American politics

Democracy in America

His Struggle

Glenn Beck's Hitler fetish

Oct 4th 2010, 14:01 by M.S.

DANA MILBANK had a long piece in Sunday's Washington Post that recaps the conspiratorial lunacy of Glenn Beck's chalkboard theorising, with a special emphasis on Mr Beck's twin obsessions with Adolf Hitler and Woodrow Wilson. (Mr Milbank's book on the subject is slated for release this month.) It's kind of fun to write about Mr Beck, because he's created a zone in which Godwin's Law necessarily ceases to function; as with Eli Wiesel, it's simply inaccurate and confusing to write about Mr Beck without mentioning Nazis, because Mr Beck talks about Nazis constantly.

In August 2009, for example, Beck played an old tape of Obama making the case for a "single-payer" government-run health-care system. "I am not comparing him to this, but please, read 'Mein Kampf' for this reason," Beck told his radio listeners. "You see that Hitler told you what he was going to do. He told the Germans."...

But Obama bears the brunt of the attacks. Beck found more fascism in his 2008 campaign speech calling for an expansion of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps and the Foreign Service. "This is what Hitler did with the SS," Beck told one of his guests. "He had his own people. He had the brown shirts and then the SS."

Peace Corps, SS, same diff. And it goes on. And on. The question is why. Psychological fixation, or political strategy? Or a bit of both? Mr Milbank advances the strategic theory: like Jonah Goldberg, Mr Beck is trying to tilt the balance of anti-extremist critiques on the left and right, which normally accuse leftists of communism and rightists of fascism, by associating fascism as well as communism with the left. It then becomes impossible to accuse right-wingers of extremism, since all extremists must by definition be leftists. Clever! If the left manages to find a counterweight to Mr Beck, we can presumably expect to see arguments that because corporations are publicly chartered entities, the CEOs of all American companies are communist apparatchiks and Mitt Romney is Joseph Stalin. ("This is what Stalin did in the late 1920s and early 1930s as he was manoeuvring for control over the Party. He tacked left to eliminate the right-wingers, then right to eliminate the left-wingers. And then he had them all sentenced to death!")

An alternative explanation is that, as Mr Beck himself says, he simply didn't learn very much about history or political science in school, and just began reading on his own a few years ago. If you try to teach yourself history and political science from scratch, you're likely to draw a lot of shallow and inaccurate conclusions, particularly when you're the sort of person who's predisposed to seeing things in terms of white hats and black hats. One role of instructors, particularly at the college level, is to smack down the sweeping generalisations and facile analogies their students tend to make, and try to force them to adopt more rigorous and complicated approaches. But what if you're surrounded by people who reward you handsomely for making sweeping, slanderous generalisations, both because it delivers ratings and because it's ideologically helpful?

I would guess Mr Beck's Nazi fixation stems from a coincidence of strategic and psychological sources. His need for an absolutist, apocalyptic storyline is part of the politics of personal crisis and redemption he represents. Popular political cranks are often inspired by some personal crisis. They may lose their jobs and families to alcoholism, like Mr Beck. Or they may fail to get into university and fall out of the middle class and into poverty when their parents die, like another hugely popular author whose work fused autobiographical self-help nostrums with rabble-rousing nationalism. I mean, you could take a bunch of lines like this:

While the Goddess of Suffering took me in her arms, often threatening to crush me, my will to resistance grew, and in the end this will was victorious.

...and compare them with Mr Beck's classic American story of addiction and redemption, and its role in his political aesthetics. The story of this other author's disaffection from labour unions certainly seems like the kind of thing you might find Mr Beck retelling:

My first encounter with the Social Democrats occurred during my employment as a building worker... I was asked to join the organization. My knowledge of trade-union organization was at that time practically non-existent... [W]hat I heard was of such a nature as to infuriate me in the extreme. These men rejected everything: the nation as an invention of the 'capitalistic' (how often was I forced to hear this single word!) classes; the fatherland as an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the working class; the authority of law as a means for oppressing the proletariat; the school as an institution for breeding slaves and slaveholders; religion as a means for stultifying the people and making them easier to exploit; morality as a symptom of stupid, sheeplike patience, etc...

And so does his description of his intensive readings in history and political theory.

I began to take a position and to oppose them. But I was forced to recognize that this was utterly hopeless until I possessed certain definite knowledge of the controversial points. And so I began to examine the sources from which they drew this supposed wisdom. I studied book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet. From then on our discussions at work were often very heated. I argued back, from day to day better informed than my antagonists concerning their own knowledge...

The contempt for the intelligentsia and the mainstream press is familiar.

More than any theoretical literature, my daily reading of the Social Democratic press enabled me to study the inner nature of these thought-processes. For what a difference between the glittering phrases about freedom, beauty, and dignity in the theoretical literature, the delusive welter of words seemingly expressing the most profound and laborious wisdom, the loathsome humanitarian morality—all this written with the incredible gall that comes with prophetic certainty—and the brutal daily press, shunning no villainy, employing every means of slander, lying with a virtuosity that would bend iron beams, all in the name of this gospel of a new humanity.

And so is the author's final arrival at an idiosyncratic and conspiratorial worldview rooted in an intense emotional identification of himself with the nation.

A thousand things which I had hardly seen before now struck my notice, and others, which had previously given me food for thought, I now learned to grasp and understand. I now saw the liberal attitude of this press in a different light; the lofty tone in which it answered attacks and its method of killing them with silence now revealed itself to me as a trick as clever as it was treacherous...the sense of the whole thing was so obviously hostile to Germanism that this could only have been intentional.

