More Than Just a Lunatic

Like many viewers, I assumed Glenn Back was just a lunatic dedicated to reviving McCarthyism. While this is true, it's not the whole story. This piece by Joanna Brooks appeared in the religion dispatches blog.
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How Mormonism Built Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck leans forward on his elbows. His voice hushes. His eyes grow red at the corners. He presses his lips together and clears his throat. He cannot speak. The tears fall, and just for a moment the brashest voice in American conservatism today falls silent.

This is what happens when Beck tells the story of his 1999 conversion to Mormonism.

“I was friendless, working in the smallest radio market I had ever worked in... a hopeless alcoholic, abusing drugs every day,” Beck said in an interview taped last fall. “I was trying to find a job and nobody would hire me... couldn’t get an agent to represent me.”

That’s when Beck’s wife-to-be Tania suggested that the family go on a “church tour,” which finally led (after some prodding from Beck’s longtime on-air partner Pat Gray, a Mormon) to his local Mormon wardhouse. Six months later, the Beck family joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

“I was baptized on a Sunday, and on Monday”—Beck’s throat tightens again; he wipes tears from his eyes with his index fingers—“an agent called me out of the blue.” Three days later, Beck was offered his own political talk radio show at WFLA-AM in Tampa, Florida, the job that put him on the road from “morning zoo” radio prankster to conservative media heavyweight.

Spiritual narratives of the I-once-was-lost-now-I-am-financially-sound variety are commonplace within Mormonism, which, like most of American Protestantism, has never been allergic to wealth. The institutional culture of the Mormon Church is strongly corporate, down to the dark suits, white shirts, and red or blue ties church leaders wear instead of vestments; Mormonism’s most powerful public figures like Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman Jr., and Bill Marriott Jr., come from the business world.

But whether or not one believes that God rewards baptism with fortune, it is clear that Glenn Beck’s conversion to and education in the Mormon faith after 1999 corresponds precisely with his rise as a media force.

Beck, who was raised Catholic in Washington state, has produced, with the help of Mormon Church-owned Deseret Book Company, the DVD An Unlikely Mormon: The Conversion Story of Glenn Beck (2008); Mormon fansites invite visitors to learn more about Beck’s beliefs by clicking through to the official Web site of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But what these fansites don’t reveal is the extent to which Mormonism has given Beck key elements of his on-air personality and messaging.

Teary Tirades and Mormon Masculinity

Before 1999, Glenn Beck told jokes and pulled on-air stunts for a living. He developed the content of his current conservative messaging (an amalgation of anti-communism, United States-founder worship, and connect-the-dots conspiracy theorizing) after his entree into the deeply insular world of Mormon thought and culture. A significant figure in this world is the late Cleon Skousen (1913–2006), the archconservative and fiercely anti-communist Brigham Young University professor, founder of the Freeman Society, and author of 15 books, including The Naked Capitalist, The Making of America, and Prophecy and Modern Times. Beck, who first cited Skousen in his 2003 book The Real America: Messages from the Heart and the Heartland, later started pitching Skousen’s 1981 book The 5,000 Year Leap on air in December, 2008. He wrote a preface for a new edition of the book issued a few months later and in his March 2009 kick-off of the 9/12 movement declared Skousen’s book to be “divinely inspired.” In a recent article for Salon.com, Alexander Zaitchik suggested that Beck “rescued [Skousen] from the remainder pile of history.” But Cleon Skousen was never remaindered among the most politically conservative Mormons, for whom he has been a household name since the 1960s.

It is likely that Beck owes his brand of Founding Father-worship to Mormonism, where reverence for the founders and the United States Constitution as divinely inspired are often-declared elements of orthodox belief. Mormon Church President Wilford Woodruff (1807–1898) declared that George Washington and the signers of the Declaration of Independence appeared to him in the Mormon Temple in St. George, Utah in 1877, and requested that he perform Mormon temple ordinances on their behalf. Many Mormons also believe that Joseph Smith prophesied in 1843 that the US Constitution would one day “hang by a thread” and be saved by faithful Mormons; this idea was given new life in the 1960s by former US Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, who cited Smith’s 1843 prophecy from the pulpit while speaking as a member of the Church’s Quorum of Twelve Apostles.

