Earlier this summer, I discussed how Glenn Beck repeatedly abuses and distorts both the Civil Rights Movement and the ideas of Martin Luther King to facilitate a particular conservative vision of “colorblindness,” which effectively inverts the history of American racism: progressives and racial minorities thus “oppress” middle-class whites in their legislative and cultural attempts to correct historical injustices [see Laura, "Dr."]. Beck likes to argue that he is “reclaiming” history, but this view is deeply ahistorical and his claims about King ignore a wealth of historical evidence to the contrary. His bastardization of American history is, of course, by no means limited to misapplying the “I Have a Dream” speech.
In a recent New Yorker article and on NPR’s Fresh Air, the eminent historian Sean Wilentz convincingly locates Beck’s historical interpretations squarely in the psychotic paranoia of the 1950s. Beck’s historical interpretations, and much of his worldview, hews unnervingly close to the ideas of the far-right, cold war-era John Birch Society and its founder Robert Welch—anticommunists so crazy they thought goddamn Dwight Eisenhower was a shill for global communism. In Beck’s bizzaro-world, Woodrow Wilson becomes a borderline demonic figure who “despised what America was” and helped bring totalitarian fascism to the United States. Wilentz, like Jon Stewart humorously demonstrated earlier this year, also notes Beck’s tendency to turn his own conspiratorial interpretations of otherwise innocuous iconography into irrefutable evidence of his own insane argument:
In one segment last year, he produced a drawing of fasces—which he described, anachronistically, as “the Roman symbol of Fascism”—and then a picture of an old Mercury dime, with fasces on the reverse side. “Who brought this dime in? It happened in 1916—Woodrow Wilson was the President,” he said. “We’ve been on the road to Fascism for a while.”
Perhaps most intriguingly, Wilentz also highlights the recently created “Beck University” where (for the low, low price of $6.29 per month!) subscribers can “learn real American history” from “experts” including conservative activists, business leaders, and professors of little credibility within the mainstream historical community. These first-rate scholars include noted anti-Semite and founder of the organization WallBuilders, “Professor” David Barton, whose own works have proven central to recent attempts to rewrite the “Founding Fathers” as devout Christians promoting a quasi-theocratic state.
Joined by unrenowned scholar Peter Lillback, whose organization promotes the “Judeo-Christian roots” of the United States, Beck presents a frenetic and jumbled history that subtly blends Mormon ideas about American Indians with a providential understanding of American history, all in order to argue that the central principle behind liberalism is Manifest Destiny. In the middle of jumping around like a monkey searching for “patterns,” and rambling incoherently, Beck celebrates the “good relationship” George Washington and the founders had with American Indians (Washington was dubbed “town destroyer” by the Iroquois, mind you) while highlighting the long-discredited eighteenth-century idea that Indians constituted the Lost Tribes of Israel.
In a recent New Yorker article and on NPR’s Fresh Air, the eminent historian Sean Wilentz convincingly locates Beck’s historical interpretations squarely in the psychotic paranoia of the 1950s. Beck’s historical interpretations, and much of his worldview, hews unnervingly close to the ideas of the far-right, cold war-era John Birch Society and its founder Robert Welch—anticommunists so crazy they thought goddamn Dwight Eisenhower was a shill for global communism. In Beck’s bizzaro-world, Woodrow Wilson becomes a borderline demonic figure who “despised what America was” and helped bring totalitarian fascism to the United States. Wilentz, like Jon Stewart humorously demonstrated earlier this year, also notes Beck’s tendency to turn his own conspiratorial interpretations of otherwise innocuous iconography into irrefutable evidence of his own insane argument:
In one segment last year, he produced a drawing of fasces—which he described, anachronistically, as “the Roman symbol of Fascism”—and then a picture of an old Mercury dime, with fasces on the reverse side. “Who brought this dime in? It happened in 1916—Woodrow Wilson was the President,” he said. “We’ve been on the road to Fascism for a while.”
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Conservative Libertarian | ||||
| ||||
Perhaps most intriguingly, Wilentz also highlights the recently created “Beck University” where (for the low, low price of $6.29 per month!) subscribers can “learn real American history” from “experts” including conservative activists, business leaders, and professors of little credibility within the mainstream historical community. These first-rate scholars include noted anti-Semite and founder of the organization WallBuilders, “Professor” David Barton, whose own works have proven central to recent attempts to rewrite the “Founding Fathers” as devout Christians promoting a quasi-theocratic state.
Videos from Beck University and from his Fox News show suggest that, for as critical as Wilentz is, he may nonetheless overstate the coherence of Beck’s arguments, which actually blend Mormon theology and nineteenth-century historical traditions with the conspiratorial worldview of the Birchers. For instance, the introductory lecture on “America’s Founding Principles” entitled “Divine Providence vs. Manifest Destiny” (go ahead, try to figure out what the hell he is talking about half the time):
Joined by unrenowned scholar Peter Lillback, whose organization promotes the “Judeo-Christian roots” of the United States, Beck presents a frenetic and jumbled history that subtly blends Mormon ideas about American Indians with a providential understanding of American history, all in order to argue that the central principle behind liberalism is Manifest Destiny. In the middle of jumping around like a monkey searching for “patterns,” and rambling incoherently, Beck celebrates the “good relationship” George Washington and the founders had with American Indians (Washington was dubbed “town destroyer” by the Iroquois, mind you) while highlighting the long-discredited eighteenth-century idea that Indians constituted the Lost Tribes of Israel.
The crux of the argument, however, is that where the Founding Fathers believed in a notion of humble “divine providence,” which placed the future of the nation in the hands of God, the rise of Jacksonian Democracy (and the expansion of the federal government) promoted a secular vision of America that emphasized the will of man. And it was at this point that the founders’ “pure” vision of a perfect society (politically-, economically-, and socially-dominated by rich, white, male slaveholders) became corrupted by no less than Satan himself! Therefore, Beck actually claims that it was not until mid-nineteenth-century that white Americans began to mistreat Indians.
All of this allows him, in a completely nonsensical and demagogic way, to draw a simplistic straight line between Indian Removal and nineteenth-century Progressivism, Wilson, Nazi eugenics, FDR, LBJ, and Obama:
It’s incoherent and garbled, but it’s also a remarkable worldview that builds fabrication and simplification atop tiny morsels of truth, all in an attempt to rectify the United States’ history of violence with American nationalism: it is all liberals fault—they are the real racists.
I think the lesson is simple: a mind is a terrible thing to develop without help.
Posts
No Response to "The Pink-Faced Half-Wit’s Guide to American History"
Post a Comment