This is going to be a quick diary.
I just saw at MediaMatters that the organizers of an Illinois congressional debate are facing death threats for refusing to recite that creepy example of ritualized conformity known as the Pledge of Allegiance. The story has taken off on many right-wing web sites such as Big Government, Hot Air & Fox Nation.
But what really surprised me above all is reading that Glenn Beck has seized upon this story. Why? Well, I'll let Michael Lind explain:
Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling utopian novel "Looking Backward: 2007-1887," which described a collectivist America in 2007 in which everyone is drafted in an "industrial army" and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)
The Bellamys, like many at the time, were inspired by the integral nationalist and statist ideals that were percolating in Europe. From the 1890s until the 1940s, American schoolchildren often accompanied recitation of the pledge with "the Bellamy salute," a stiff-armed salute of the ancient Roman kind that was indistinguishable from the later fascist and Nazi salutes. Heil Amerika! It was Franklin Roosevelt who suggested replacing the salute with a hand over the heart.
In the course of the 20th century, support for the pledge migrated from the collectivist left to the reactionary right. The original Bellamy pledge read: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all." In 1923 WASP nativists prevailed in having "my flag" replaced by "the flag of the United States of America," to make sure that young Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, among others, knew they weren't pledging allegiance to the old country. In 1954, Congress inserted the words "under God," following an influential sermon by a Protestant pastor who argued that the model for the United States in the Cold War should be ancient Sparta.
Could anything be more foreign to America's enlightened 18th-century liberal and republican traditions than this toxic compound of collectivism, nativism, Spartan militarism and theocracy?
The idea of wingnuts getting tearful over a "spontaneous" recital of a collectivist prayer may seem ironic at first, but it's really quite fitting.
Despite all this rhetoric about conservatives being "rugged individualists" or "anti-government rebels," the American right's stance has always been one of rigid subservience to the prevailing social order no matter how unjust it may be. They only become "rebels" when it is to preserve or restore the status quo they feel entitled to. Their stance on both social policy and economic policy is actually quite stifling to the individual. Social conservatives demonize all lifestyles, sexual orientations and cultures they feel are somehow "alien" or "other." The image of the single mother or the openly gay man is terrifying to them because it breaks the bland forced conformity they seek to impose on America. Likewise, economic conservatives tend to have no problem with a large monopolies that wipe out real choice and individual character. At the same time they oppose regulations on these monopolies that protect the rights of minorities and individuals considered to be "deviant" by the wider collective.
So, while today's conservatives may disagree with Bellamy about economic equality, they certainly share his view of state-mandated conformity.