Many key elements of Beck’s on-the-fly messaging derive from a Mormon lexicon, such as his Twitter-issued September 19 call: “Sept 28. Lets make it a day of Fast and Prayer for the Republic. Spread the word. Let us walk in the founders steps.” This call to fasting and prayer may indeed have been an appropriation of the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, but it is also rooted in the traditional Mormon practice of holding individual, familial, and collective fasts to address spiritual challenges.

Even the overt sentimentality Beck now indulges from time to time was formed within the cradle of Mormon literary culture. Take, for example, his novel The Christmas Sweater (2008) (co-authored by Mormon writer Jason Wright) and its accompanying children’s picture book, which tell the story of an impoverished twelve-year-old boy who rejects a “handmade, ugly sweater” his widowed mother knits him for Christmas, only to watch his mother die in a fiery car crash hours later. This punishing sentimentality is a consistent feature of Mormon storytelling from Church-produced cinematic classics like Cipher in the Snow (1973) and The Mailbox (1977) to the New York Times-bestselling novel The Christmas Box (1995) by Mormon author Richard Paul Evans.

Finally, Beck’s oft-ridiculed penchant for punctuating his tirades with tears is the hallmark of a distinctly Mormon mode of masculinity. As sociologist David Knowlton has written, “Mormonism praises the man who is able to shed tears as a manifestation of spirituality.” Crying and choking up are understood by Mormons as manifestations of the Holy Spirit. For men at every rank of Mormon culture and visibility, appropriately-timed displays of tender emotion are displays of power.

Peace on the Religious Right between Mormons and Evangelicals?

Indeed, Beck, who grew up without a father, narrates his conversion and personal transformation around a series of tearful bonding moments with Mormon men, from the Sunday School teacher who first taught him about the Mormon concept of Zion—“Tears started to roll down his cheeks, and he said, ‘It can only happen if I truly love you and you love me’”—to his baptism by immersion by his longtime friend Pat Gray, who was so choked up, according to Beck, that “he couldn’t get the words out.”

Not typical of Mormon masculinity are Beck’s high-decibel swings between bombast and self-deprecation. Such demonstrative excesses are socialized out of most Mormon men during a regimented process of masculine formation that begins with entry into the lowest ranks of Mormonism’s lay priesthood at age 12, intensifies during compulsory missionary service from age 19 through 21, and continues throughout a lifetime of service within hierarchical priesthood quorums. A textbook example of the traditional Mormon “man of steel and velvet” is Mitt Romney, whose inability to connect with the Republican base may have as much to do with his lack of familiar jocularity and chest-thumping outrage as it does with the perceived weirdness of his Mormon beliefs. As a convert, Beck missed out on crucial early years of Mormon male socialization. Consequently, his renegade persona may endear him even more to his Mormon male fans who might like to comport themselves as he does, but feel they cannot.

It’s true that his Mormonism sometimes gets Beck into trouble with evangelical Christians, who have long antagonized Mormons by denying the authenticity of their belief in Jesus Christ and deriding the Mormon Church as a cult. Last December, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family Web site pulled a Beck column, citing concerns about his Mormon ties. Still, Beck’s spectacular rise suggests that evangelical conservatives (especially those under 40 who may not remember the anti-Mormon cult crusades of the 1980s) are increasingly willing to set aside their reservations about Mormons when it suits their pragmatic and political interests.

Glenn Beck marks an unprecedented national mainstreaming of a peculiar strand of religious political conservatism rooted in, and once isolated to, the Mormon culture regions of the American West. That Mormons are capable of leveraging disproportionate political influence with decisive results was one of the great lessons of California’s 2008 election season, wherein readily-mobilized Mormons, who make up 2% of California’s population, contributed more than 50% of the individual donations to the successful anti-marriage equality Proposition 8 campaign, and a sizeable majority of its on-the-ground efforts.

