favor of a policy that I supported — like expanded stem-cell research — I’d probably tell a pollster that the protest had in fact made me more sympathetic to the cause, even though my mind on the issue was already 100 percent made up and was not going to be swayed. The real question, then, is how many minds are being changed on the issue. And it may not be all that many. Three relevant polls have come out on this subject in August: a Rasmussen poll found some further erosion in support for the bills pending before Congress, but a Gallup poll did not find any further decline in Obama’s approval on health care since mid-July. Nor did a CNN poll find any decline in support for the Democrats’ health package, although that poll is now about a week old.

Let’s face it, we’re all desperate to try to make use of any data that happen to come our way, but there really isn’t a lot one can deduce from this particular question.
The really interesting data in the poll comes when Gallup asks if the following behaviors during a town meeting are better described as “democracy in action” or “an abuse of democracy.”

• “making angry attacks on a health care bill and what it might do”
• “booing when members of congress make statements that the opponents disagree with”
• “Shouting down supporters when they speak in favor of a health care bill

On the first two questions Democrats and Republicans respond in predictably partisan ways – Dems calling them “abuse” while Republicans call them “democracy” Independents, however, lean strongly toward calling them “democracy in action” in the first case (55%-37%) and marginally in the second case (47%-42%).
From a fiercely partisan perspective, this might seem a disappointment, but realistically it’s entirely reasonable. I mean, come on, let’s be realistic – of course making angry attacks on a bill you disagree with is OK in a democracy, as is booing (within bounds).
But the absolutely critical fact shown in the Gallup poll is how the respondents viewed the third behavior, “Shouting down supporters when they speak in favor of a health care bill”.

59% of the American people said it was an “abuse of democracy” compared with only 33% who called it “democracy in action”
54% of independents called it an “abuse of democracy”, compared with only 38% who said it was “democracy in action”

And here’s the real eye-popper:

58% of REPUBLICANS called it an “abuse of democracy” compared to only 38% who called it “democracy in action”

In short, what this poll is showing is that the vast majority of the American people very strongly and profoundly disapprove of the “shout them down – intimidate them” type of tactics the Astroturf firms were circulating and recommending when the town halls started. In fact, it is already possible to see a subtle dialing down of the overtly” bully-boy” approach in the most recent town halls.
So for Dems the key strategic information here is that they should focus their criticism very specifically on the “shouting down” or “bullying” type of tactics and pin that strategy very specifically on the Astroturf firms.
Here’s an example of how this can be expressed:

“It is absolutely healthy and vital that ordinary Americans get the chance to express their views about health care reform – and to express those views as clearly and passionately as they wish. Staunch opponents of health care reform must be given the opportunity to make their voices heard as well as supporters.”
“But when “inside the beltway” Washington lobbying groups opposing health care reform start circulating instructions to “shout down” elected officials when they try to speak and to disrupt town hall meetings before people can express their views, that’s not OK. Those are tactics that have no place in a democracy.”
“The beltway lobbying firms should clearly and explicitly disavow these tactics and directly criticize the people who employ them – not only in a few face-saving press releases but in all of their communications with their supporters. If they don’t, the sincere grass-roots protesters should consider whether these are the kind of organizations with which they want to be associated.”.

Last week I challenged a particularly nasty commentary by David Paul Kuhn that alleged that Democrats were even nuttier than the Republicans who believe the ‘birther” narrative because many Dems believe that George W Bush had “advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks”. Here’s what I said:

There are two different ways that a survey respondent could interpret the Rasmussen question about Bush’s possible “advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks” – one of which is entirely rational and, in fact, undeniably true.
Gee whiz, come on. Doesn’t everyone still remember the warnings Bush received about the potential use of airplanes as terrorist weapons in the summer of 2001 – warnings Condi Rice admitted did not get followed up? Don’t we all remember the CIA memos saying that “something big” was in the works in September? Don’t we all remember the 9/11 Commission and Richard Clarkes’ dramatic statement that “We failed the American people”
These were not hallucinations or the product of fevered, paranoid Democratic brains. They were component elements of the undeniable fact that there were indeed significant advance warnings that a terrorist attack was in the works for the fall of 2001 – a fact that was the central subject of the 9/11 commission hearings, 10 or 15 books and hundreds of articles.
One would have to throw out every single academic study of the past 30 or 40 years about the effects of question wording on survey response not to recognize that, for many survey respondents who remembered the 9/11 Commission Report and other media coverage, the phrase “advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks” could be cognitively processed as meaning:
“The Bush administration had substantial advance knowledge from U.S. intelligence sources that a terrorist attack on the U.S. was being predicted as imminent in the fall of 2001”
Rather than interpreting the question as saying:
“The Bush Administration had specific and detailed advance knowledge about a particular group of 19 Saudi Arabian terrorists armed with box cutters and trained to fly commercial jet aircraft who planned to hijack four U.S. airliners at 9:45 in the morning on September 11th 2001 and attempt to crash two of them into the New York World Trade Center”

