Is Glenn Beck Healthy for the Right?

Following the anti-Obama festivities of the weekend of September 11, 2009, headlined by Glenn Beck’s 9.12 Project and march on Washington, one must certainly attest that the radio and TV host wields some amount of influence on the grassroots Right and beyond. Beck’s exposure of the depravity of ACORN and a rare willingness to sharply criticize the Bush administration make him stand out among the conservative commentariat. But could Beck be just as much of the problem of the Right as its solution?

Watching in 2009, it might appear as though Beck would be a suitable spokesman for a Bush-less Republican Party. He wails against the bank bailouts and the readiness with which Dubya expanded the government. Beck’s eagerness to attack the Bush administration is commendable and many of those attacks are those which Republicans and conservatives need to hear because if someone’s goal is to cut government, restore individual liberty, and be governed by laws instead of men, the first fact that must be grasped is that today's Republican Party is not your friend.

The problem with windbag talkers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and their minor league impersonators, is that they never seriously challenge the status quo of their party. This is done to the point that conservative talk radio may as well be called Republican talk radio. After all, these are the folks who jumped on the bandwagon for pro-choice, state-run health care Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. The speed with which they followed the empty suit perfectly illustrates how empty the vessel of contemporary American conservatism is. And it is why the talk radio medium ought to be generally, but not completely, ignored.

Is Glenn Beck different? It’s true that he frequently has Ron Paul as a guest, as well as his son, Rand. Judge Andrew Napolitano, who readily calls Republican and Democratic politicians the criminals that they are, is a regular guest host. Another regular is Professor Kevin Gutzman, a contributor to takimag.com, among the most anti-Bush and anti-GOP establishment webzines, Left or Right, to talk about states’ rights, an issue faux conservatives avoid like the Bubonic plague. Plus, Glenn Beck openly criticizes the Republican Party when the sycophants are still tip-toeing around the fact that maybe Bush might have, possibly, done some things that might not have been quite okay.

I actually somewhat like Beck. His schtick can get a little tiresome, going from crying to yelling to having a fire-side chat all in the same afternoon, but he also does some relevant reporting. Everyone following the news right now has heard about Beck’s reporting of the ACORN scandals. He’s the only TV or radio personality I can think of who has actually taken a skeptical view of the Federal Reserve and the insane monetary practices of printing a trillion dollars. He’s also the only TV host I’m aware of who actually has members of Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty for segments on his show. To people like Rush and Hannity, Ron Paul is still a four-letter word.

Beck’s 9.12 Project is admirable and rather uncontroversial. “Common Sense” was a decent read and was actually pretty independent-minded, calling out both parties for their extravagance but most of it falling on the Democrats.

However, a recent mash-up video has surfaced where Beck can be seen calling Ron Paul a “crazy, kooky guy,” suggesting that last year’s bank bailout “wasn’t nearly enough” and that he “supported the Patriot Act.” Interspersed were neocon party lines of Ahmadinejad as Hitler who was making preparations for a second holocaust. (Also see this video where he contemptibly smears Ron Paul supporters for having a “money bomb” on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, as domestic terrorists, oddly foreshadowing the Obama administration’s reports about potential right wing domestic terrorism which Beck would ironically denounce.)

Such a video obviously has the potential to be easily taken out of context and spliced together in Michael Moore fashion to make Beck look like a despicable flip-flopper. Indeed, anyone could be embarrassed by seeing their worst predictions all glued together. For example, in a needlessly rambling blog from over a year ago, I implied support for the war in Afghanistan over the one in Iraq, a position I certainly do not hold today.

Since the material from the nefarious video was originally uttered, Beck has admitted that he did support the Patriot Act but regrets it. In a more surprising video, Beck reveals that

“I guess the scales are falling off my eyes. . . . In 1900 with Teddy Roosevelt . . . we’re going to tell the rest of the world, ‘We’re going to spread democracy.’ . . . in Latin America, we really became thuggish and brutish. It only got worse after the next progressive came into office . . . the next one was a Democratic progressive, Woodrow Wilson, and we did, we empire built. The Democrats felt we needed to empire build with one giant, global government, it was originally . . . League of Nations . . . then it became the United Nations, one world government. The Republicans took it as ‘We’re going to lead the world and we’ll be the leader of it.’ I don’t think we should be either of those. I think we need to mind our own business and protect our own people. When somebody hits us, hit back hard, and then come home.” (emphasis mine)

If there is one issue that continues to unite the mainstream Right, outside of opposition to Obama, it’s the unwavering support for Bush’s wars. Even if it took him more than seven years, Glenn Beck should be commended for speaking out against enduring military occupations. May he keep it up.