How much traction Glenn Beck can muster remains to be seen. But if the American religious right has sometimes been imagined as a monolithic product of the evangelical Deep South and Bible Belt, the rise of Glenn Beck suggests that those who would understand American conservatism might also look West, toward Salt Lake City.

Global Warming and Corporate Cooling

Joshua Holland looks at the Chamber of Commerce in Alternet:

What distinguishes it from other conservative lobbying shops is its massive resources; the CoC has a budget of upwards of $150 million per year, and it throws that into a wide array of affiliate organizations that influence public policy in myriad ways and at every level of government.

Given its reach and impact on our public-policy debates, the CoC has operated under the radar to some degree. But its claim to represent a consensus of American businesses -- presumably a pragmatic role, given the diversity of its members' interests -- took a hit last week with the high-profile defection of a number of major firms because of the CoC's unyielding opposition to the very moderate and distinctly business-friendly climate-change bills wending through Congress.

Such corporate heavyweights as Nike, GE and Apple -- and energy giants like Exelon and Pacific Energy and Gas -- have recently either distanced themselves from the Chamber, resigned their seats on its board of directors or quit the organization altogether in protest of what PG&E CEO Peter Darby called the CoC's "extreme position" on global warming and "disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality of [the] challenges [it poses]."

Read it here. ey

Mole's-Eye View of Wingnut Culture

Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah, on NPR's Fresh Air:

I think there is a perception, especially within the media, that Barack Obama could avoid inciting the kind of opposition that President Clinton did by implementing a moderate to liberal agenda. And what I was able to witness at these gun shows earlier in the year, before the battle was brewing over health care and the government bailout, was an incipient extreme opposition to Barack Obama building within the Republican grassroots and on the far right.

And it stemmed from conspiracy theories spread by radio hosts who are not very well-known in the mainstream but are extremely popular, like Alex Jones, that President Obama had a plan to put right-wing dissidents in concentration camps under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. And when I spoke to people at gun shows, this conspiracy theory was really popular, the same with, you know, Obama's supposed plan for mass gun seizures.

And so, people were buying as many guns as they could, including high-powered weaponry, like 50-caliber, semiautomatic rifles, which have been shown to be able to down aircraft, you know, sniper rifles that can be easily disassembled and put into a briefcase that's concealable. I showed this in a video I did called "Gun Show Nation."

And the crowd you see at gun shows, I mean, some people are just basic, apolitical gun enthusiasts, but it's a very political gathering. There are Confederate flags. There are even Nazi flags being displayed throughout the conference because it brings in elements that are even considered extreme within the right-wing grassroots, like neo-Nazis.

And it's a gathering place. Gun shows have become a gathering place for people who are the most extreme opponents of Barack Obama's agenda, and they're energized again by the battle over health care. And we're seeing it across the board; it's not just with the extreme, militia-oriented elements. We're seeing it within the Christian right.

A recent poll showed that seven out of 10 white evangelicals are extremely opposed to Barack Obama's proposed health-care reforms. And the Christian right is raising a lot of money, organizing against health care. So it's across the board. The right is growing again. And those who pronounced the death of conservatism, or the death of the Christian right, were premature.

Read the whole interview. ey

From Open Racism to Compassionate Conservatism and Back

Michelle Goldberg of the American Prospect writes:

Throughout the Bush years, homophobia and professions of anti-racism were twinned in a weird way, as if the latter proved that the right wasn't simply still skulking around history's dark side. At a deeply surreal 2006 event at the Greater Exodus Baptist Church, an African American church in downtown Philadelphia, leaders of the religious right invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks on behalf of gay marriage bans and Bush's judicial nominees. At the end of the evening, several dozen clergymen, black and white, joined hands in prayer at the front of the room. "Black Americans, white Americans," said a beaming Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council. "Christians, standing together." The whole premise of compassionate conservatism -- which shoveled taxpayer money towards administration-friendly churches like Greater Exodus Baptist -- was that the right cared as deeply as the left about issues like inner city poverty.

