Why Has Glenn Beck Captured The Imagination Of Idiot America?

Teabagger-in-chief

In his NY Times column yesterday Frank Rich got to the heart of American's distrust of the Modern Republican Party. In going over Rep. Joe Wilson's recent screaming episode during the Joint Session, he points out that Wilson defended himself by saying his outburst was "spontaneous," which troubles Rich: "It’s not good for the country that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It gives permission to crazy people."

Giving permission to crazy people actually seems to be the GOP's #1 grassroots strategy. Even if Republican Party officials can't stir up the enraged masses themselves-- part of the rage is aimed at them-- they have surrogates who do it every single day, from O'Reilly, Hannity, Coulter, Limbaugh, Dobbs and Savage to Time Magazine covergirl Glenn Beck. Rich corrects the impression many have that Beck is just a lower rent imitation of Limbaugh. "He is something different. That’s why he is gaining on his antecedents-- and gaining traction in the country’s angrier precincts."

Though Beck’s daily Fox News show is in the sleepy slot of 5 p.m., his ratings are increasingly neck and neck with the prime-time tag team of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and he has beaten them in the prized 25-to-54 demographic. It’s not just because he is younger (45). This self-described “rodeo clown,” who wells up with tears for dramatic effect, doesn’t come across as cranky or pompous, like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. A fervent Mormon convert and proselytizer, he is untainted by association with the old Dobson-Robertson-Reed religious right. Unlike Limbaugh, he bonds with his fallible listeners by openly and repeatedly owning up to his own mistakes, including his history of drug and alcohol abuse. Unlike Hannity, he is not a Republican apparatchik.

Beck has notoriously defamed Obama as a “racist,” but the race card is just one in his deck. His ideology, if it can be called that, mixes idolatrous Ayn Rand libertarianism with bumper-sticker slogans about “freedom,” self-help homilies and lunatic conspiracy theories. (He fanned Internet rumors that FEMA was establishing concentration camps before tardily beating a retreat.) It’s the same crazy-quilt cosmology that could be found in last weekend’s Washington protest, where the marchers variously called Obama a fascist, a communist and a socialist, likening him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot. They may not know that some of these libels are mutually exclusive. But what they do know is that they need a scapegoat for what ails them, and there is no one handier than a liberal, all-powerful president (who just happens to be black).

Beck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator-- with appropriately overheated capital letters-- in his best-selling book portraying himself as a latter-day Tom Paine, “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.” Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse.

Rich's column is called "Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice A Day" and it is Beck's parroting of Dick Durbin's frustrated cry that bankers shouldn't write the agenda for the United States Senate and his honing in on Durbin's sad admission that Wall Street owns the Senate, that differentiates him from the Greed & Selfishness GOP hate talkers like O'Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh.

“Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union)... Unlike liberal critics of capitalist inequities, of course, Beck and his claque are driven by an over-the-top detestation of government. Washington is always the enemy, stealing their hard-earned money to redistribute it to the undeserving and shiftless poor (some of whom just happen to be immigrants or black). Though there is nothing Obama can do to stop racists from being racist, he could help stanch the economic piece of this by demonstrating how a reformed government can at times actually make Americans’ lives better. That’s what F.D.R. did, and that’s the promise Obama made, swaying some Republicans and even some racists, during the campaign.

Too many Americans are impatiently waiting for results. It’s hard to argue that the stimulus package reviled by big government-loathers is a success when unemployment continues to rise and most Americans feel none of the incipient “recovery” spotted by Ben Bernanke. The potential dividends to be gained at the end of the protracted health care debate also remain, for now, an abstraction to many who have lost and are continuing to lose their jobs, their savings and their homes.

Last month Public Policy Polling asked Arkansas voters whose vision for the future of America was superior, Obama's or Limbaugh's. 55% picked Limbaugh. I hope they include Beck next time. Or Paris Hilton. Idiot America, as Charles Pierce has elucidated in his brilliant book of the same name, is a many splendored thing. And Glenn Beck is hardly the first huckstering crackpot Time put, straight-faced, on their front cover. Even sillier were Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye.

[S]uppliers of "Christian" products, up to and including the various churches themselves, have created a self-contained and profitable universe in which almost everything that was worthwhile about Christianity's contact with the secular world has been cheapened and fashioned into tawdry souvenirs for the suckers. Sacred music has traded Gregorian chant, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Thomas Dorsey, and Mahalia Jacksonfor "worship anthems" sung by stubby white guys who look like they flunked the audition for Counting Crows. A literature that once produced C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton now sells millions of copies of the Left Behind series, written by Jerry Jenkins and the noisome political preacher Tim LaHaye, in which the end times occur and the Antichrist arrives in the person of one Nicolae Carpathia, so named, perhaps, because the authors didn't think of calling him "Evil J. Transylvania." Carpathia comes to power preaching one-world government based in the United Nations, which, at least, proves that Jenkins and LaHaye have rooted their profitable Apocalypse in the American conspiratorial tradition...

Anyway, he has a good run of it until Jesus comes back to earth and does a lot of bloody slaying and dismembering in and around the village of Megiddo, which has had enough trouble. (Jesus, it seems, had developed a talent for disemboweling people in the years since he left town.) The plot is preposterous.

Preposterous enough to sell millions of copies-- a literary equivalent of the new Zombieland film-- and to have gotten them, like Beck last week, on the cover of Time. And Pierce reminds us that Catholics were once in the business of selling off their saints piecemeal, "and sometimes the finger you bought turned out to be a pig's knuckle, but the vendors of holy relics were absolute pikers compared with those who traffic in the notion of an embattled elect surrounded by a scornful world. Because nothing sells in the modern Christian marketplace like the notion that Christians are beset on all sides by powerful forces desperately in need of a good disemboweling, it was inevitable that religious marketing would flow into the country's politics," where it has been sold as a product and where who better to do the disemboweling (until Jesus comes back, anyway) than a weepy, ex-addict Mormon?