"America today begins to turn back to God," Glenn Beck said during the "Restoring Honor" rally on the National Mall on August 28, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Features » January 31, 2011
Glenn Beck’s American Ark
The ubiquitous Fox News host offers followers an old-time apocalyptic vision
Beck has become a preacher, fashioning a faith that merges politics and religion. It is a faith that draws on and re-enacts the nation’s most enduring religious tradition. And he is its messiah.
We sit in the dim light of the theater, waiting for the full measure of entertainment and enlightenment the $18 ticket entitles us to. The cost is about double that of other movies, but we have been promised a plan to restore “trust, truth, and treasure” to the homeland. How can you put a price tag on that?
After the final preview fades, across the screen flashes a list of the ways that American government is broken. A pregnant silence follows, then the question: “Had enough yet?”
Enter Glenn Beck, our host for the evening, dressed in a purple sweater, jeans and Chuck Taylors. Beck is a former alcoholic and addict who was driven to the brink of suicide under the ministrations of “Dr. Jack Daniels” before sobering up and finding religion (Mormonism) in the late 1990s. Now a hero to Red America as the host of an early evening show on Fox News, Beck has promised to uncork some hard truths for our edification. But for now he just lets the love wash over him, mugs for the cameras, and grins.
This special December screening is the video companion to Broke, Beck’s October 2010 book, which will sell about 1 million copies if past sales figures are any guide. The movie is a two-hour affair, performed live in Pittsburgh and relayed via satellite to theaters in every major American city. It all adds up not just to a big pile of money–Beck made an estimated $23 million in 2009–but a sphere of influence among the substantial number of Republicans who are inclined toward Tea Party-ish enthusiasms and activism. In a recent poll of Republican Party activists, Beck was named the GOP’s second-favorite personality behind Rush Limbaugh.
Beck’s prop this evening is a deep-blue vintage Mustang in mint condition sitting on the left side of the stage. He explains that it is symbolic of the U.S. Constitution as it was originally drafted, before the nation put some miles on it and started “tinkering” with it. “The Founders gave us the perfect engine,” says Beck. Everything will be fine if we just restore its original condition.
What this means in practice is never clear. Beck avoids questions about slavery and voting rights for women and minorities in the 1780s. He mostly talks about personal virtue and empowerment, and rebuilding the nation’s faltering character.
“They” need you to believe you’re powerless to change things, Beck says. “They” signifies some combination of the federal government; the mainstream media, embodied by the New York Times; educational institutions; liberal-leaning religious institutions; and so-called experts, especially scientific experts associated with all of the same.
Beck returns to the theme of deficits again and again, which is curious because there is no connection between deficit spending and the Constitution. After all, borrowed money helped build the nation and some of the Founders certainly did support deficit spending. But what the Constitution signifies for Beck and his followers isn’t a set of specific laws or principles that should govern the nation. It is more like a code of virtue that should regulate individual conduct. The code’s highest values are freedom and personal responsibility. Government’s only legitimate function is to protect freedom. Everything else is left to the individual. What deficit spending does, from this point of view, is wear away at the code of virtue passed down by the Constitution. It makes us all debtors unable to fulfill our obligations.
Broke gets rolling. Beck brings up charts comparing our Medicare and Medicaid spending with the entire budgets of other nations. He talks about the fiscal crises past and present wreaking havoc in Europe. He warns about hyperinflation, citing the case of Weimar Germany, where people walked around with bundles of worthless cash in wheelbarrows. Experts can’t solve the problem, says Beck; it’s they who got us into this mess. “We’ve got to decide! We’ve got to be the greatest generation.”
“No chance!” snorts the man in the row in front of me, shaking his head. He’s the Loud Talker in the audience. Though he mostly agrees with Beck, he hates the idea that there might be hope.
His mood presumably lightens as the message turns darker, more apocalyptic. “I haven’t wanted to be the one to bring this message,” says Beck, teary-eyed and choking on his words. “It’s crazy to think the things I’ve said the past few years. But now they’re happening.” The nation has been subverted from within. “They” corrupted everything, with malice aforethought. “The rain is coming,” Beck says. “It’s time to build an ark.”