This week, in his blog, Brendan Nyhan offers essentially the same criticism of the Rasmussen question. As he says:

The problem, as Media Matters points out, is that the wording of the Rasmussen poll (“Did Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?”) almost surely conflates people who believe Bush intentionally allowed an attack to occur with those who think the administration was negligent in its attention to the potential threat from Al Qaeda. Even National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg conceded this point in a column published soon after the poll was released.

But then he goes on to say the following:

Another, lesser-known poll used less ambiguous wording and found similar results. A July 2006 Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll asked the following question:

There are also accusations being made following the 9/11 terrorist attack. One of these is: People in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East….

In short, using a more appropriate comparison poll, the primary conclusion stands — both party’s bases are disturbingly receptive to wild conspiracy theories.

Nyhan is clearly right that this question is better than the previous one. But – when viewed in light of the academic literature about how ordinary respondents actually cognitively process poll questions – the fact is that it is still insufficient to support his conclusion.

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The current debate between Democrats and Republicans as to whether the teabag/health care reform protests are spontaneous “grass roots” events or totally artificial creations of “Astroturf” lobbying firms is now settling down into a familiar pattern of dueling partisan op-ed page commentaries, sound-bites and press releases. It is therefore an opportune moment to consider a somewhat more nuanced version of this question — exactly how are the local protesters and the lobbying firms really related.
On the one hand, since the April 15th Tea Parties it has been obvious that there is indeed a decentralized network of thousands of local conservative activists distributed across several hundred cities around the country. The 300,000 people that Nate Silver estimated participated in Tea Party events on April 15th are a small percentage of the nation’s total population, but they are a politically significant force because of their wide local distribution. After April 15th there was never any real doubt that these local activists would be ready and willing to mobilize around any of a number of conservative political causes.
Only a minority of these activists are directly paid by lobbying firms or are long-term active volunteers in conservative organizations or the Republican Party. In this very specific and limited sense, many individual protesters can indeed be called “authentic” rather than artificial.
But to properly judge the significance of the teabag/anti-health care protesters of today, it is more instructive to compare them with the student protest movement of the 1960’s. There are actually certain major similarities – and one profound difference.
Let’s look at the student protest movement first:

• On the broadest level the “student movement” of the 1960’s was united by opposition to the war in Vietnam but beyond that it was a kaleidoscopic mixture of outlooks, lifestyles and political perspectives. The student movement included straight traditional liberal “politicos”, extreme radicals and hippy-counterculture protesters whose outlook ranged from highly political to largely non-political. The issues that motivated the participants in the student movement — aside from Vietnam — included civil rights, the environment, legalization of drugs, control over the university itself as well as a vast range of other liberal to radical social and political concerns.
• What gave the “student movement” the powerful sense of solidarity and community that it undeniably had was a distinct social and cultural outlook and a sensibility rooted in the environment and culture of the university and the satellite culture of bookstores, coffee houses, music venues, co-op’s and so on that operated around it. There was a profound sense of shared cultural identity as students, youth and rebels against the dominant culture – a clear perception of “us versus “them”
• The student movement and culture created its own information channels – underground newspapers, alternative magazines and “comix” as well as a universally shared, deeply political music – both folk and rock — and an intense appreciation of the few kindred spirits like the Smothers Brothers who existed in the mainstream media.
• The student movement faced constant and deep divisions over tactics – divisions that evolved over the decade – first between peaceful demonstrations versus sit-ins and then between disruptive protests and more radical actions like “shutting down” the universities and the weathermen’s “days of rage”

In these four particular respects, the current teabag/health care protesters do indeed exhibit certain distinct similarities.