What a difference an election makes. Even if you believed that compassionate conservatism was always a bit of a con, it's amazing to see how quickly it has vanished, and how fast an older style of reaction, one more explicitly rooted in racial grievance, has reasserted itself. [...]

It's not, after all, as if the Christian right was something completely removed from the old racist right -- rather, as Reed acknowledged all those years ago, they were initially deeply intertwined. The Columbia historian Randall Balmer has shown that Christian conservatives were not, contrary to their own mythology, initially mobilized by their outrage at Roe vs. Wade. Rather, what spurred them into action was the IRS's attempt to revoke the tax-exempt status of whites only Christian schools, schools that had been created specifically to evade desegregation. [...]

Before he became a political organizer himself, Falwell -- who ran one of those Christian segregation academies -- attacked Martin Luther King Jr. for his political activism. ("Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners," he said.) Before Tony Perkins was basking in homophobic interracial amity, he paid Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. In 2004, David Barton, then the vice president of the Texas GOP, spoke at an event featuring white preachers and ministry workers dropping to their knees before their black brethren to plead for forgiveness. Thirteen years earlier, Barton had twice been a featured speaker at meetings of the Christian Identity movement, which preaches that blacks are sub-human "mud people." One could go on and on.

As racism grew politically unacceptable, the Christian right was able to channel resentment over the decline of white male privilege into a Kulterkampf directed at more acceptable enemies, like gays and lesbians. The movement borrowed heavily from Catholic theology and convinced itself that it was in a righteous struggle against a culture of death, not a culture of diversity. Now the mask is off. One wonders if fifteen years from now, they'll bother apologizing all over again.

Read the whole piece. ey

Movement Building -- On-line and Off

Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, in the Huffington Post:

Contrary to what a lot of people may think, it wasn't the technology that made the Obama movement possible. What went hand in hand with the technology was a resolute and unyielding focus on good-old-fashioned political organizing. As a movement, we measured our success by the number of doors knocked on, phone calls made, and dollars raised. The array of technology platforms that we used simply helped us extend our organizing capacity and refine our work.

So where is this movement now?

It's alive and well. The people who organized and fought so hard last year to elect Barack Obama as president still care just as much, if not more, about the issues that were central to the campaign. The values that we shared in common -- a commitment to rethinking politics, to transparency and openness, to personal responsibility, to a socially and economically just society -- are just as vibrant as they were a year ago.

What's missing is the organizing leadership....

I do believe progressive organizations of all stripes have a responsibility to understand what happened in the Obama campaign in 2008 and adopt a similar strategy. Regardless of the issue that a given progressive group is organizing for, there is much to be learned.

Some guidelines to start:

* People are your biggest asset. They are not to be treated as a loose network of piggy banks spread across the country. Each person has her own passions, her own story, her own reason for caring. Listen to these stories, help these individual tell them, and make it easier for others to listen to them as well.
* Give your supporters not just a cause, but a moment to rally around. Events are what galvanize people to action. Even for the causes that require long-term commitments, set a date and a goal to organize toward.
* Embrace networking technology. The Internet is not just a platform to help you blast your carefully crafted and rigorously tested message as widely as possible. Whether it's on your own site, on Facebook, or on any other network, think about how you can use technology to encourage your supporters to speak and to spread their passion. Setting up a page and calling it a day is not enough.
* Building support for a cause requires human contact. A slick online events platform will do you no good unless you have people on staff who know key people in key places who can get more people to host more events and turn out more attendees. State-of-the-art technology can only go so far. A good-old-fashioned conversation can take you the rest of the way.
* Invest in technology and organizing. Neither of these things comes cheap, but when they have the proper budget, they can yield enormous returns.

There are tens of millions of Americans who care about progressive issues that affect all of us. If progressive groups fail to take advantage of this energy and demonstrated capacity, they will waste a uniquely potent moment in American history.

