Glenn Beck

It was more Oprah than Coughlin at last weekend’s big jamboree on the national mall. Those expecting a macro-scale outburst of the usual Tea Party frothing were disappointed to discover that the rally was, in David Weigel’s words, "about as angry as a Teletubbies episode." About as angry, and only slightly more political. The keynote speaker was the cuddly, pious, group hug version of Glenn Beck. He wasn’t there to talk to you about the New Black Panther Party, but about your own spiritual health.

It was a canny move on Beck’s part, and not just because it made liberals predicting a white riot on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial look like fools. It was also the final step in his transformation from a political commentator who does some other shticks on the side to arbiter of all that matters in life. Want to get mad about politics? Watch the TV show! Need an education? Go to Beck University! Looking to be titillated? He has the beach read for you! And for those who want a good, cathartic cry, there’s his Christmas special.  With the "Restore Honor" rally, he came out as an amateur theologian as well. If you have a single emotional or intellectual need, Beck promises to fill it.

As if to underscore the point, this week saw the launch of the Blaze, a Huffington Post-style news and opinion aggregator. Now Beck’s fans can get their window into the political world exclusively from a Beck-approved outfit, and then tune in at night to hear Glenn Beck’s thoughts on what Glenn Beck said earlier that day. This is epistemic closure taken to new, dizzying extremes: It offers people the opportunity to voluntarily enter into an arrangement in which their political views, religious attitude, and even fundamental life philosophy are constructed and mediated by a single pseudo-messianic figure.

Viewed in that context, Beck’s fevered rants about "liberation theology" and Park51 head Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf’s alleged extremist ties take on a new meaning. That is because Rauf, the Rev. James Cone (the founder of black liberation theology), and most of the other suspiciously dark-skinned boogeymen in Beck’s rogues’ gallery are his opposites. These are men who explicitly advocate for minority representation and ideological pluralism. They directly confront and challenge homogeneity -- both ideological homogeneity and other kinds. Whether you agree with their views or not, you conquer new intellectual territory and expand your own wisdom simply by giving them a fair hearing.

But doing so requires hard work, deep concentration and a willingness to question even your most deeply held values. Actively, voluntarily undermining your own beliefs and assumptions is a scary, lonely, even painful thing, especially when there are no easy ways out once the process has started, and potentially no end in sight. Our ability to do this is what makes us human, but so is our ability to be terrified by it.

Beck understands this terror. It is what he makes his livelihood off of. What he offers to his customers is a way to avoid that terror and the other pitfalls of introspection and critical thought. He already has all the answers. No need to look for any of them yourself.

That basic pitch is of a species offered up by hucksters of all kinds: political parties, radical religious sects, self-help books and so on. What makes Beck so remarkable -- and the influence he wields so unsettling -- is how he combines all of these things into a single all-encompassing product.

Claiming divine inspiration, the former disc jockey promised miracles. "You're going to see the spirit of God unleashed," he told his radio audience. Even the weather signaled the Lord's approval. "Dare I say it, God is smiling?" Afterward, Beck showed video of a flock of Canada geese honking their way over the Tidal Mall. "God's flyover," he called it, and "a miracle."

Beck then appeared on (where else?) "Fox News Sunday," to pronounce President Obama an adept of "liberation theology," which he decreed "a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ." Beck himself is a Mormon.

This may have puzzled Fox News viewers who think the president's a Muslim, but let's not sweat the small stuff. Beck could call Obama a Zoroastrian or a space alien and his fans wouldn't know the difference.

To the Associated Press, the portents were more mundane, but nevertheless significant. "If Democrats had doubts about the voter unrest that threatens to rob them of their majority in Congress," Phillip Elliott's account began, "they needed only look from the Capitol this weekend to the opposite end of the National Mall. ... Neither Democrats nor Republicans can afford to ignore the antiestablishment fervor displayed Saturday during Beck's rally."

On the left, some of my own more excitable correspondents saw the KKK. "Exchange the white sheets for the black robe regiment," wrote one fellow with reference to Beck's (basically imaginary) army of evangelical Founding Fathers. Another observer at Firedoglake.com made the obligatory Nazi comparison, writing of "Beckstallnacht," as in "Kristallnacht" -- anti-Jewish pogroms in 1938.

Even the estimable David Niewart saw something ominous. "Given the content of Beck's rally," he wrote, "something significant did happen Saturday, and it will affect our discourse going forward: Beck officially and publicly married the tea party movement to the Religious Right. ... That is a deeply disturbing development."

So what else is new? The Tea Party conterminous with the religious right? Why next they'll be saying the Moral Majority's allied to the Christian Coalition!

Let's take them in order. First, regarding the 2010 congressional elections, if even 10 percent of the estimated 100,000 or so attending Beck's shindig had voted for President Obama to begin with, it might have political significance.

But as that's highly unlikely, all that the gathering tells us is something we already knew. An awful lot of rural and small-town white Protestants feel estranged and a little paranoid, especially given bad economic times.

Partly it's what psychiatrists call projection: Will they now be treated as second-class citizens? It's also partly a reflection of the fact that "rednecks" are basically the only American ethnic group it's still OK to lampoon. These are Beck's people. But they were always going to vote GOP, because they always have.

Second, I'll start heeding warnings about "brown shirts" when mobs of unemployed young men start smashing windows and burning cars. Crowds of retirees singing patriotic hymns and praying are no more objectionable than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and no real threat to anybody.

Fox News' average audience is 65. Because he's on in the afternoon, Beck's demographic probably trends older. Fifteen years ago, the old-timers attending his politicized prayer meeting were all agog about the Rev. Jerry Falwell's lurid video "The Clinton Chronicles," portraying a Democratic president and his wife as drug smugglers and murderers.