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Let the sick, the weak and the destitute be the first to arrive:
Let America see them enter the meeting hall
Walking on crutches
Rolling wheelchairs
Leaning on canes
Pushing walkers
Holding IV bottles
Carrying tanks of oxygen
Let the sick, the weak and the destitute be the first to arrive:
Let America see them
Holding high in the air medical bills they cannot afford to pay
Holding high insurance claims that were denied
Holding high pictures of family members who died…without insurance, and without decent care
Let the sick, the weak and the destitute be the first to arrive:
Let America see them.
Ask for the right to sit in the front …because the issue is ultimately about them.
Ask for the right to speak….without catcalls, booing or interruption.
Ask to be shown the respect and dignity they deserve ….but have been denied.
Ask if they need to shout to make their voices heard…. or if America is ready to listen.
Let the sick, the weak and the destitute be the first to arrive at the meetings on health care
Let America see them…..and then decide what kind of country America is and what kind of country it wants to be.

A David Paul Kuhn column over at RealClearPolitics offers the thesis – stated in his title – that not just Republicans, but “Both Parties have their Fanatics.” While recognizing that substantial numbers of Republicans indeed believe against all evidence that Obama was not born in the U.S. , Kuhn argues that Democrats are equally –and in fact even more — delusional than the Republicans because a spring 2007 Rasmussen poll showed that 35% of Dems believed that “George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.”
On this basis Kuhn unleashes a veritable fountain of pejorative adjectives, even dusting off Richard Hofstadter to promote his “Dems are even more nutty and fanatical than Republicans” equivalency thesis.
He says:

“The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” was title of historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous Sixties essay. “I call it the paranoid style,” [Hofstadter] wrote, because “no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

Kuhn continues:

Most conspiracy theorists’ fidelity is to theory, not truth. They tend to uphold a belief despite the facts. The possible, however improbable, trumps the logical. And it’s futile to attempt to disprove their belief. It’s like debating with those who believe the world is flat.

Having thus set the stage with these hefty portions of hyperbole and Hofstadter, Kuhn then says the following:

The disparate treatment of the two conspiracy theories is unmistakable. More Democrats fell into the “truther” camp than Republicans fall into the “birther” camp. But the mainstream media has covered the “birther” poll far more vigorously. It’s easy to understand, unless one is invested in the opposing camp, why these incongruities irk the political right.

Wow. Take that, you damn Democratic nutcakes. Democrats are not only nuttier than Republicans, but the liberal media, as usual, is giving them a free pass.
This is dramatic, to be sure, but unfortunately there’s a huge and basic fallacy in the argument.

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The sight of major conservative commentators ranging from Bill O’Reilly to Ann Coulter and top Republican officials Like Michael Steele directly attacking the “Birther” narrative — that Obama was actually born in Kenya and is thus ineligible to be president — marks an extraordinary moment in recent political history. For the first time leading conservatives and Republicans are explicitly attacking a widespread grass-roots extremist narrative.
In the past, this has always been absolutely unacceptable. Among movement conservatives there is even a specific slogan that explicitly rejects ever splitting the conservative movement with attacks on extremist views – “There are no enemies on the right.”
Just consider the following:

• In the Clinton years, videotapes, pamphlets and books by conservative publishers accused Clinton not only of infidelity and theft, but of murdering his business partner and smuggling drugs for the Colombian cartels. Democrats were accused of planning a UN invasion of the U.S. and mass roundups of patriotic Americans. Neither the leading conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh nor the Republican political leaders like Newt Gingrich ever publically challenged any of these clinically delusional accusations.
• During the 2004 elections leading conservatives and the Republican Party not only refused to disavow the patently dishonest “swift boat” attacks on the military service and military records of candidate John Kerry and Georgia senator Max Cleland, but tacitly endorsed them.
• During the 2008 campaign, slanders against Obama – as being a “Muslim”, “terrorist sympathizer” or even the “anti-Christ” were widely circulated in a parallel underground internet based campaign. These slanders became so virulent that John McCain himself was finally moved to deny them during one memorable campaign rally. Sarah Palin, however, immediately picked up the gauntlet and, in her rallies, continued encouraging the expression of “tin-foil hat” views.
• After the election, the “Muslim” and “terrorist” accusations faded into the background as they were replaced by swirling charges of impending “socialism”, “communism” , “fascism” or all three at the same time — culminating in the Teabag protests on April 15th.

