Glenn Beck

Gingrich Obsoletes Beck

And so the torch passes from one schlock historian to the next. But the winner, at least in this case, might be the facts. In brief, Newt Gingrich went on that which remains of Beck’s show last night, to pitch his candidacy to Beck’s pre-primed, radicalized base. But Beck led off in typical fashion by accusing Gingrich of being a supporter of modern-day socialism, or at least of being in agreement with historical  “socialists” like (ahem) Teddy Roosevelt. To my chagrin, in reply, Gingrich responded by simply demolishing him. While reading, remember that Beck uses the words “socialism” and “progressivism” interchangeably, based on a sloppy historical equivalence.

GLENN: Let’s start with ‑‑ let’s start with a piece of audio here where you were talking about healthcare and you went down the progressive road with Theodore Roosevelt.

GINGRICH (RECORDING): And for government to not leave guarantees that you don’t have the ability to change, no private corporation has the purchasing power or the ability to reshape the health system, and in this sense I guess I’m a Theodore Roosevelt Republican. In fact, if I were going to characterize my ‑‑ on health where I come from, I’m a Theodore Roosevelt Republican and I believe government can lean in the regulatory leaning is okay.

GLENN: Regulation and the government scares the crap out of me and I think most Tea Party kind of leaning conservatives, and Theodore Roosevelt was the guy who started the Progressive Party. How would you characterize your relationship with the progressive ideals of Theodore Roosevelt?

GINGRICH: Well, that depends on which phase of Roosevelt you’re talking about. The 1912, he’s become a big government, centralized power advocate running an a third party candidate which, for example, Roosevelt advocated the Food and Drug Act after he was eating ‑‑ and this supposedly the story, after he was eating sausage and eggs while reading up to Sinclair’s The Jungle, which has a scene in which a man falls into a vat at the sausage factory and becomes part of the sausage. And if you go back to that era where people had ‑‑ dealing with the Chinese where the people had doctored food, they had put all sorts of junk in food, they ‑‑ you know, I as a child who lived in Europe and I always marveled at the fact that American water is drinkable virtually anywhere.

So there are minimum regulatory standards of public health and safety that are I think really important.

GLENN: Okay. So you’re a minimum regulation guy on making sure the people don’t fall into the vats of sausage?

GINGRICH: Yeah. What I’m against is the government trying to implement things because bureaucracy’s such a bad implementer, and I’m against government trying to pick winners and losers.

It’s not clear what Gingrich views as the proper place of regulation — what exactly is “pick[ing] winners and losers,” and what, aside from abolishing the Republican-initiated practice of federal bailouts, does its avoidance entail? — but here we have the most conservative of the plausible Republican nominees explaining to Glenn Beck that regulation is not a per se evil, and that the “Progressives” weren’t so bad after all. That might contribute to losing Gingrich some of his far-right backers, but this is a guy that should be able to trade on his legacy to avoid any such fears.

If the Republican Party ever decides to walk back from its apocalyptic, hyper-deregulatory mania of the past two years, this is what its start would look like. How odd to hear it from Newt Gingrich, though.

Another thing we should take from the interview is just how bad an interviewer Glenn Beck truly is. He’s fine when pouring his soul, with all of its collected absurdities, into an empty vessel (YouTube), but not with someone willing to challenge his principles on his own turf. I love it.

Why “Occupy (Take Back?) Wall Street” Might Matter, Maybe

The “Occupy Wall Street” protesters are a strange bunch. On the one hand, they’re far too few, and far too unsure of why exactly they’re there, to be taken seriously. (Locals will remember the comparably schizophrenic agenda of the “Take Back NYU” protests in 2009: those guys were hilarious.) On the other, they’re getting into a disproportionate amount of trouble, always a sign of a successful protest; pretty good at putting a useful spin on it; and when they can be troubled to state a unitary agenda, it comes off as inoffensive, educated, and classically liberal. The pervasiveness of corporate influence in America really is worth protesting, and despite the fact that there aren’t really enough of them to fill the two-block-by-two-block square between Ground Zero and Broadway (not on, but just north of Wall Street), these guys seem to be getting their share of attention, from both sides. Should we care about them?

