"Flags, soldiers, and oaths to God, leader and country (dominate) Beck's rallies," Zaitchik wrote. "The Rally for America (held in 2003) featured speakers who made threats against the Left, echoing the threats of violence that are routinely heard on Beck's radio show. The events were a strange U.S. hybrid that combined Nurembergian expressions of power, blind allegiance to a divinely anointed leader, and TNN schmaltz."
Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League last year pegged Beck as "the most important mainstream media figure who has repeatedly helped to stoke the fires of anti-government anger" and was critical of Beck for "promoting the idea that (President Barack Obama) is dangerous." Beck has put forth a seemingly endless array of turgid conspiracy theories (for example; liberals are conspiring to kill President Obama in order to take permanent control of the government) and his claims (since disavowed) of secret "FEMA concentration camps" had been frequently augmented by portentous warnings that America heads toward "socialism (and) totalitarianism beyond your wildest imagination."
But perhaps Beck's deepest moment of Glenn destiny-changer is The Plan, a presumptuous, chokingly hubristic, and supposedly God-sent 100-year codification of the "re-founding" of America and an outgrowth of an element of Christian existentialism that, over time, has steadily crept into Beck's message. It's an element which -- in the aftermath of his Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C. -- has probably now established a permanent threshold within the Beck doctrine's painfully convoluted philosophical mix .
In comments in a New York Times article published last year, respected conservative writer David Frum, opined that Beck's rise "is a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility."
If Frum is correct, it would appear that the potential danger of Beck's promulgation of his doctrine's direful, potentially secessionist rhetoric to professional conservatives like Limbaugh and company, lies in the extent to which the fallout from any kind of major civil unrest resulting from this rhetoric can be tied to the broader conservative movement. The success of the Beck doctrine holds the potential for discrediting the public image of mainstream conservatism the same way the failure of the Bush doctrine de-legitimized much of what formed the basis of neo-conservative thought.
Certainly, such factually-dyslexic conservative hype merchants as Republican Party leaders Sarah Palin and Limbaugh, along with others such as O'Reilly, and Hannity, talk a lot of the same hot-button conservative smack heard from Beck, but unlike Beck, with many of the others, somehow one gets the feeling that there is a certain degree of pretense involved. Learned revolutionaries, they are not, but, sheer ignorance plays only a bit part in their strident promotion of many of the more outrà © aspects of conservative ideals. What they are is market-driven. They know just how far to rock the boat and to what level of extreme should be avoided to prevent its capsizing and jeopardizing the conservative "brand" as a whole.
Thus, the bottom line motivation for the brassy fervor with which they brandish their conservative cred is the seemingly limitless potential for personal enrichment. Most of those who inhabit the conservative realm -- from slick, culturally-focused "new media" conservatives to the traditional, fiscally-driven rabble-rousers of the old school -- realize that the fires of right-wing identity politics pay the bills, but they also understand that those fires need to be properly fanned.
Therefore, it would hardly surprise me to learn that all of the Limbaughs and O'Reillys out there stumping the conservative grind privately consider Glenn Beck to be a tad unsettling if only for the fact that he may be just delusional enough to actually begin to believe a lot of the twisted psycho-linguistics that engulf his "teachings." They may well view him from within the prism of his openly-acknowledged suicidal tendencies; as a vainglorious time bomb; a jittery, insecure, pompous powder keg of a figure in search of some form of martyrdom -- either political or clinical -- who therefore needs to be kept at arm's length of that fire. They might be unsure about whether Beck's tumultuous, tear-provoking morality and his whole fetish for the Constitution shtick is just artlessly purposeful affectation; but they have to know that a major slice of the angst is real. Real enough to render Beck subject to the delusion that any social upheaval originating from his crusade to "take back America" and "restore" its honor is justified by the squint-eyes gleam produced by the unvarnished morality of his cause.