But who had an interest in this?

Was all this a mere accident?

Gradually I became uncertain.

...When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes.

It's all connected, people! Except, of course, it isn't. Glenn Beck isn't an anti-semite. Adolf Hitler was not a leftist. There are a couple of legitimate ways to compare the two, notably that both employ an argumentative style in which the claim that one is speaking forbidden truths is enlisted to ward off outraged reactions to what are in fact slanderous lies. But there are good reasons why people refrain from doing things like comparing their opponents to Nazis, and one of them is that once the gloves come off, it's hard to get them back on again.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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1-20 of 43
CJ Lives wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 2:09 GMT

But, but, but... The Nazis called themselves National SOCIALISTS!

You're just trying to confuse us!

hedgefundguy wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 2:30 GMT

At one time, wasn't Beck a host of a "Morning Zoo" type
radio program?

I just want to know who left his cage unlocked.

Regards

JGradus wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 2:43 GMT

I DEMAND at least one M.S. Smack Down a day.

Every time I think that the States might actually not be insane, I just need to look at your penal system and Beck. For France I just need to look at a French.

With Italy I would never doubt.

Nick Shay wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 2:50 GMT

Glenn Beck is Hitler?

jomiku wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 2:50 GMT

I agree with you. Beck is messianic and needs to create an enemy against which he must stand. The irony -and I think this is a proper use of the word - is that he speaks about the evil Hitler even as his rhetorical methods of slimy, associative labeling and distorted facts is Hitlerian in method. This is why I refer to him as the smiling face of evil.

A sad thing is that his descriptions of church - as in if your church starts talking about social action run because that's Stalinism - is directly opposed to the pillar teachings of the Mormon Church. But that may show the failings of religion in general, that people can "believe" and yet actually "believe" in terrible things.

abjecthorror wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 3:15 GMT

I think Godwins law is often overused. There is a big difference between calling someone Hitler as a pathetic attempt to win an argument and comparing the actions of someone to those tactics used by Hitler as a cautionary note, I do feel however that a series of related actions need to be seen in order to make the comparison, on the other hand people on the other side of the argument shouldn't automatically assume that the use of the comparison means that the next logical stepis a world war and genocide.... Hitler did a lot of bad things, any one of which would be bad enough to make a cautionary tale

afvincent wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 3:19 GMT

Dear hedgefundguy,

Ad hominem fallacy, sir.

Sincerely,
afvincent

bgardner wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 3:28 GMT

I don't really think it makes any sense to think of Glenn Beck as anything other than an entertainer.

A good one at that.

LexHumana wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 3:39 GMT

The left needs to stop freaking out over Glenn Beck -- he is simply the political-commentary version of "Jerry Springer". He is over-the-top intentionally; it drives his viewership and ratings.

Kushluk wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 3:51 GMT

It's insulting to compare Glenn Beck to Hitler. Glenn has shown no talent for generalship.

Doug Pascover wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 4:10 GMT

Satirizing deplorable people is an Orwellian tactic.

baseballhead wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 4:12 GMT

Beck: You think we don't know what you're talking about when you say "take my hand"?
Dewey Cox: What do you mean? It's about holding hands.
Back: You know who's got hands? THE DEVIL! And he uses'em for holding!

nschomer wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 4:19 GMT

The author is correct that only some meaningful comparisons to Hitler may be made in the case of Glen Beck, so long as he DOES, as bgardner mentioned, remain solely a rabble-rousing entertainer. For the moment, he is more Goebbels than Hitler, but the gloves come off the minute he starts trying for elected office.

T.R. Brown wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 4:20 GMT

Glenn Beck's "fetish" demonstrates the problem with the prevalent use of single "left-right" axis (no pun intended). Using that scale, Obama is quite logically a socialist (or, worse, a communist!) because he imposes restrictions on business. Similarly, Sarah Palin is a Nazi because she would impose restrictions on individuals. Naturally, both comparisons are absurd in any analytical context. Taking that logic to its absurd conclusion, for example, results in libertarians being both leftist and rightist (upholding both social and economic freedoms) and comparable to both fascists and communists as a result.

The use of a more complex double-axis is far from perfect but certainly more preferable. As long as the media and political classes insist on the use of traditional left-wing and right-wing categorizations, however, I think we'll simply see more of this "Obama is a Stalinist and Beck is a Nazi" rhetoric.

Oct 4th 2010 4:44 GMT

Dammit, DP, that was clever. I've never seen anyone play on the potential double meaning of "Orwellian" before.

k.a.gardner wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 4:49 GMT

To follow-up on nschomer's mention of bgardner's comment:

Both Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck were on their "Bold & Fresh Tour 2010" in Dallas on Saturday night. They claimed ... "It's an event that makes professional wrestling seem like a night at the opera." !

Oct 4th 2010 5:11 GMT

And here I thought Beck was just trying to create parallels to Roosevelt for Obama's legacy.

MyopiaRocks wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 5:16 GMT

He's a fool. The oxygen will dry up and his ratings will plummet with the next republican administration (unless they're commie fascists, too! Oh no, they're everywhere! Look behind you!).

Just look at Rush: He was so bored when W was president he had to become what he despised: A degenerate drug addict living an immoral womanizing lifestyle. Maybe Beck will join the peace corps?

jr_ wrote:
Oct 4th 2010 5:33 GMT

Glen Beck's Hitler fetish is interesting... I guess. Personally, I am more curious about progressives' Glen Beck fetish.

1-20 of 43

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