Glenn Beck

Conservative Solutions to the “Ground Zero Mosque”

Quick post for a lazy day. Seriously, is anyone at work?

Here’s Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck arguing for the largest exercise of eminent domain in American history: the government should “take” all of Lower Manhattan, and make it a battlefield memorial! While this would legitimize part of the Bush administration’s conception of the extent of war powers — the homeland is a battlefield for purposes of detention, but not when construing bans on torture — I thought national parks were a hallmark of socialism?

Imaginary Assassins

I missed this earlier, but another of Glenn Beck’s Saturday stunts rips from the classic annals of demagoguery:

Making a show of fear for one’s own safety dramatically conjures the specter of enemies, even if they don’t actually exist. This was, again, a stunt used to great effect by Augustus after he assumed sole mastery of Rome. When minting new Senators, to underscore the still-fresh memory of his adopted father’s death at the Body’s hands, and (by some interpretations) keep anger at the Senate alive, thus deferring the Republic’s restoration, the princeps conspicuously wore mail under his tunic, carried a sword, and was followed by bodyguards. See Suetonius, De Vita Caesarium, “Divi Augustus,” XXXV. That the demure father of his fatherland could still fear for his safety, after all the good he’d done, made the point better than any actual assassin could.

Similarly, Beck’s decision to flaunt his bulletproof vest speaks to paranoia and persecution but omits any reasonable basis to believe it, or a credible threat, exists. The classier — but riskier move — is to trust. One searches history in vain for any record of Obama, or any American president, wearing a bulletproof vest.  Rumors that 44 wore a suit laced with bulletproof cloth are just that, and underscore rather than refute the point.

New Glenn Beck Site Already Undermining Religious Tolerance

In its inaugural front page, Beck’s new site, “The Blaze,” includes an article criticizing Imam Rauf, the man behind the “Ground Zero mosque,” for equating Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Naturally, this is a mischaracterization — Rauf’s point is on the underlying unity of the three Abrahamic faiths, a critical (and ancient) concept in Islamic theology, rather than any formal equality — but we’ve reached an extraordinary point in interfaith dialogue when one side of the political spectrum can bristle at attempts to build bridges.

Historically, the notion that Christians and Jews shared core beliefs with Muslims, entitling them to a modicum of respect under the Caliphate, provided the doctrinal basis for the dhimma contract, a proto-theory of religious liberty that made medieval Islam more progressive (on its best days) than its European peers. The contract survives the fall of the Caliphate today, in mainstream Islam, as a religious justification of American ideas of pluralism and religious freedom. On the other hand, its rejection by Beck puts him and his followers somewhere to the right of the Caliph Umar, and ought to prompt the question of which religion — Islam, or the aggressively hegemonic Christianity pushed by Beck — is actually more inimical to American values.

Salvation by Works?

NRO’s “The Corner” doubles-down on the narrative that Obama is all talk — “hope, change” — without any exhortation to the hard work it actually takes to make things better:

And there’s another key difference: Glenn Beck is not just trying to make you feel good.

On Saturday, he talked about some hard stuff — sacrifice and sweat and truth. Barack Obama’s message has been: Put me in office and we’ll pass things that make everything better. The reality betrays that, of course, but that’s been a key message. Glenn Beck isn’t presenting himself as the answer. He’s rallying to people to politics only as a limited answer to the problems before us. This non-candidate’s civics message is a rally to work harder and a caution about snake-oil salesmen in Washington.

This is provably false. Recall his victory speech:

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there.

I promise you, we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem.

But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.

This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.

It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.

In fact, Obama’s pushed the idea of “sacrifice” and community service so hard, that the National Review, indeed the very blog on which Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote, likened it to slavery, or forced labor camps, one, two, three, four times. At least. Missing from this new distortion is any attempt to cure the cognitive dissonance. Just an expectation that the reader has, by now, forgotten.