The Loud Talker is impressed. “He does massive amounts of research,” he says to his companion, who registers my pen and paper while glancing back. “We should be taking notes.”
When I was a kid, each summer my family piled into our Chevy and drove to my grandparents’ farm in northeastern Missouri. They weren’t farmers, but they bought the property–about 500 acres, a barn and a small house–and moved there in the early 1970s, when my grandfather retired from his job at a John Deere factory in Ottumwa, Iowa. The nearest town was several miles away.
Only a few years ago, on the way to my grandfather’s funeral, did I ask why they had pulled up roots and spent several years of retirement isolated from everyone and everything they had known. (They eventually did move back to Iowa.) It turns out they were preparing for the invasion of the American homeland by Soviet forces. All through the ’50s and ’60s, they had been reading books and pamphlets published by doomsayers, most endorsed by or associated with the John Birch Society. So the middle of nowhere seemed a good place to ride out the coming Communist storm. I thought about that farm as Beck choked out his words about the coming rain, the building of an ark.
One interpretation of Beck–whose early professional life was spent as a radio “shock jock” using vulgar humor to offend and entertain commuter audiences–sees him as an entertainer still playing a role. But things are more interesting, and more ominous, than that.
Beck has become a preacher. Turn down the sound and he is indistinguishable from the televised megachurch evangelists who hammer away at sin day and night. The relentless pacing of the stage, punctuated with pregnant pauses and abrupt stops; the impish “we know something they don’t know” grins; the fierce earnestness; the odd and inscrutable gazing into the distance; the weeping and wailing for the nation’s soul.
Beck has fashioned a faith that merges politics and religion–and he is its messiah. It is a faith that draws on and re-enacts the nation’s most enduring religious tradition: decrying a cancer within the body politic and calling for redemption and a return to wholeness. Think of witches, slavery, Catholics, Jews and blacks. Think of the John Birch Society and godless Communists.
What has replaced witches and slavery and minorities and Communism is the American state. Not the America that exists in Beck’s imagination, but “establishment” America, represented by the federal government’s bloated bureaucratic agencies, addiction to spending and secular humanism. “Those with the spiritual armor will save the republic,” Beck cries out near the end of Broke.
Of course, this is all an act: an act of faith. Faith is a conviction that goes beyond the available evidence and becomes true through the process of believing. Beck has constructed a story in which America is at war against itself–the “real” America against a usurper state. It’s the founders and their true descendants who believe in freedom versus the progressives–from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama–who believe in the enslavement of individuals and the ever-increasing power of the state.
A century of progressivism–which is to say, treason–brought us to this point. Now, the battle is on.
With the fate of humanity’s last best hope, America, hanging in the balance, this is a powerful story. For a large percentage of the conservative movement and the GOP, it is also a true story.
“Kill me. Jail me. Hate me,” Beck thunders. “My convictions are the only thing that matter.” “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall,” Bob Dylan once sang, in a very different political context. Now Glenn Beck says it’s raining and he’s building an ark. Brace yourself–it looks to be a rough ride.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Theo Anderson, an In These Times staff writer, is writing a book about the historical and contemporary influence of pragmatism on American politics. He has a Ph.D. in American history from Yale University and teaches history and literature seminars at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
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Reader Comments
Of all the weird and frightening thing that have happened since Obama became president, absolutely the weirdest is Obama’s pretense of studying and learning from President Reagan. Reagan was absolutely alone in recognizing that the Soviet Union was corrupt, inefficient, and verging on bankruptcy and collapse. No one in the State Department, in the Intelligence Services, in the military, no economist, certainly no Democrats, and no one overseas recognized what was going on before their very eyes. Reagan alone saw, understood, and acted to bring down the Soviet Union, over the doubts and objections of friends and foes alike.
So, is Obama studying Reagan to understand the futility of Marxist economics? Ummm, no. Obama is studying Reagan to learn the art of compromise in order to better his (admittedly lousy) performance in accomplishing Marxist goals. The signature characteristics of all Marxist states are corrupt institutions and inefficient operations as we have abundantly witnessed in Obama’s first two years. Obama needs lessons from somebody who has actually transformed the world both domestically and internationally in order to accomplish his Marxist goals.
