Re: Tea'd Off

Nice, he calls Beck a racist without actually showing any, you know, racism...

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Peter Chattaway
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2010 10:22 AM
To: Daniel Amos off-topic listserver
Subject: [DADL-OT] Tea'd Off

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/hitchens-201101

Forfeiting a both-houses Republican victory, rational conservatives ignored or 
excused the most hateful kind of populist claptrap (e.g., the fetid weirdness of 
Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project). The poison they've helped disseminate will still be in 
the American bloodstream when the country needs it least.

By Christopher Hitchens
Illustration by Ross MacDonald
January 2011

It is often in the excuses and in the apologies that one finds the real offense. 
Looking back on the domestic political "surge" which the populist right has been 
celebrating since last month, I found myself most dispirited by the manner in 
which the more sophisticated conservatives attempted to conjure the nasty bits 
away.

Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New 
York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out 
that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten 
voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 
1950s and 1960s. His soothing message:

These parallels are real. But there's a crucial difference. The Birchers only had 
a crackpot message; they never had a mainstream one. The Tea Party marries fringe 
concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message 
about spending and deficits.

The more one looks at this, the more wrong it becomes (as does that giveaway 
phrase "responsible-seeming"). The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream 
message-the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United 
States-that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. 
It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced 
President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a "dedicated, conscious agent" of that same 
Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and 
despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge 
them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the 
crackpot fringe.

Now, here is the difference. Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his 
audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work 
of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so 
extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church 
had to distance itself from him. It's from Skousen's demented screed The Five 
Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he 
shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a 
divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future 
apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen's posthumously 
published book on the "end times" and the coming day of rapture was charmingly 
called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The 
Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as 
"pickaninnies." And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for 
denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he 
described as this "Communist" assault.

So, Beck's "9/12 Project" is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste 
material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a 
generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under 
stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the 
dangers of "spending and deficits"? It's enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole 
new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for 
ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this 
will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less.

I remember encountering this same mentality a few years ago, when it was more 
laughable than dangerous. I didn't like Bill Clinton: thought he had sold access 
to the Lincoln Bedroom and lied under oath about sexual harassment and possibly 
even bombed Sudan on a "wag the dog" basis. But when I sometimes agreed to go on 
the radio stations of the paranoid right, it was only to be told that this was all 
irrelevant. Didn't I understand that Clinton and his wife had murdered Vince 
Foster and were, even as I spoke, preparing to take advantage of the Y2K 
millennium crisis-remember that?-in order to seize power for life and become the 
Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu of our day? These people were not interested in the 
president's actual transgressions. They were looking to populate their fantasy 
world with new and more lurid characters.

There is an old Republican saying that "a government strong enough to give you 
everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have." This 
statement contains an essential truth that liberals have no right to overlook. But 
it is negated, not amplified, if it comes festooned with racism and superstition. 
In the recent past, government-sponsored policies of social engineering have led 
to surprising success in reducing the welfare rolls and the crime figures. This 
came partly from the adoption by many Democrats of policies that had once been 
called Republican. But not a word about that from Beck and his followers, because 
it isn't exciting and doesn't present any opportunity for rabble-rousing. Far 
sexier to say that health care-actually another product of bipartisanship-is a 
step toward Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ten percent unemployment, on the other hand, is 
rather a disgrace to a midterm Democratic administration. But does anybody believe 
that unemployment would have gone down if the hated bailout had not occurred and 
GM had been permitted to go bankrupt? Why not avoid the question altogether and 
mutter about a secret plan to proclaim a socialist (or Nazi, or Jew-controlled: 
take your pick) dictatorship?

Again, there is a real debate about the pace and rhythm of global warming, and 
about the degree to which it has been caused (or can be slowed) by human activity. 
But at the first Tea Party rally I attended, at the Washington Monument earlier 
this year, the crowd-bristling with placards about the Second Amendment's being 
the correction-was treated to an arm-waving speech by a caricature English peer 
named Lord Monckton, who led them in the edifying call-and-response: "All 
together. Global warming is?" "Bullshit." "Obama cannot hear you. Global warming 
is?" "bullshit." "That's bettah." I don't remember ever seeing grown-ups behave 
less seriously, at least in an election season.

Most epochs are defined by one or another anxiety. More important, though, is the 
form which that anxiety takes. Millions of Americans are currently worried about 
two things that are, in their minds, emotionally related. The first of these is 
the prospect that white people will no longer be the majority in this country, and 
the second is that the United States will be just one among many world powers. 
This is by no means purely a "racial" matter. (In my experience, black Americans 
are quite concerned that "Hispanic" immigration will relegate them, too.) Having 
an honest and open discussion about all this is not just a high priority. It's 
more like a matter of social and political survival. But the Beck-Skousen faction 
want to make such a debate impossible. They need and want to sublimate the anxiety 
into hysteria and paranoia. The president is a Kenyan. The president is a secret 
Muslim. The president (why not?-after all, every little bit helps) is the 
unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X. And this is their response to the election 
of an extremely moderate half-African American candidate, who speaks better 
English than most and who has a model family. Revolted by this development, huge 
numbers of white people choose to demonstrate their independence and superiority 
by putting themselves eagerly at the disposal of a tear-stained semi-literate 
shock jock, and by repeating his list of lies and defamations. But, of course, 
there's nothing racial in their attitude .

As I started by saying, the people who really curl my lip are the ones who 
willingly accept such supporters for the sake of a Republican victory, and then 
try to write them off as not all that important, or not all that extreme, or not 
all that insane in wanting to repeal several amendments to a Constitution that 
they also think is unalterable because it's divine! It may be true that the Tea 
Party's role in November's vote was less than some people feared, and it's 
certainly true that several of the movement's elected representatives will very 
soon learn the arts of compromise and the pork barrel. But then what happens at 
the next downturn? A large, volatile constituency has been created that believes 
darkly in betrayal and conspiracy. A mass "literature" has been disseminated, to 
push the mad ideas of exploded crackpots and bigots. It would be no surprise if 
those who now adore Beck and his acolytes were to call them sellouts and traitors 
a few years from now. But, alas, they would not be the only victims of the 
poisonous propaganda that's been uncorked. Some of the gun brandishing next time 
might be for real. There was no need for this offense to come, but woe all the 
same to those by whom it came, and woe above all to those who whitewashed and 
rationalized it.

Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Send comments on all 
Hitchens-related matters to [email protected]


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