Why then, with this consistent history of allowing extreme right-wing myths to go unchallenged have major conservative commentators and top Republicans suddenly begun to challenge the “Birther” narrative? What’s so special about this particular view?
The answer — speaking metaphorically — is that the creature the official conservative/Republican movement has nurtured all these years has broken out of the laboratory and is beginning to ravish the countryside.
The first indication of a serious problem was the catcalls and booing of Republican politicians during the teabag protests. But the issue suddenly became critical in recent weeks as opinion polls began to suggest that support for Obama’s health care plan was starting to decline among moderate voters. This raised the possibility that Republicans might have a chance to derail Obama’s key initiative, inflicting a major political setback on his entire agenda.
To have a chance to achieve this major objective, Republicans now desperately want to avoid being identified with the birth certificate issue because the notion is overwhelmingly rejected by moderates. In fact, to most moderates, any Republican politician who flirts with this notion looks like an irresponsible panderer to irrational extremists – hardly someone to be trusted with reforming health care.
Hence the sudden desperation in official conservative and Republican circles to drive the creature they have created back into the lab where it can be restrained. The problem, however — as every horror movie since the classic 1931 version of Frankenstein depicts — is that the creature never actually does get recaptured. With the uncontrollable nature of the internet and the desperate struggle for ratings among conservative TV commentators, there are now simply too many independent forces providing support for “tin-foil-hat” extremist views for either the Republican Party or the official conservative commentators to regain control.
All one has to do is remember the movies. The lab-coated mad scientist who creates the creature always ends up getting thrown off the windmill, blown up in the laboratory explosion or gobbled up by the flesh-eating zombies he was in the process of creating as his personal army. Republicans are starting to feel an uncomfortable resemblance to those movie characters these days when they come face to face with their “tin-foil-hat” conservative constituents.
Hey, I wonder if George Romero is available to take a meeting…….

The continuing Republican criticisms of Obama as being “weak” and “apologizing to everybody” instead of being “strong” and “resolute” present these kinds of dichotomies as if they were abstract moral options between which Obama – and America – were completely free to choose. But the reality is that behind the abstract political rhetoric of terms like “strength” and “weakness” there is always the more practical level of military reality and the military strategies that can be based on it.
All of George Bush’s goals, threats, promises, language and rhetoric regarding the Arab-Persian world, for example, were not simply expressions of certain abstract moral values in which he just happened to believe but were firmly rooted in a very specific military analysis and strategy – a strategy that had been developed in the 1990s after the first invasion of Iraq. The basic premise of this strategy was that with the extraordinary military technology America had developed – known under the general rubric of the “Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)” — America – in alliance with Israel — could militarily dominate the Middle East.
Looking at maps after the 1991 invasion of Iraq and considering the weak defense Saddam had mounted (US tanks had come within 70 miles of Bagdad, after all) these strategists concluded that by invading Iraq, converting it into a pro-US ally and setting up major military bases there we could obtain a central and decisive strategic position in the region. An invasion and pacification of Iraq would allow us to establish major American air, armor and infantry forces directly on Iran’s border and simultaneously threaten Syria and Jordan from the rear. This would severely weaken the main lines of communication and supply from Iran to the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the occupied territories. In a domino effect, Israel would then find both Hezbollah and Hamas much more isolated and easier to control. Taken together, this would result in a combined US-Israeli military dominance of the region so powerful that it would allow us to then profoundly intimidate Iran and any other anti-US forces.
Two major corollaries followed from this basic military strategy. First, America had no real need for European or international allies (other than as window dressing) and second, America did not need to seek popular support in Muslim world. Military force by itself would be sufficient to achieve all our objectives. A massive network of U.S. air and land force bases in Iraq would serve as a permanent staging area for the fast and overwhelming projection of US military power and influence across the region while the dramatic success of the political and economic system we would install in Iraq would inspire Muslims to follow the U.S. example.
9/11 provided the opportunity to put this strategy into effect. From that time all of the rhetorical and political stances Bush took – and which Republicans continue to advocate today – were based on this underlying military analysis and military strategy.
Unfortunately, as all Americans are now painfully aware, from a purely military point of view, this strategy simply did not work.

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Zackary Roth has an important piece up on the TPM site that notes the profoundly disturbing way many news networks competed for interviews with Mark Sanford by promising to go easy on him and let him spin the “hiking” story the way he wanted. E-mails sent to Sanford’s press people included the following:

• David Gregory: “coming on Meet the Press allows you to frame the conversation as you really want to… You know [Sanford] will get a fair shake from me and coming on Meet the Press puts all of this to rest.”
• Producer for the MSNBC Morning Joe show: “Of course the Governor has an open invite to a friendly place here at Morning Joe, if he would like to speak out.”
• Producer for MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer “…Mark could spin this favorably if he talks it up as the outdoors man in the woods etc. For all we know he’s contemplating the last year of his term and thinking through his priorities before he goes on his family vacation.”
• Anchor for WIS-TV – “Off the record, I think this whole thing is ridiculous. Sounds like slow news day stuff.”