Probably. If we’ve learned two things from the tea partiers — and I suggest that that is precisely how many things we’ve learned from them — it’s that the crazier you are, the more attention you’ll get; and numbers don’t matter if you can put on a good show. Despite the right’s nonstop attempts to fudge the numbers, Glenn Beck’s 9/12 project drew substantially fewer than the Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, but left a stronger mark on the national consciousness because the attendees took themselves seriously, for all of their obvious silliness. American politics is fundamentally about the drama of it all, and the contrast of consciously grungy hipsters (and zombies) with the tall, stately buildings of the Financial District tells a good story. I would blanche at giving the protesters the kind of official recognition Republicans have afforded the tea parties, but it might be time for elites to pick up, contextualize, and refine their message into something that could actually effect policy change. Beneath the superficial absurdity of “Occupy Wall Street,” there’s a valid undercurrent of old-style economic populism, something that’s been missing and needed since the ’80s. It’s past time for someone to tap into it, and tell the true story of corporate greed.

How Does a Conservative Fight Glenn Beck?

By carefully indulging in his insanity, apparently.

Story is, Glenn Beck views Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign as something approximating world government, or socialism, or fascism, or whatever, because someone married to someone in government giving life advice substantially equals the worst of Stalin’s purges. Mike Huckabee, who continues to struggle with obesity, disagrees. Naturally, for Beck, this middling disagreement renders Huckabee a complete enemy, worthy of the ultimate epithet.

As quoted by Politico, Mike Huckabee:

“This week Glenn Beck has taken to his radio show to attack me as a Progressive, which he has said is the same as a ‘cancer’ and a ‘Nazi,’” Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor whose battles with his own weight are well known, wrote on his HuckPAC website. “What did I do that apparently caused him to link me to a fatal disease and a form of government that murdered millions of innocent Jews?”

So, Huckabee takes issue with Beck for equating him, by the transitive property, with Nazis. But not for equating Progressives with Nazis. That’s entirely justified.

Arbitrations Do Not Work Like That! Why Florida Is Not Under the Suzerainty of Shar’ia Law

I saw this article on Glenn Beck’s news site, but I never thought it’d make it to any site even slightly more reputable. Nevertheless, here it is on Politico, a site that manages to satisfy that criterion sometimes.

Apparently, an Islamic arbitration tribunal (an a’lim) conducted an arbitration according to Islamic law. This is entirely unsurprising. The panel issued an arbitration award purporting to resolve a dispute between the elders of a local mosque but — here’s where it gets tricky — we’re not sure whether the arbitration is over. So, a Florida state court judge deciding the matter held that that specific question would be resolved according to Islamic law (pdf).

Glenn Beck, of course, summarily flipped out. And the Republican Party’s newest, fastest-growing cottage industry — “getting paid to yell about Muslims” — took it as another reason to fast-track a Florida law that would ban Islamic from any forum, even a private court dispute.

This panic, and the expected over-reaction, suffer from about as many flaws as you can imagine. First, and as a threshold matter, as Judge Nielsen took pains to indicate, religious disputes in religious organizations are generally resolved under religious law, with state and federal courts taking a prudent “hands-off” approach. There’s case law holding Christian patriarchs to canon law in resolving church disputes; why the Hell wouldn’t there be case law holding Muslim sheiks and imams to shar’ia law, in the same narrow arena?

But the problems run deeper than that. Lawyers who regularly handle the wars leading up to and the fallout following arbitrations — like yours truly — will tell you that arbitration is a creature of the parties’ creation. Courts increasingly let the arbitrators (and therefore, by proxy, the parties) decide the rules of the game, from whether the dispute is arbitrable to, in a recent decision out of the Second Circuit (pdf), whether the statute of limitations ran. When the arbitrators decide which law to apply, or limit the arbitration somehow — even if one party objects to the decision — they’re just following orders. They’re not surrendering to the applied law, or witnessing its dramatic takeover of the forum state’s court system. They’re doing their job, as the parties asked. Florida has no more surrendered to shar’ia law than New York has surrendered to FINRA. And the latter is a far more present and therefore terrifying animal, I assure you.