(In a filmed interview, I once asked Falwell if the commandment against false witness was less important than the one forbidding adultery. Rather to his credit, he said they were the same. Of course, what else could he say?)

More recently, the same cohort made Tim LaHaye's awful "End Times" novels a huge bestseller. There's always been a big audience in the United States for conspiracy theories and religious melodrama. The apocalyptic theology of the hard-shell denominations where hucksters like Beck and his costar Sarah Palin have their biggest following basically demands it. It's Satan worship one year, secular humanism the next. The latest bogeyman is Islamic fundamentalist Shariah law, an almost purely theoretical threat in the USA.

Which actually constitutes progress. Back in Mencken's day the enemies were Catholics and Jews.

What does a middle-aged white man with delusions of grandeur do next? You start a news website. Never mind that you work for a news company that has its own site. You are Glenn Beck, and you now control the information that your people consume. Everyone has the same (incomplete) knowledge, which you will then reinforce through your talk show and general public wankery.

The Blaze launched mere days after the D.C. rally last weekend, and reviews began coming in immediately. The Christian Science Monitor went so far as to ask, "Why?" Which is a ticket to madness when directed at a guy like Beck.

Meanwhile, reports are still coming in about the "Honor" rally -- Beck disputes the media's crowd estimates, CBS News examines Beck now compared to a year ago, and the Washington Post tries to explain why Obama just doesn't get little Glenn. Religious questions about the Mormon Beck have been raised in the days since the D.C. rally as well. On Faith considers the possibility that a) God is speaking through the pundit (shiver), b) Beck will spur the return of American civil religion or c) that Glenn Beck has no clue who his God is. And Southern Baptists want nothing to do with him.

Check out some of the better counter-rally signs on display last weekend, in case you were worried it was one big right-wing self-love-festival:

 

So what will Glenn and Sarah be talking about at this upcoming event? No one knows. Glenn Beck mentioned on his radio program today that he would be speaking in Alaska, with Sarah Palin, "a week from Saturday." He didn't mention that a week from Saturday is 9/11, because Glenn Beck forgot about 9/11.

Oh, also! Next month is the Iowa Republican Party's annual fall fundraiser. And Sarah Palin will be the keynote speaker! She was invited to do this in 2009, but she never even bothered to get back to them. This year, apparently, something is different.

Either Sarah Palin is running for president, or she and Glenn Beck are just embarking on another of the money-making schemes that they are both deeply devoted to. Almost certainly the latter.

I was surprised, but I shouldn't have been, by Obama's kind words for his predecessor, George W. Bush. I didn't expect Obama to excoriate the neocon chickenhawks who lied us into war, but I wasn't entirely prepared for his praising the president who got us into this mess. But he did:

It's well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one could doubt President Bush's support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security. As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it.

Wouldn't it be lovely if Bush repaid Obama's stretching the truth a bit there by speaking out to Republicans who falsely believe Obama is Muslim, that he wasn't born here, or to the 52 percent of Bush's party who say our president supports the imposition of Islamic law in this country. (Oh, and the former president might also join some of his colleagues in supporting the right of New York Muslims to build the Park51 community center near ground zero.) I won't hold my breath; Democratic statesmanship and generosity is almost always a one-way street.

Meanwhile, other news media picked up on what I observed Saturday: the incongruity of Glenn Beck inviting virulently anti-Catholic Rev. John Hagee to address the spectacular "Restoring Honor" tribute to himself that Beck staged on Saturday. (I talked about it on MSNBC's "Hardball," video below.) Hagee, it's well known, has called Catholicism "the great whore," and suggested Hitler was Catholic and the pope was responsible for the Holocaust. John McCain had to renounce Hagee's endorsement after his anti-Catholic bile was widely publicized. So why was he at Beck's rally?

I have no idea. Beck was raised Catholic, before he converted to Mormonism. He claims his new religious efforts are open to everyone, but he raised Catholic hackles back in March when he told his radio listeners they should leave any church that preached "social justice." The Catholic Church has of course preached social justice (admittedly along with less progressive ideas) since Jesus was a boy (I've always wanted to use that term literally), and officially, with papal encyclicals going back to Rerum Novarum in 1891, supporting the rights of workers to form unions, the need for just wages and the importance of government intervening to advance the common good (while backing private property rights as well). Even the comparatively conservative Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 released "Caritas in Veritate," a surprisingly progressive encyclical backing economic justice, environmental protection, global disarmament and equitable international development. Liberal Catholics saw Beck's "leave your church" rant as an attack on Catholicism. So I think the Hagee choice suggests Beck isn't terribly focused on welcoming Catholics into his big right-wing evangelical tent.

Finally, on the day President Obama announced the end of combat operations in Iraq, I saw Paul Krugman reminding us that our "serious" political class has a new Saddam Hussein: deficits. All "serious" political writers must treat deficits with as much deference as they treated Bush claims about weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. It was a disturbing thought on a sad day.  I wrote yesterday about my frustration with President Obama adopting a Republican anti-deficit frame for his economic pitch as we head into midterm elections that look bad for Democrats. I see nothing more encouraging on the political horizon today.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader John Boehner is already measuring drapes in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office (or rather ordering his putting green), and he told Sean Hannity he won't have a formal GOP platform for the 2010 elections until mid-September. But clearly Boehner thinks he doesn't need one. His own economic proposals -- mainly extending all the Bush tax cuts and repealing healthcare reform -- would add another $4 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to analysts at the New Democratic Network. He doesn't want that getting out to actual voters any time soon. I talked about that on MSNBC's "The Ed Show," and that video's here too.

First "Hardball":

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Here's "The Ed Show":

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