This promise of favorable treatment as an enticement to get a political figure to appear on a particular show is disturbing enough in the case of a governor like Sanford. But its implications are even more – there’s no other word for it – sinister — in the case of two other figures who every TV show is going to be absolutely desperate to snare – Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney.
Palin, obviously, will be desperate to limit her exposure to easy “softball” interviews and it’s all too easy to imagine the sleazy promises many shows will make to get her – “Don’t worry, no Cokie Roberts type-stuff”, “we’ll ask you the right kinds of questions ” etc. Romney also will want to avoid all manner of challenges about his changing positions over the years. Obviously, hard-right conservatives like Palin know that they can get a free ride on a FOX show, but so does the audience. It’s much more disturbing to imagine a competition in laxity among all the other networks as well.
Let’s say it plainly: the competition for these two political figures is going to be a vile, no-holds barred race to see which interviewer can flush every speck of his or her journalistic integrity down the toilet — a championship face-off in the World Olympics of media pandering.
But what can Democrats do about this?
Here are three quick ideas:

1. Democrats should insist that TV or other interview shows reveal the terms of any deal they offer Palin or Romney in order for them to appear. If the shows refuse to disclose this, they should be called on it. In fact, under federal communications law, undisclosed “sweetheart” interview deals might even qualify as kickbacks – they are far more valuable to the subjects than cash.
2. The moment any TV show announces an upcoming interview with Palin or Romney, Democratic magazines and websites should immediately begin proposing questions that the interviewer should ask. The Republicans made a big and effective stink claiming that a network show featuring Obama on health care would be slanted before it even aired. Democrats should make no less of an advance stink about likely kid-gloves treatment of Palin or Romney.
3. Desirable Democratic interview subjects should make it clear that they will avoid interviewers who give Palin or Romney kid-gloves treatment and will seek out honest journalists instead.

George Carlin used to have a comedy routine about the TV commercials that promoted new drugs by saying “remember to ask your doctor to prescribe XYZ”. Carlin commented: “When you name the drugs you want your doctor to prescribe, he’s not a doctor any more, he’s a pusher.”
In the same way, when the producer of a network news show promises a political guest control over the questions and formats of their appearance in order to get them to appear on a particular show, he or she is not a news professional any longer, but the journalistic equivalent of a streetwalker.

Dictatorships are often caught off guard by sudden explosions of popular discontent. It takes them several days to determine that the protests are so deep and widespread that they cannot be controlled by normal means.
Once they make this determination, however, they often make a strategic decision to strike back as savagely as possible. It is at this point that massacres often occur and hundreds of people are beaten, jailed or simply disappear. Protest movements of ordinary people are by their nature almost never able to directly resist the full power of the organized violence soldiers or elite riot police can unleash against them.
After the violent repression pauses and the streets temporarily become quiet, the regime follows up with a mixture of carrots and sticks. The ordinary protesters are told that they are “forgiven,” that they were mislead by a small group of subversives, that perhaps – perhaps – some unfortunate mistakes had been made and that some small and symbolic concessions will be offered. At the same time, a massive wave of brutal, covert and systematic arrests are made in an attempt to decapitate the leadership of the protests.
The streets are quiet and strangely empty. No-one is sure what will come next.
At this moment the regime has one vast and overwhelming objective — to re-establish a surface appearance of normality. Things must be quiet. The leader has to give a speech reasserting his legitimacy, and reassuring the population that the institutions of the country are intact – that things have gone back to normal.
This is a critical moment in every struggle against dictatorship. If the regime is successful, a surface calm may indeed return. A sullen, grumbling undercurrent of discontent always remains, but life goes back to what it was.
But if the protesters return to the streets to defy the authorities once again, on the other hand, an awesome and profound psychic barrier collapses. The protesters demonstrate to both themselves and to the authorities that their spirit cannot be broken, that they will never again be the same people they were before. From that moment on uniformed men with guns may still control the streets, but the legitimacy of the regime has received a mortal blow.
In moments of quiet reflection the protesters know success may take months or years of patient organizing and persistent struggle, but each of them senses that in some profound way the tide has fundamentally shifted to their side.
The regime will never be the same again — because they will never be the same again.
That is what happened yesterday in Iran.