True, one party here is having shar’ia “forced” on them, a prospect fraught with some superficial discomfort. But the scope of the force is both incapable of generalization — under this rule, if you don’t want shar’ia law to govern your dispute, well, don’t found a mosque! — and boring for its regularity. People lose choice of law disputes all the time. Your remedy is the courts, not the media.

Finally, even if we assume that it’s a “problem” for courts to apply shar’ia law (1) in a religious dispute and (2) in an arbitration and (3) where it’s fair to assume it applies, the cure, here — a total ban on shar’ia from any court dispute — is worse than the poison. Mostly because it’s unconstitutional. For some, arbitration under shar’ia will be a benefit. Like the opposite party in this case. And the instant we deny a party access to that right, we’ve denied them something — the entitlement to arbitration under religious law — on the basis of religion.

Now I’m no big city lawyer, but that seems like it’s a problem. And I expect the religious right would agree, if they had a shred of decency, or even a superficial interest in larger principles.

Radicalizing on the Right: Collective Bargaining, as an Antitrust Violation?

Elections have consequences, we say. But exactly what consequences? To listen to the right’s increasingly radical agenda, from repealing birthright citizenship to dictating spending cuts based exclusively on hot-button social issues, you’d think no Democrat had ever won elected office, or none ever would again. Can a “historic” midterm election wipe away a decidedly more historic presidential election, even as it becomes increasingly clear that Republicans have failed to win the public’s trust, and that Democrats will retain the White House in 2012?

The Wall Street Journal thinks so, as they take aim unions, not specifically, but generally, characterizing them as a restraint on trade tantamount to a monopoly. This conclusion, while not without some superficial appeal, Congress expressly rejected in the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, a gloss on the earlier Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, not as a concession to the power of the unions — which, remember, had almost no power, after 1890! — but as a recognition of the real goal of the Sherman Act. Antitrust law clearly concerns itself not with the general problem of aggregate action, but aggregate action as it impacts customers and capitalist theory by undermining the proper functioning of the free market. Union activity does not come within that prohibition or that theory, rightly understood.

But let’s step back and appreciate the, for lack of a better word, balls on Murdoch’s Journal (mixed, as always, with hilarious hackery). They’re not hitting back at Wisconsin unions, or the Wisconsin problem, or public employee unions, or even unions generally (I revise my above commentary). They’re striking at the core of collective bargaining theory. Absent the Clayton Act’s exemption, collective bargaining — boycotts, picketing, strikes — becomes illegal. Modern conservatism would consign us again to the abyss of pre-1900 “free markets,” robber barons, Hessian strikebreakers, filled milk, all in the name of some warped conception of liberty. And this continues unless we stop it in 2012.

Grim omens aside, enjoy this Simpsons clip of Burns-brand strikebreakers (hulu).

Glenn Beck-Style Sophistry Explained, in One Link

Beck’s “news” site, TheBlaze, links from this inflammatory title:

AS HEARD ON BECK RADIO: MUSLIMS PLAN THURSDAY SHARIA LAW RALLY IN DC

Click to enlarge.

To this:

This coming Fourth of July, Muslims are planning a “Million Muslim March” in D.C. to “re-establish the feelings of brother and sisterhood among Muslim Americans” and start the “healing” process after 9/11. And while there is no indication that rally will dabble in Sharia law, a different D.C. march scheduled for Thursday boldly declares its goal of bringing Sharia law “directly to the doorsteps of the United States of America.”

Take one example of a fringe group and, by association, link to and tar all Muslims. And so a peaceful march of solidarity becomes, magically, about Shar’ia.

Why Do People Like Terrible Things?

