Will Glenn Beck’s Common NonSense Change Our Nation?
A fascinating expose’ by author Alexander Zaitchik on Mr. Beck and some of his rather sordid history. This provides some important background and insight for better understanding the source of some of this demagoguery and how to challenge it.
America has this long tradition of twisted, odd, widely beloved and yet darkly dangerous right-wing cultural impresarios that pop up out of our landscape like cultural tornadoes, leaving huge swaths of derangement and destruction in their wake. Aimee Semple McPherson. Father Coughlin. Joe McCarthy. Once in a while, when the cultural cross-currents intersect just so, they rise on the whirlwind, gather huge followings, and lead their followers on a furious high-velocity turn that blows across the countryside in desperate pursuit of a utopia only they can see. These maunderings are typically mercifully short and usually end in disaster, for both the people who started the storm as well as those who got swept away in it. And all is forgotten—until the next time.
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One of the consistent threads running throughout Beck’s career has been this rather vicious mean streak that has changed over the years. It now sort of masquerades under a veneer of political argument, but at its base it’s the same kind of gut spleen that’s constantly looking for new avenues of expression…
Probably the most famous example of this mean streak that I was able to track down is the time he called up a competing DJ’s wife on the air and proceeded to mock her for having a miscarriage the previous week. She had just come back from the hospital. He did this live on the radio, which is of course illegal—he didn’t notify her that she was on the radio—and then there’s the moral question involved. He was the bad boy of an already bad-boy genre. Not many people liked him.
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OK, this is a long question, so bear with me. One of the things that’s got progressive right-wing watchers most concerned is Beck’s real skill in co-opting the language and symbols of American patriotism. The right has done this systematically for 40 years—but Beck is a genius at it.
I’m thinking specifically of the way he’s hijacked Tom Paine, who was easily the most progressive of the Founders. Paine was the first one to propose social security and welfare. The 19th century elites found him so threatening that they wrote him right out of history. Most Americans didn’t even know who Tom Paine was until FDR and Eleanor put him back in the pantheon, for reasons of their own.
Another example is how he’s publicized Jonah Goldberg’s revisionist idea that the Nazis were somehow left-wing welfare statists. Can you speak to this?
AZ: What makes that founder appropriation possible is relative ignorance on the part of his fan base. The only books on the subject they read are these religious psuedo-histories that Beck recommends to them. Also: Beck himself has only recently started to learn about this stuff, and he’s really not a scholar on early American history, to put it mildly. So it’s an easy sort of touchstone for him to seem like he’s representing the deepest and most consistent traditions in American history.
Of course, if you went back to exactly what the founders and many of their fellow revolutionaries believed—Paine being perhaps the most glaring example—it’s just absurd that he would claim that mantle. As you mention, Paine was profoundly rationalist—he despised Churches and preachers, especially money-minded charlatans like Beck. But it’s Beck’s use of Ben Franklin, my own favorite Founder, that drives me the most nuts. [Beck] has an enormous picture of Ben Franklin on his TV set a lot, and also in his radio studio. Of course, Ben Franklin was a giant of the Enlightenment: this is not a guy who’d have had any patience for Glenn Beck had they been contemporaries. And Beck himself would not have idealized Ben Franklin. For one, Franklin embodied the scientific spirit, and Beck hates science. While Franklin was making the case for lightning rods, Beck would have been running around arguing in favor of continuing to ring Church bells during storms to appease an Angry Christian God, which is what they did in Colonial Philadelphia before Franklin.
And you can just go down the line. Thomas Jefferson, of course, believed in a pretty radical egalitarian view of society. His belief in limited government wasn’t a belief in limited government for its own sake, but limited government for the sake of a society of equal citizens, in which there weren’t massive concentrations of economic wealth like the kind we see today—which Beck not only glorifies, but openly worships. There’s few things that’ll quiet Glenn Beck faster than a kind word from or the presence of a multi-billionaire industrialist.
As for the argument that the modern welfare state inexorably leads to some kind of Nazi state, or that the two even exist near each other on the same continuum, it’s hard even to know where to begin. The modern welfare states in the U.S. and Europe were built up in large part as a direct response to Nazism, as a way to preempt something like it from happening again. The idea that the welfare state leads inevitably to totalitarianism has been proven wrong. Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom, was a very specific warning against the British welfare state, which turned out just fine. That whole argument, which Beck makes in a clown costume, has been completely discredited by history.