If so, Beck's steadily-mushrooming megalomania could spoil it for all those who shill the mainstream conservative line if he winds up essentially hijacking the ideological gravy train on which professional conservatives now comfortably ride. Die-hard curators of mainstream conservative dogma might view the premise of Beck's fringe demagoguery as a dangerous, philosophically reckless ends justifies the means formulation. The problem however, is that this potential danger holds little sway among Beck's dauntingly, starry-eyed disciples; including those who may have bore witness to their savior's prior admissions of personal struggles against "demons" of moral ambiguity.
"We all have our inner demons," Beck acknowledged in 2006. "I for one; I can't speak for you, but I'm on the verge of a moral collapse at any time. It can happen by the end of the show,"
The Beckoning
Apparently, Beck's American Gothic persona of a faith-enshrouded homespun defender of American cultural fundamentalism aligns well with the psyche of the kind of Americans who look at President Obama and see a dead ringer for someone like jailed former Liberian President Charles Taylor, a scoundrel who'd earn a spot on anyone's short list of the corrupt, illegitimate, often anti-American Third World strongmen. Therefore of course they are aghast; left with rationalizing that the electorate's choice for president in 2008 was less an expression of the will of the people as it was an unpatriotic affront to the honor of this great nation. For them, it will take someone like Glenn Beck to restore that honor. And given the bizarre nature of his current and past behavior, it may be easy to conclude that Beck has always sensed -- or perhaps maybe even needed to believe -- that he was right all along; that out of all others, he is indeed "The One;" the charismatic most worthy of the righteous hallelujahs of the entire conservative base. From that perspective, it seems safe to assume that the thousands upon thousands whom Beck found not only willing, but anxious to abide his demand for a pilgrimage to the National Mall became his affirmation of this sense.
Consequently, as evidenced by the clamorous wake-up call linked to his success in drawing so many from across the country to his Restoring Honor rally -- an event that has been described as "a tent revival crossed with a pep rally intertwined with a history lecture married to a U.S.O. telethon" -- it's hard to deny that today, Glenn Beck is nothing short of America's foremost male demagogue (we all know who owns that distinction from among the opposite sex). It's difficult to imagine any of Beck's high profile counterparts like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, or Sean Hannity drawing that many people to a political rally in Washington D.C. on a late-summer weekend even if they pulled a Beck move by promoting it as a largely religious event.
Which is why, despite the many high profile rallies and events at which Beck was either the headliner or in some other significant way involved, his Restoring Honor gig has to be seen as his true coming out party. It's obvious that the addiction to adulation is a significant passageway in the maze of conflicting issues -- for example, the idea of a Mormon deigning to lead a vast brigade consisting largely of Christian nationalists -- which must be navigated to finally reach the unadulterated core of Glenn Beck. If so, the sheer numbers of people who showed up -- crowd estimates ranged from a seemingly low 87,000 to Beck's own estimate of 500,000 -- is sufficient to provide Beck a major adulatory rush. But like all addicts, that rush is only a temporary fix. Knowing this provides encouragement to anyone who has predicted that Beck's head will one day explode in a Howard Beale-like meltdown, to just sit back and wait for signs of the inevitable. As it turned out, Beck compulsions prevented him from waiting for his cue. The first discordant note in that familiar chorus of narcissistic behaviors often exhibited by those sucked into the mythology of their own deceitfully contrived imagery was in fact, delivered before the rally even had a chance to conclude.
"I went to the National Archives," claimed Beck at one point, "and I held the first inaugural address written in his own hand by George Washington."
As many now know, that claim by Beck is as authentic as O'Reilly's earth-shattering brain-fart about winning a Peabody Award or Fox News Channel's annoyingly diffident "fair and balanced" swagger. As it turns out, Beck did in fact, manage to access a tour of the Archives during which he was able to view the artifact. But it's been well-reported that Archive policy prohibits public handling of historical documents including Washington's Inaugural Address, a policy that was not waived on Beck's behalf.
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