“Clothe Yourselves in the Morals of the Toga”

After the fall of Rome — but before Justinian could sweep away her people and her infrastructure — Theoderic the Ostrogoth used this line, and reference to Roman foundational values generally, to prop up his reign as an invader-king. It strains credulity to think the heroes of Rome’s past would’ve easily suborned a foreign presence, or a king, much less the combination of the two. Nevertheless, Theoderic’s over-the-top affiliation with Rome’s past — to the point of adopting a Roman nomen (Flāvius Theodericus), minting solidi in the old fashion, etc. — indicates that he believed, rationally, that defining himself by foundational values would help solidify his hold over Gothic Rome.

Theoderic understood what today’s tea part movement seems to understand, too: foundational myths are abnormally squishy, potent, and steady-state, or regressive. One is rarely asked to honor his forbears by disturbing the status quo. For our example, look no farther than Glenn Beck’s conscious attempt to co-opt the history of America’s founding at this past weekend’s “Restoring Honor” rally.

The remarkable line that defines his overarching thesis is this:

We’ve got to start at the beginning and look at the patterns [in early history]… the first thing they did was pray together.

This is probably true, actually. But while the Founders built a culture permeated by God, they built a government in which He had no official place. Jefferson, exemplifying the Founders’ views towards the blending of church and state, refused to offer prayers ex cathedra for fear that future generations would read his example as a mandate. These men may have invoked divine favor in their ventures, by praying together, but they did not invoke it to write their laws. This is not a trivial distinction.

But it’s one that Beck can easily elide, without drawing too much criticism, because of the traits that make founding myths unique. Due to their importance, the events surrounding them are abnormally well attested. This same importance gives rise to a need to mythologize. Particulars are created and destroyed in the collective memory, for their ability to add to, or detract from, a compelling narrative, one that supports the State.

The result, naturally, is prismatic. Depending on how deep you want to look — only superficially, at the story that emerged, or to the details, first those emphasized, then those discarded — you can create a different story, one that supports your reading of the history. Here, Beck emphasizes particular points from the cultural history of the era, but omits the background and depth that give them meaning. You might as well photograph a shadow.

We — Democrats, liberals, non-theocrats, what have you — are quick to blame the right, and usurpers like Beck, for their acts of historical theft. But we should be quicker to offer our own version of events. In our quest to build a better world — one where gays can marry, where Muslims aren’t blamed for the crimes of terrorists who share their faith in name only, etc. – too often, we succumb to the temptation to treat history as an enemy. Because our forbears enslaved, discriminated and excluded, what can they possibly teach us? But this avoidance accepts as true the right’s narrow premise, that the Founders gave us a static nation. To the contrary, our founding story, unique in human history, is meant to challenge us to build a better future, rather than comfort us with memories of a better past.

We need to be more honest and forceful about what we believe and why. We trust in a “living Constitution,” not because some law professors dreamed it up as a way to legitimize gay rights, but because the document is explicitly a charter of expanding liberty. The liberal account of the founding supports our modern causes, makes a good story, and has the virtue of being a truer account. If we are honest with ourselves, Theoderic’s trick shouldn’t work here. But it will, if we let it.

Glenn Beck’s Roman Maneuver

After scheduling a pro-theocracy rally on the date & site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech, Glenn Beck provides the following:

Press already comparing my speech to MLK. What? I’m not MLK. most of speech will be off bullet points. The rest ad-lib. MLK genius.Me? Not.

The trick — disclaiming an elder’s mantle, or a high title, just as you set yourself up to assume it — is deft, and ancient. Suetonius describes how Augustus repeatedly denied all titles, taking only that of “first citizen,” though he was a king in all but name:

When the people did their best to force the dictatorship upon him, he knelt down, threw off his toga from his shoulders and with bare breast begged them not to insist.

Suetonius, De Vita Caesarium, “Divi Augustus,” LII; cf. id. at LVIII.