But it’s still quite precarious that Glenn Beck has shed his more odious positions once the Republicans were thoroughly repudiated. His antics are a bit annoying, bordering on bad soap opera acting, but he still displays better independence than his more unoriginal talk radio colleagues.

So, is Glenn Beck healthy for the Right? Maybe, maybe not. Is he part of the solution or is he part of the problem? If he’s part of the problem, he’s far less of it than Rush, Hannity, Levin or Coulter.

Conservatives have been betrayed in an unrepentant fashion for the entirety of this century. If the evolution of Beck’s positions mean anything, it means that he might be a spokesman and a platform for an effective and genuine anti-government movement. It also means he’s someone who’s worth keeping at an arm’s length for any Republican Party that wants to move past the errors of the Bush administration.

Unassertive Conservatism

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, Mark Levin, 245 pages.

Although Republicans have been completely out of power for only about 130 days (no White House and neither chamber of Congress), the party and the conservative movement are undeniably in a pretty crappy place. Infighting began almost as soon as Barack Obama finished delivering his victory speech. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum immediately threw Sarah Palin and social conservatives under the bus for ruining the party. The spat between GOP chairman Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh still lingers. More recently there was a back-and-forth dispute between talk show host and writer Mark Levin and Dallas Morning News columnist and “Crunchy Con” spokesman Rod Dreher. Also, Levin has recently tussled with David Frum himself. Blood is everywhere.

What all of these altercations reveal is that despite the new president’s ambitious agenda, Republicans and their conservative enablers are still only fighting among themselves. There is good reason for this. Republicans got drunk on power and crashed the family car while their conservative supporters cheered from the passenger seat. They are still trying to figure out who is to blame.

And as conservatism appears no less doomed than the Republican Party, there are efforts to claim the mantle of what constitutes “true conservatism.” Enter the aforementioned Mark ("The Great One") Levin and his new book, Liberty and Tyranny.

Levin, the author of 2005’s Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America, holds a law degree from Temple, which presumably puts him in a higher intellectual bracket than the majority of his talk radio colleagues. Levin’s intellectual background is one of the reasons that his new book is so highly touted. Liberty and Tyranny is supposed to be an index of what it truly means to be conservative in the early 21 century. It is the new Conscience of a Conservative, the next The Conservative Mind and your “one-stop-shop for conservatism.”

When I endeavored to read the latest “This is what conservatism really means” screed, I was prepared to dislike it. As with many others in his profession, Mark Levin was a vibrant voice of support for the presidency of George W. Bush. So how could he possibly write a coherent book about conservatism that doesn’t descend into fawning servility to the GOP?

Well, he does write a fairly coherent book. Whether it’s coherent conservatism is a different matter.

I say this because of the disconsolate and discombobulated state American conservatism finds itself. During the administration of George W. Bush, conservatives became seen as nothing more than the Republican cheering section - supporting the Republican administration, deviating only occasionally on immigration and national education policy. Yet no matter what atrocity the Bush administration committed, conservatives by and large went along. Because of this, it is increasingly difficult for seemingly anachronistic conservatives like myself to believe the majority of these folks. For example, I could listen to Rush Limbaugh’s radio program for 3 hours and probably agree with the lovable little fuzz-ball perhaps 90% of the time, yet feel utterly frustrated because the man is a hypocrite and a sell-out to his cause.

The same problem generally afflicts Mark Levin. Liberty and Tyranny has plenty of good quotes that are conservative, and at times even libertarian. However, the reader must always remain aware that Mark Levin was another conservative who cheered the march of The Decider.

As opposed to what frequently occurs on his radio program, Levin writes in a rather temperate tone. The constant theme throughout the book is that conservative principles are the same principles as those espoused by the Founding Fathers. In fact, the closing line of the first chapter reads: “Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny precisely because its principles are the founding principles.”

This is a troubling line and as well as a troubling theme. It’s not that I do not believe traditional conservatism can trace its lineage to the Founders. Russell Kirk certainly did this and more. But making a statement like Levin’s is circular reasoning. Conservatives are like the Founders and the Founders are like today’s conservatives. George Washington was the first supply-sider and Thomas Jefferson believed in pre-emptive war, right?

Levin’s chapters on the free market, opposition to governmental take-overs of environment matters, and the Constitution are actually quite good. He descends into some typical fallacies, such as blaming protectionism and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff for causing the Great Depression and saying that World War II ended our worst recession (spending our way out), although these are not particularly glaring instances of a writer’s carelessness or ignorance.

Levin does make many valid points about federalism and restraint, which are historically conservative objectives. Federalism is indeed one of the greatest assets to American republicanism. Dividing up power preserves liberty. Allowing localities to govern themselves, and not by a distant power, was one of the hallmarks of the American War for Independence. Levin even has a great quote for it: “Individuals with widely divergent beliefs are able to coexist in the same country because of the diversity and toleration federalism promotes.”