Monday saw a devastating string of reviews of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the Bono-produced new musical based on the Spiderman comic books, with the New York Times summarizing it as follows:

“Spider-Man” is not only the most expensive musical ever to hit Broadway; it may also rank among the worst.

Ouch. And then it got mean. Nonetheless, last month, Spider-Man actually outsold Wicked, a musical that’s not just a crowd-pleaser, but actually a good show. Why? Why do people like terrible things? We posed that question last week, in different form – if Glenn Beck is so wrong, why is he so popular? — and as it turns out, the two questions have a bizarre unity. Because Glenn Beck is Spider-Man‘s biggest fan. Naturally.

A lot of this may have to do with spectacle.  Beck’s typically hyperbolic description of the show:

I’m telling you, you go buy your ticket – you buy your ticket now, if you’re thinking about coming to New York, because when this thing opens and it’s starting to run, you will not be able to get tickets to this for a year. This is one of those shows, this is the ‘Phantom’ of the 21st century. This is history of Broadway being made. I sat next to the casting director, by chance, and I said, “You, sir, are part of history.”

Is not entirely off base. In fact, the bold parts are clearly true. Spider-Man‘s theater presence dominates 42nd street — the promotional materials are huge — to the point that it dwarfs, and appears to include, nearby theaters. Case in point, the adjoining New Victory Theater has actually taken to reminding their patrons, before the show, that they are not in the right place for Spider-Man. And Spider-Man is the most extensively covered show currently playing in New York. This hype becomes self-sustaining. The show is “popular” in the literal sense of the word: it generates knowledge, opinions, and discussion. Given that, who wouldn’t want to see it? I do, and I’m fairly sure that I’ll hate every minute of it.

Modern media rewards the spectacular. Spider-Man is a spectacular failure; Beck, simply a spectacle. Merit need not enter the equation.

Republican Caucus-Goers Will Destroy America

There’s just no sugarcoating it. Either this is a very poorly built sample group, or… something.

Set aside the near-plurality that think the President is a Muslim (although they split over whether he’s “practicing” or not). There are, believe it or not, deeper problems, like the two — two voters!! — who say the President’s true “religious belief” is “liberalism,” the “most intolerant religion of all,” an assertion that is definitionally false. And the guy who’s convinced that Obama’s desire to “mak[e] [Egypt] into a republic” is incompatible with his exhortations to “democracy” (“He doesn’t know what a ‘republic’ is!”). Idiocy.

As we’ve explained before, the incompatibility of “republicanism” with “democracy”  is a view that Glenn Beck’s inculcated into his viewers, for some such reason, probably to equate the Democratic Party with some desire for the chaos of direct democracy, directly applied. I’ve even gotten comments about this site’s subtitle, which, I was told, indicates a subversive desire to build democracy in a constitutional republic like America. How dare I! Apparently the Tocqueville reference is lost on some. To set the record straight, in modern parlance, even in political science (cf. Arend-effing-Lijphart), a democratic republic may appropriately be described in shorthand as a democracy, or as a republic. “Democracy,” as a term of art meaning only direct democracy à la Athens, is archaic, but the kind of usage you’d expect from the unserious historical fanboys populating the populist right.

Anyways, the point. Panels like this will pick the next Republican nominee. I like Obama’s chances.

Has the Marketplace of Ideas Failed, or Just the Metaphor?

Andrew Sullivan (through co-bloggers) flags a question that must occur to any witness of the past two years:

Justice Holmes said a long time ago that the best test of the truth is its ability to get accepted in the marketplace of ideas. Glenn Beck has gotten very far in the marketplace of ideas. If he’s so wrong, where is the speech on the other side showing him to be wrong?

The full quote, by the way:

The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

U.S. v. Abrams, 250 U.S. 616, 630 (1919) (Holmes, J., dissenting). So why are we losing in the marketplace?

It strikes me that we have two answers to this question. The first, to concede that we’re not doing enough to push back against those who we (rightly) view as extremists, but (perhaps unwisely) ignore. The second, that some failure in the marketplace functions to distort the voices of some over others, preventing the marketplace from being able to accurately gauge and evaluate the claims of all players.