While Glenn Beck has surely come upon this ruse by instinct rather than by learning, the result is the same. This man is scripted to high heaven.

The New Racism

In two of the Republican Party’s latest projects, both mainstreamed from the fringe — anger over the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and suspicion over whether the fact of one’s birth can suffice to make him “American” — some common threads emerge. First, both are conspicuously racial. Second, both are racist, in that they proceed from a generalization about an identity, to a specific, negative conclusion about each member.

But neither qualify as “racism,” at least in the traditional sense. The old racism looked for subjects: inferior persons and groups, who don’t deserve to participate in polite society. New racism, at least in these instances, contains no such assumption of white superiority. Quite the opposite: it looks for enemies. For example, in the “Ground Zero Mosque” narrative, Muslims aren’t doddering fools. They’re evil geniuses, exploiting our naive notions of religious freedom to crown an existential victory over The West. And then they’ll use the resulting apparatus to launch terror attacks, and otherwise subvert American culture. Genius!

Compared with old racism, in its governing principles, new racism seems to proceed from a place of less strength. Part of this we can read as a triumph. Equal protection law conclusively bars the majority from making theories of racial inferiority manifest in societal rules; if we no longer build or credit those theories, the law (combined with societal growth) has presumably generated some positive feedback.

However, neither this feedback, nor the intervening years since the civil rights movement, have done anything to quiet the underlying tensions. Equalizing the races has just flattened the conflict. The dangerous notion  of cultural incompatibility persists, and simply finds its voice anew in the consequence of the flattening. If all are equal, the Other can’t be lessened; but he can be feared. Glenn Beck can’t say Obama’s race makes him inferior, but he can ask whether it means he hates white America. It’s the same story, just from a different perspective.

As of yet, we lack the vocabulary to deal with this new racism. Consequentially, we let it slide. Glenn Beck is still on the air. More and more Republicans rush to condemn the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and in so doing, acquire a campaign issue without having to actually think about policy (call this a side benefit). Sooner or later, though, someone will have to address it.

Diversity: How the Other Half Lives

Ross Douthat — who isn’t a moderate common-sense conservative but plays one in the NYT opinion pages — yesterday penned his latest overwrought defense of his party’s fringe, this time hoping to mainstream the right’s worrying rediscovery of reverse racism.

For those just joining us, one of the right’s dominant narratives in the time since Obama’s accession is that a black man’s success necessarily implies the end of white dominance, with all the horrors that attend such an inversion. The idea that black and white America exist in some sort of zero-sum relationship sometimes finds more toned-down iterations, or spawns spin-off theories — like the idea that a minority Supreme Court justice can’t understand white America — but in all, the theme, that minority victory means white defeat, is the same.

This species of thought isn’t as noxious as classical racism, but we should realize, the difference is one of degree, and learned subtlety. It’s still racism, and it’s still wrong. Per Ta-Nehisi Coates, “the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping–positioning the bigot as the actual victim.” Any narrative that puts race at odds with race is inimical to a happy, just society, no matter how much you dress it up.

Douthat’s column takes this new, old racism — the medium favored by your Becks and Buchanans — and tries to equate it with an affirmative action system gone awry, favoring poor blacks and minorities over poor whites. But they’re not the same. Beck and Buchanan find their force in anger and emotion; Douthat’s assertions about the problems of modern affirmative action, if true, are based on facts. The latter is legitimate. The former is race-baiting, and can’t be so bootstrapped into respectability.

Further, Douthat’s claims about affirmative action are interesting for what they imply: not that affirmative action is wrong (as we used to hear), but that it’s not working equitably. To identify affirmative action’s problem, Douthat has to accept its central conceit: that experiential diversity, using race as a proxy, might be beneficial to academia. The remedy for Douthat’s wrong is not an end to affirmative action, but true evenhandedness in its implementation. That, and that alone, is something we should probably get behind.

