Glenn Beck’s Neo-Lindberghism
During the 1930s, there was a strong reactionary political movement that correlated with the foaming reaction that was sweeping through Italy, Spain, Germany and Japan. We can find many well known and lesser known figures at the epicenter of this movement.
Glenn Beck seems to be dedicating his airtime to digging up these fascist fossils and touting them as political heroes. In taking on a Donald Duck cartoon that eschewed his radio rhetoric, he praised Walt Disney as an opponent of the “communists, socialists, union organizers and progressives.” Yeah, Glenn, and you know who else he was an opponent of?
Beyond Disney, of course, there was the promotion on air of The Red Network: A “Who’s Who” and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots. The book is filled with lovely bits of overt racism and anti-Semitism:
The colored people are a sincerely religious race. As long as they stayed in Africa un-Christianized, they remained, as did pagan white men, savages. Their pagan brothers in Africa today are savages, while in a comparatively few years, under the opportunities of the American government and the inspiration of Christianity, the American Negroes have acquired professions, property, banks, homes, and produced a rising class of refined, home loving people. This is far more remarkable than that many Negroes are still backward. The Reds play upon the Negroes’ love of their own people and represent them as persecuted in order to inflame them against the very white people who have in reality given the colored race far greater opportunities than their fellow negroes would give them in Africa today.
With Beck touting books that describe civil rights movements as communist conspiracies, it’s really no wonder that Beck has attendees coming out to his rallies with confederate flags waving and signs saying “MLK was Pro-Communist!.”
At the height of this movement, Sinclair Lewis wrote a little book called It Can’t Happen Here, documenting well the rise of a fascist movement taking control in the United States in the form of Berzelius Windrip. As extremism takes hold, a principled democratic journalist in the form of Doremus Jessup becomes so disgusted that he escapes to Canada.
The book came at a time when America was in the midst of the Great Depression, and one striking face of the fascist movement was Charles Lindbergh, a spokesman for the America First Committee. Along with Lindbergh was Father Coughlin, the strongest parallel to Glenn Beck. The following video gives a pretty good taste of his rhetorical style, and the rise as the first American political ideologue of the Catholic order bears strong resemblance to Glenn Beck’s significance as the first American political ideologue of the Mormon order:
Like Coughlin, Beck has slowly morphed into something else. Beck has taken on the anti-war rhetoric of “minding our own business,” despite his support of George W. Bush and his policies during his pre-Fox News days. Like Coughlin, Beck opposes a collectivist president while touting “social justice.” He’s also taken on a rationalization of anti-Americanism that reflects Coughlin’s evolved adoption of rationalizing Italian and German fascism:
I imagine alot of readers at LGF will nod their heads to some of Beck’s sentiments and understandably so. No one knows what to do in Afghanistan and it is really hard to rationalize war overseas when unemployment and fiscal turmoil embroil us at home. However, the neo-Lindbergh approach is reductionist and just as wrong headed as endless empire. It must be through engagement with surrounding, concerned powers (read the book Reset by Stephen Kinzer to see where I’m going here) that we will be able to leave a Middle East that will not just pull us back in.
A similar book to that written by Sinclair Lewis would be appropriate now. George W. Bush’s unpopularity pulled the wind out of the great balloon of Reagan-era conservatism, and the populist movement that is replacing that conservatism, which had neoliberalism and coalition building at its epicenter, is a whole different animal entirely now. In an economic climate that resembles the 1930s more than the 1970s, the parallels are indeed ominous.