In truth, it’s probably a little from Column A, a little from Column B. True, unlike Republicans (e.g.), Democrats and the institutional left seem particularly inept at forming a coherent and consistent message, the kind capable of infinite repetition by similarly aligned operatives, until it achieves dominance in the news cycle. But if the marketplace is a perfect mediator of ideas, this strategy shouldn’t work in the first place.

Justice Holmes’ metaphor was never perfect. Critically,  it fails to account for the unusual power (and frequency of occurrence) of demagogues, and assumes an absence of meaningful transaction costs for new participants (barriers to entry). But since 1919, despite lower barriers to entry for day-to-day participants, like me and you, the barrier for meaningful entry is vastly larger. The individual market power of larger speakers suffices to exclude any competition, and relegate new ideas to the fringe. In the aggregate, such speakers may together, collusively or otherwise, frame the national narrative, to the exclusion of third-way options. Thus, Glenn Beck may scream at Keith Olbermann, but CSPAN remains unwatched, and the marketplace has failed.

Despite this failure, the marketplace metaphor allows us to  identify the problem, and the impossibility of solution. As we trust free speech to lead to truth, we trust capital markets to generate innovation and prosperity. But we long ago recognized the possibility of failure in the capital markets, and addressed it with laws preventing fraud (the Securities and Exchange Acts) and monopolization (the Sherman and Clayton Acts). The marketplace of ideas suffers from similar problems, but admits of fewer solutions. Constitutional law expressly forbids the state from policing fraud in public discourse, and from preventing monopolies of ideas, unless they separately implicate antitrust law. We must therefore rely on competition and ingenuity alone to keep the marketplace running — a risky proposition indeed, and one that justifies anger against walking, breathing market failures like Glenn Beck, a veritable Standard Oil of the mind.

Alternately, although the marketplace metaphor may guide us to useful values, it may not be a good way to evaluate instant claims to truth, because it explicitly takes the long view. The marketplace may lead to truth, but a sampling of it at any given point in time will represent an incremental step that, depending on the phase of the discourse, may be closer to truth or to error. Consider a dampening sine wave (right), like y=sin(x)/x. The equation resolves at a value infinitely close to zero (truth), but at any given point, the value of the equation, and its first derivative, may point away from zero. So too with public speech. We simply happen to find ourselves at a peak of the equation, or rather, a valley.

Glenn Beck’s Christmas Paean to the Constitution

WordPress won’t let me embed the video, and thank God; I’d rather not profane our pages, anyways. But please don’t miss this video of his, describing, four days before Christmas, the “birth of the Constitution.”

The timing and phrasing of it all suggests a not-so-subtle dog whistle to devotees of obscure quasi-historian Cleon Skousen, Beck’s epistemological inspiration, who holds the Constitution out to be a divinely inspired document enshrining Christianity (specifically, Mormonism) as the backbone of an America deliberately designed by God as the vehicle of the world’s cap-s-Salvation. It’s… creepy stuff. Naturally, in Beck and Skousen’s America, the separation of church and state becomes a necessary casualty of America’s eschatological role. And history goes out the window, too. Take Beck’s assertion that, for Thomas Jefferson, one of the prime functions of government is the “adoration” of God. Let’s go to the text:

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government.

Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?

Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Jefferson — who refused to offer a Thanksgiving prayer rather than risk setting a precedent that the state should take as a prime function the adoration of God — drew a clear line between the religious beliefs of the people, and the religious activities of its government. One could spend a lifetime policing these little infractions, committed by amateur historians like Beck and his peers, either too poorly read to notice such vital distinctions or too dominated by their agenda to care, and still come up short. I feel compelled to note this one only as an example of how brazen our opposition has become in selecting, and blowing out of context, vital elements of our shared history. This is a religious Nation, but we must carefully protect the stoic nature of our  State, as a bulwark for the protection of both men of conscience, and men of faith.