So, what we’re left with is a column that makes some interesting points, but strains to leverage them into an ex ante rationalization of pure polemic from the movement’s lesser (but more popular) lights. In other words, classic Douthat. And a metonym for post-2008 conservatism as a whole: a clever, well-intentioned minority chained to a dying movement, struggling to lend its credibility to the frothing majority. And failing.

The “Free Market”: Confusing the Means with the End

The question of whether (and how) we should trust industry is a uniquely American debate. It’s also one that history resolved for us, about a century back.

The answer (are you surprised to know?) is, not overly. Given free reign, and a bit of economic power, our own countrymen see no fault in crushing striking employees with private armies, locking child workers in burning buildings, and the list goes on, just to push the profit margin a little higher.

Yet a few short weeks ago, the American right looked at the BP oil spill, and asked not how to heal the damaged land or its inhabitants, but, how Obama could justify his “cruelty” to BP. The free market will demand that BP remedy the damage it’s caused; why get in its way?

Because the free market doesn’t work that way (and hasn’t, here: BP is already backtracking on promised payments). Why do we suddenly think it does, again?

The resurgence of this debate, via the tea parties, can be attributed to the fact that the Progressive Era has become a victim of its own success. Though Glenn Beck et al hope to obscure this background, the Progressive Era, and the sweeping reforms it created, weren’t a primary movement, and didn’t spring ex nihilo from the mind of Woodrow Wilson — the socialist supervillain in Beck’s counterfactual narrative. They were reactions to real problems in the world, caused by unrestrained corporatism (remember The Jungle?). And they worked. You don’t see as many blatant abuses of corporate power these days; well, at least not of the same order (securities fraud is the new filled milk).

Because the Progressive Era worked, we now have the liberty to question whether it was necessary. But you don’t tear down a wall just because you can’t see the barbarians anymore. And you don’t question the thinking that led you to build it in the first place.

In fact it might be time to go back to the origins of the debate. On that note, consider this: the free market is not its own good, and the word “free” doesn’t automatically make the following noun a quintessential American value. The free market is a tool for the vindication of other values — and a good, even a vital one. But we value the free market to the extent that it creates valuable competition and progress, and no farther, and err when we start propping it up for its own sake. No man does (or should) have the “freedom” to sell a defective product and hope to get away with it — whether the product be medicine, or a share in a collateralized debt obligation — and it’s not patriotic to fight for that imagined right.

If we hope to extricate ourselves from our current predicament, we need to take this lesson to heart, end the quasi-religious belief that “The Free Market” is the answer to every question, and stop framing the debate over every regulation as an absolutist choice between “freedom” and “socialism.” That might mean getting past the Republican Party, and what it’s become.

Tea Parties: Popular, But Not Populist

Matthew Continetti, whom, until recently, I held in almost unfathomably low esteem, deserves praise, and is getting it, for parsing the tea party movement for us, and substantially dispensing with its most undesirable elements. But let’s look deeper.

In one long article, largely bereft of the flim-flam that’s characterized his other popular columns, Continetti manages to isolate two distinct strains of tea party “thought,” and utterly demolish Glenn Beck’s, which he properly identifies as the lesser of the two. Samples:

[Beck's equivalence between liberals and fascists] is nonsense. Whatever you think of Theodore Roosevelt, he was not Lenin. Woodrow Wilson was not Stalin. [. . . .]

For Beck, conspiracy theories are not aberrations. They are central to his worldview. They are the natural consequence of assuming that the world hangs by a thread, and that everyone is out to get you.

In substantiating these allegations, Continetti takes the liberal, Salon-level critique of Glenn Beck’s philosophy — that its indebtedness to obscure Mormon ideologue Cleon Skousen proves its identity with the John Birch Society and other whackjobs — and mainstreams it. Good. In the process, Continetti even gets away with a few zingers.