Another interesting quote, this time regarding the Constitution: “. . . others are persuaded by the Statists’ distortions, arguing that the judge’s job is to spread democracy or liberty.” While Levin is correct that that is not a judge’s job, he later says that sometimes it is the job of the government to do just that. Almost at the end of the book, while discussing “self-preservation,” Levin states that “there are occasions when democracy building is prudent.”

Really? Earlier, Levin says that the government, i.e., the judiciary, should not spread liberty, but somehow the government, through the military and probably also through presidential orders, should sometimes spread liberty. This seems like having it both ways. It’s wrong if a liberal judge decrees something which makes it Statist, but conservatives know that sometimes spreading liberty is okay, if it’s done through the military, that is.

This, however, does lead to an error that is glaring: Levin never once mentions that war has not been constitutionally declared since 1941. For a writer that went through law school, and extols the Constitution over and over in this book, it’s rather odious to see that the most heinous of unconstitutional acts, undeclared war, is altogether ignored. Levin can go on and on about how such-and-such liberal program is not specified in the Constitution. But he seems to ignore outright that Republican and Democratic presidents have commandeered the power to make war for themselves.

An Aberration like that is indicative of the great problem of contemporary conservatism. To satirize, the routine goes something like this, “Government is bad. Government intrudes into our lives. Government intervention into the private sector is Statist. Oh, but the government has the right to intervene into other nations’ affairs.”

Now which is it? Should government intervene, under the banner of spreading liberty or not? Lots of conservatives rail against statism, some of them do so very well. But if someone, say Mark Levin, expresses support for a standing army, that itself is statist. The military, no matter how noble its warriors, is still a big government institution. It is an institution that requires heavy taxation and expansion at home in order to manage it. And there you have it: Conservatives say they want small government at home, big government abroad, and seem surprised to discover that they have gotten big government in both.

Another constant throughout the book is Levin’s campy dichotomy between conservatives and statists. In Levin’s world, conservatives only look to restrain themselves and keep the civil order in mind when they make decisions. Statists only want to accrue more power. True enough about statists, but what conservatives is he talking about? It couldn’t be George W. Bush who only amassed more and more power for himself. Although President Bush clearly fits Levin’s definition of a Statist, Levin, almost nowhere in his book, makes any attempt to distance himself from our most recent chief executive.

Let’s take a look at another quote to illustrate this: “The Conservative believes that in the context of the civil society, progress and modernity are essential to man’s well-being and fulfillment, despite their inevitable imperfections.” Sounds good to me, but this begs the question, when did a “conservative” ever act this way once they were in power?

Perhaps the best line that sums up the bewilderment of today’s “conservatives” is this: “Republicans seem clueless on how to slow, contain, and reverse the Statist’s agenda.”

That just about says it all. For all of the work conservatives have done for the Republican Party, some who are genuine anti-statists, have little to show from their party of choice. And this is one of the great downfalls of the book. At no point does Levin ever suggest that the problem for conservatives may be that we have put too much faith in the GOP to achieve our goals. As long as people like Levin continue to support the Republican Party no matter what, no amount of conservative rhetoric in books like Liberty and Tyranny will change a thing.

Examining Levin’s notes, almost 40 pages, one has to wonder just what sort of research the man did to come to his conclusions about conservatism. There are a few sprinkled references from the Founders, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Toqueville, and St. Augustine, but the vast majority of resources Levin used were from websites and contemporary newspapers. If he wished to glean wisdom from past generations, which he claims, he could have made more than one reference to Russell Kirk or a single reference to Robert Nisbet or Richard Weaver, men who spent years researching the historical tenets of the conservative tradition. Instead, it appears Levin sought to justify his opinion of conservatism by cutting-and-pasting.

One minor improvement in this area would have been to supply a reading list at the conclusion. That was one of the assets of Ron Paul’s 2008 book The Revolution. Once Dr. Paul’s book was finished, there was a list provided for the reader to continue their quest for freedom. Instead of only taking the doctor’s word for it, readers were encouraged to keep learning. Levin would have benefited his readers or anyone else looking to expand the conservative cause by including something similar. Absenting such a list makes Liberty and Tyranny the last word.

Taken as a whole, and considering my initial angst, Levin’s book isn’t awful, but it certainly isn't good, much less a sure-to-endure “conservative manifesto.” It’s a decent book, but does a poor job convincing this reader that the conservatives who followed George W. Bush without hesitation have learned anything from the mistakes of that administration. In the end, it is unlikely that Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny will be any more memorable than any of Ann Coulter’s endless ad hominem “Liberals suck” books.