So now we have Glenn Beck, a somewhat goofy but exacting researcher and a knowledgeable and dynamic spokesman against the follies of the Obama Administration. Theo Anderson criticizes Beck with no understanding of what Beck is saying, leading me to believe that Anderson’s doctorate may be of the affirmative action type, just like Obama’s law degree.
If Anderson is not AA and as dumb as a turnip, he knows exactly what Beck is talking about, that is, the Constitution of the United States of America which Democrats are trying desperately to subvert by making it mean whatever they want it to mean.
And for the record, the status of women and slaves was established in prehistory. The lot of women and slaves improved only with liberal (classical liberal, not faux liberal) Western philosophical development. Women took the lead in their own emancipation, but the leaders in the emancipation of slaves were old whit males: Republican Lincoln who led the fight in the War Between the States, Republican Eisenhower who enforced school integration in Arkansas and Virginia, and Republican Senator Dirksen who wrote the Civil Rights Act legislation. Democrats who contributed to the Civil Rights unrest were Bull Connor and his dogs, Lester Maddox and his axe handle, and George Wallace who blocked the schoolhouse doors to prevent Blacks from entering. LBJ was a vile racist who promoted Black voting for political advantage.
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Posted by scorp on Jan 31, 2011 at 11:30 PM
“They” are straight out of the Neo-Marxist playbook. When Lenin captured Russia in 1918, it got somewhat messy. Since the workers did not want to become Marxists as Marx and Lenin supposed that they would and should, Marx killed about five million Ukrainian Kulaks and millions of others in the collectivization program in order to illustrate the beauty and wonders of Marxism.
Then comes Antonio Gramsci, an Italian socialist and associate of Comrade Stalin. Gramsci had no problem with the blood and the dead bodies, but it created a bad impression and bad press (but not from the NYT, as it happened). Gramsci added to Marx’s philosophy and originated the idea of Cultural Communism, intending to establish a Marxist state without all the messy bloodshed. Gramsci said that cultural institutions should be infiltrated and captured, and the Marxist utopia would be established in that manner. The cultural institutions that Gramsci targeted included political parties, the media, academia, and religious bodies, and the elitists who had influence in these institutions. It may be a coincidence that Anderson’s “They” are exactly the same elitists whom Gramsci wanted to co-opt nearly a century before, but I doubt it.
Au contraire. For centuries, every political system had it that what was produced was subject to the crown, dictator, chief, mugwump. bigwig, whomever. The English (classical) liberal philosopher John Locke developed the novel idea that what a person produced belonged to him and not to some strong-arm totalitarian, and that property was among the things subject to the rule of law. This idea was central to the foundation of this Republic.
The idea that some people must donate what they have produced to others that have not produced is totally alien to the principles on which this Republic was founded. But it is obviously popular among non-producers and Marxists who developed a whole alternate philosophy. Not stated in the Marxist philosophy is that, far from a classless society, elitists control the distribution of goods, taking a sizeable cut for themselves. For examples, Michelle’s multi-million dollar vacations and Nancy’s multi-million dollar taxi service.
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So, almost without exception, federal budget expenditures fall within the powers granted to the federal government except for the confiscatory taxes that are pissed away on entitlements and other Democratic Party foolishness. LBJ’s War on Poverty cost $6.6 trillion over a thirty-year period, did nothing to alleviate poverty, ended up wasteful and corrupt, and was ended by Clinton because of the waste and corruption, leaving a $6 trillion national debt. Clinton’s Dot.com Bubble rose and started falling well within the Clinton Administration and added $3 trillion to the national debt. The Carter and Clinton Administrations were solely responsible for the Housing Bubble that added another $5 trillion to the national debt. And all of that deficit spending is well outside what the Constitution authorizes.
In actual practice, it is difficult to see how a Marxist state differs from the rawest totalitarian dictatorship except the elitists pretend to have noble intentions, adding hypocrisy to their many crimes.
Posted by scorp on Jan 31, 2011 at 11:31 PM
There is a connection between deficits and the constitution. None of the wars the US has been in since the end of WWII were actually declared, and the constitution says that only congress can declare war.