But he still makes the critical error of equating the tea party sentiment, whatever it is, with some form of conservative populism, powered by an abiding respect for America’s founding mythology. It’s neither, and these are errors we shouldn’t overlook just because the latter half of the article scores some overdue points against bigotry. For Continetti, the tea party movement:

[D]raws its strength from the American founding. It celebrates the Founders and their ideas. Tea Party members devour books about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel Adams. They carry pocket copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. They believe strongly in the Bill of Rights, especially in the Tenth Amendment’s admonition that all powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved for the states and the people. Their rhetoric invokes the constitutional vision of a limited government with enumerated powers.

Well, kind of. Tea party rhetoric invokes a “constitutional vision,” but not the one that carried the day at the Convention, as the focus on the Tenth Amendment evidences. By setting that amendment over the rest of the document, and especially critical passages like the Necessary & Proper Clause, tea party members effectively disregard all of the history that followed after the Constitutional Convention, even some that followed within a matter of decades, thus recasting rather than honoring the delicate balance set by the Founders. As surely as Theoderic the Goth’s famous exhortation that the conquered Romans “clothe themselves with the morals of the toga” facilitated the usurpation rather than the reinstatement of Roman rule, so tea partiers’ usage of the vocabulary of the Founding indicates an awareness of, but not necessarily a respect for, its ideas. Those are not the same things. One is subversive, the other reverent; one can coast on the endless repetition of a few phrases (“We the People!”), while the other requires actual study, maybe even an “elitist” degree here or there.

Further, there’s nothing “populist” about Rick Santelli, whom Continetti hopes to pass off as the moderate, even-tempered foil to Beck’s dangerously unbalanced side of the movement. But Santelli’s famous anti-bailout harangue rebuts any claim to moderation, and despite Contenetti’s best efforts, doesn’t really fit into a populist mold. God bless him, though, he tries!

The topic may have been economic policy, but Santelli really was making a moral argument. For him, the housing plan rewarded bad behavior. It changed the rules so people could remain in homes that they shouldn’t have been able to purchase in the first place. The responsible taxpayer’s earned wealth was being diverted to bail out the irresponsible. Government modification of interest rates was a band-aid that didn’t address the underlying problem. “You can go down to minus 2 percent [interest],” Santelli said. “They can’t afford the house.” This, in Santelli’s view, was the textbook definition of moral hazard.

In Santelli’s opinion, American elites had neglected the people surrounding him, the commodities traders who made up “a pretty good statistical cross-section of America, the silent majority.” The silent majority felt separated from the democratic process. It was tired of seeing the government redistribute income to individuals who did not deserve it. If the people had the power to shape policy, Santelli implied, things would be different. “How about this, president and new administration,” Santelli said: “Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum, to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages…”

This is popul-ar, in that it channels a rough, angry, mob-like anger, but it’s not popul-ist, and the passing reference to “elites” doesn’t somehow work the necessary transformation. Santelli and the tea partiers look at the financial crisis and see irresponsibility, not by corporate America, not by Goldman Sachs and Magnetar, but by you and me. We lived beyond our means, and now we deserve to reap the whirlwind, but instead, good, salt-of-the-earth television anchors (?) like Santelli foot the bill for our recovery, thanks to Obama’s “socialist” policies. This a very Calvinist way of looking at things. It also makes good storytelling, and may even be right (that’s quite collateral to the matter at hand), but it’s the antithesis of populism. The very minute you look for enemies below rather than above you, the populist mantle, at least as worn by Jackson and Bryant, slips from your shoulders.

It seems to me that the tea party movement hopes to use populism as an excuse to rely only on “common sense” and pocket Constitutions in policymaking. This was Santinelli’s point, and it’s routinely Beck’s and Palin’s too. But that’s feel-good demagoguery, not populism, and showy pretension, not a genuine interest in the Founders’ legacy. Until the tea parties outgrow both instincts, they won’t deserve our respect. But if they do outgrow both, will there be anything left of them?