Read the whole article. ey

Wingnuts & Bolts

Chip Berlet identifies "the tools of hate" that create a common language for rightwing backlash:

When these are blended with conspiracy theories about elite and lazy parasites, the combination is toxic to democracy.

DUALISM
Dualism is simply the tendency to see the world in a binary model in which the forces of absolute good are struggling against the forces of absolute evil. This can be cast in religious or secular story lines or “narratives.”

SCAPEGOATING
Scapegoating involves wrongly stereotyping a person or group of people as sharing negative traits and blaming them for societal problems, while the primary source of the problem (if it is real) is overlooked or absolved of blame. Scapegoating can become a mass phenomenon when a social or political movement does the stereotyping. It is easier to scapegoat a group if it is first demonized.

DEMONIZATION
Demonization is a process through which people target individuals or groups as the embodiment of evil, turning individuals in scapegoated groups into an undifferentiated, faceless force threatening the idealized community. The sequence moves from denigration to dehumanization to demonization, and each step generates an increasing level of hatred of the objectified and scapegoated “Other.”

One way to demonize a target group is to claim that the scapegoated group is plotting against the public good. This often involves demagogic appeals.

CONSPIRACISM
Conspiracism frames demonized enemies “as part of a vast insidious plot against the common good, while it valorizes the scapegoater as a hero for sounding the alarm.” Conspiracist thinking can move easily from the margins to the mainstream, as has happened repeatedly in the United States. Several scholars have argued that historic and contemporary conspiracism, especially the apocalyptic form, is a more widely shared worldview in the United States than in most other industrialized countries.

Conspiracism gains a mass following in times of social, cultural, economic, or political stress. The issues of immigration, demands for racial or gender equality, gay rights, power struggles between nations, wars — all can be viewed through a conspiracist lens.

Historian Richard Hofstadter established the leading analytical framework in the 1960s for studying conspiracism in public settings in his essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” He identified “the central preconception” of the paranoid style as a belief in the “existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.”

According to Hofstadter, this was common in certain figures in the political right, and was accompanied with a “sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic” which “goes far to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation.”

Then he describes the political trends behind the current rightwing backlash:

In her book Populism, Margaret Canovan defined four types of political populism. Populist democracy is championed by progressives from the LaFollettes of Wisconsin to Jesse Jackson.

However, the other three types — politicians’ populism, reactionary populism and populist dictatorship — are antidemocratic forms of right-wing populism. These were characterized in various combinations in the 1990s by Ross Perot, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan and David Duke — four straight white Christian men trying to ride the same horse.

Two versions of right-wing populism are current in both the United States and Europe: one centered around “get the government off my back” economic libertarianism, coupled with a rejection of mainstream political parties, which is more attractive to the upper-middle class and small entrepreneurs. The other is based on xenophobia and ethnocentric nationalism, which is more attractive to the lower middle class and wage workers. These two groupings unite behind candidates that attack the current regime since both constituencies identify an intrusive government as the cause of their grievances.

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The GOP Jack-in-the-Box

Glenn Greenwald ain't too surprised about Joe Wilson's catcall:

That some people react with particular animus towards the first black President is obvious. But there is nothing new about the character of the American Right or their concerted efforts to destroy the legitimacy of Obama's presidency.[...]

Nothing that the GOP is doing to Obama should be the slightest bit surprising because this is the true face of the American Right -- and that's been true for a very long time now. It didn't just become true in the last few months or in the last two years. Recent months is just the time period when the media began noticing and acknowledging what they are: a pack of crazed, primitive radicals who don't really believe in the country's core founding values and don't merely disagree with, but contest the legitimacy of, any elected political officials who aren't part of their movement. Before the last year or so, the media pretended that this was a serious, adult, substantive political movement, but it wasn't any truer then than it is now. All one has to do is review their behavior during the Clinton presidency -- to say nothing of the Bush years -- to see that none of this is remotely new. Nothing they're doing to Obama is a break from their past behavior; it's just a natural and totally predictable continuation of it.

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