Those wars were, and are, expensive. Without Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m pretty sure our deficit would be smaller.
Posted by Ayn R. Key on Feb 1, 2011 at 11:11 AM
WTH -
Thanx for sharing. I have some insight concerning China. I have been to China four times, the first time in 1984 on a tour. The Chinese economic boom was just starting and tourist hotels were among the first things they built. I went to the largest department store in Guangzou which was a two story building with dusty wooden floors. Now there are miles and miles of huge modern buildings in the big cities and modern facilities near the tourist attractions, but the rural towns are still pretty primitive.
There is a permanent odor of coal smoke in all the big cities and the pollution is terrible. In 2000 we took a back road north toward the Great Wall and this particular road was a main route for the coal trucks moving toward the Beijing power plants. As it happened, we drove north for miles on a narrow two-lane blacktop on the edge of a mostly dry river. There was a rocky overhang on our right and a sharp drop-off down to the river on our left, with the trucks in a VERY long slow-moving line traveling south. The road was so narrow that a breakdown or flat tire among the trucks brought everything to a halt until the problem was fixed. I am sure there was a different road that the return empties followed, and the return road had to have been of lesser quality because the better road, none too good, was dedicated to the loaded trucks I am sure. China commissions two new coal-fired generating plants each week.
The Building Bubble is horrendous and the crash is coming. There are too many extremes in China: pollution, corruption, huge population, too many rich, too many poor, etc. Brace for it.
Posted by scorp on Feb 1, 2011 at 5:51 PM
Scorp, really?Your contact with reality is as Beck’s, which is to say, questionable. You both need to stick to your medication schedule.
Most of what you ranted about came with no supporting facts, just like Beck’s shows. You speak like you have some sort of direct line to truth, but then so do megalomaniacs and some epileptics, but then people so afflicted have a brain disease. I assume you do not, but yet the appearance is unmistakable.
Conspiracies behind every rock and you see world domination at every turn by the misguided “liberals,” you live in a dangerous world of your own making.
Fact: the Founding Fathers did not write the Constitution for the Tea Partiers, or the conservatives, but it has been coopted by the teabaggers and Repubs as if they alone know the “original intent” of the Founders. The founders were, in fact, radical liberals(classic, or otherwise, who cares). They also intended for the central government to have great powers, read the Constitution, it is right there, and they also stated the limits of the states’ powers. The 10th Amendment did not say the states have sovereign powers equal to the central government as some teabaggers and Repubs want to think. There is a movement by some people like you, the teabaggers, the Repubs, and Beck, to steal the meaning of the Constitution and subvert it to be something it was never intended to be. All of you want to see danger at every turn, and enemies all around trying to take away your personal liberties; you need someone to blame for all your manufactured maladies. There are challenges to this democracy, but finding false reasons for these challenges and laying blame where there is no justification is one of these very challenges.
There is a fight going on right now, and it is between the misinformation, lies, mischaracterizations, propaganda, and misleading claims being presented by the right, the teabaggers, the Repubs, FOX noise, rightwing radio, and the right’s demagogues, of which Beck and Rush are the top ones, and the left’s last stand for the truth in which the claims by the right are debunked on a daily basis. The right does not have exclusiveness to facts, facts are neither right nor left. Is it a left or right fact that on most occasions, during the day, the sky is blue? It is those kinds of facts that the left deals with, as in evidenced based rationality, not the faith based rationality of the right and evangelical Christians.
If you post a comment, it should be one with verifiable facts, of which your post had very little of. Saying something doesn’t make it so. If I say Beck is a socialist, I need to show somehow with evidence that it is true. If you say Obama is a Marxist, you need to show somehow with evidence that he is indeed a Marxist. As it stands I know Beck is not a socialist and I know not to make that claim. But I do think he is a demagogue and the evidence is clearly shown on his FOX noise shows and his radio shows that indeed show that, he is just that. According to Random House Unabridged Dictionary:
demagogue: a person, esp. an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people.
and
to treat or manipulate (a political issue) in the manner of a demagogue; obscure or distort with emotionalism, prejudice, etc.
I rest my case.
Posted by Raymond Nash on Feb 3, 2011 at 2:40 PM
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