Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance
By Alexander Zaitchik
Hardcover, 288 pages, $25.95
John Wiley & Sons
May 2010
In recent years, Beck has increasingly become a narcissistic demagogue huffing delusions of grandeur, but his ego and his narcissism feed, and have always fed, directly into a larger business plan. They are one and the same. Beck's narcissism and demagoguery cannot be separated from his business success any more than that success can be separated from the spiraling madness we see on Fox News and in Washington, D.C.
Beck's political grandstanding is, at bottom, little more than a circus entertainer's love of an audience, matched with a fine appreciation for the uses of notoriety, spectacle, and shamelessness. Like Barnum's great museums and traveling freak shows, Beck's twice-daily performances, one on radio and one on television, trade in light amusement, canny deceit, and titillating monstrosity.
Glenn Beck, perhaps more than any other figure on the conservative right, presents a dilemma for movement progressives: Is it bad politics for us to take him seriously? Are we merely giving him more oxygen by giving him attention, feeding his popularity by highlighting his extremism? Is fact-checking his numerous distortions and outright lies worth the effort? Surely, we think, anyone rational can see his buffoonery, and those who would be convinced by any fact check already are not believing him. And yet his camp followers won’t be switching any allegiances based on anything Media Matters—or, for that matter, neutral traditional media outlets--debunks. So what’s the point?
Well, the main point for journalist Alexander Zaitchik in his excellent critical biography Common Nonsense, is that Beck is tying into a dark side of America that’s been with us for a long, long time, combining the fan-flaming of Elmer Gantry and Billy Sunday with the mushy, god-based, red-white-and-blue streak of reactionarianism that rejects modernism and embraces an America that never, ever was. It’s not so much Beck's getting history so very wrong that is so disturbing—it’s that so many Americans are eagerly egging him on, seemingly begging to be brought into his Very American Fantasy.
Reality doesn’t matter. Sentiment does. “Gut feeling” does. Tears and confessionalism, militarism and simplistic, unquestioning nationalism does. And Beck is both riding that frothing wave and, to a certain extent, channeling it. But clearly, it's not entirely under his control.
Zaitchik’s book sketches the outlines of Beck’s early life and career, his years as a regular old AM shock jock who wasn’t really successful until he stumbled onto the sentimental nationalism circuit. The trademark mean streak, however, shone through even in the early years; the author relates how Beck took to the airwaves to “kid” a former radio show partner after his wife suffered a miscarriage that he couldn’t even make a baby right.
This is a beautifully written and insightful biography—thoughtful, considered, and very intentional about the need to understand Beck both as a symbol of something larger going on in America and as a person, or as the author so brilliantly phrases it, “Our very own crackpot capitalist Che Guevara—fueling his legend and pushing his ideology with one hand, selling the T-shirt—millions of them—with the other.”
This wedding of capitalism, anger and misty-eyed American exceptionalism is a constant throughout the book. As a reader, you well might end up with dozens of highlighted pages that perfectly capture this mix. Take Zaitchik describing the particular flavor of Beck’s 2003 Rally for America:
If this was political theater with Riefenstahlian overtones, it was fascism on a picnic blanket. The events were a strange American hybrid that combined Nurembergian expressions of power, blind allegiance to a divinely anointed leader, and TNN schmaltz.
Or Zaitchik’s take on Beck’s bestselling blockbuster:
The content of Common Sense, which debuted at number one in June 2009, is standard Beckian corporate-populist quack-quack. Underneath the colonial theme-park prose are the usual bromides held together by spit and venom. It is spiced with idiotic historical assessments ("Our collective experience since the Founding has taught us all governments are fascist in nature") and sprinkled with Mormon dispensationalism ("Great and powerful miracles are about to unfold before us").
The greatest value in the book is Zaitchik’s patient exploration of the affect Beck’s conversion to Mormonism has exerted on his politics and beliefs, but also on his methods of message of delivery. Beck has managed something fairly difficult in the presentation of his schmaltz to the audiences he’s dog-whistling: he’s using the tried and true confessional style of his chosen religion to rope in evangelicals and even more secular (but teary-eyed) members of the hard right. This is no small feat, as Mitt Romney can testify; many on the right are not all at ease with Mormonism, and Beck's bridging of its style with old-fashioned knee-jerk patriotism is part of his unique appeal.
It is hard to imagine a religion better suited to Beck's emotional needs and personal style than the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Mormonism has institutionalized Beck's favorite mode of speech, the sentimental monologue. It also encourages a certainty of spirit based on self-revelation that lies outside argument, fact, or logic. What Beck does on radio and television is amped-up version of the testimony ritual; he fervently talks about what he believes—knows—is happening, describes the dark secrets he has uncovered, conveys the transcendent importance of these discoveries, and frames it all in a Manichean narrative—America as a battlefield on which God-fearing defenders of liberty face off against evil big-government conspirators...
Along with being the teariest form of Christianity, Mormonism has developed maudlin sentimentalism into an art and an industry. Mainstream Mormonism is the closest thing the United States has to a Disney religion, with orthodox culture that has replaced the tragic sensibility with a masochistic addiction to uplift. The church produces and promotes a steady stream of LDS-approved books, music, and films that form a G-rated Wellbutrin-fueled world unto itself. In this world, the grand Wurlitzer of human experience is reduced to a single-note caricature of the redemption theme.
That revisionist history nationalistic schmaltz was ushered in the front door of American politics by Ronald Reagan certainly doesn’t hurt Beck’s cause or style. In fact, it could be argued that Beck, had he preceded the “Morning in America” soft focus presidency of the Great Communicator would not be the raging (in both senses of the word) success he is today.
Central to this over-the-top sentimentalism is an undercurrent of persecution and falling prey to mysterious powers that are plotting the nefarious undoing of America behind the scenes. “Beck has been quietly mainstreaming right-wing consirpacy culture for the better part of a decade,” Zaitchik writes. And we’d all better start taking this seriously. It’s very American, very alarming and has some very serious implications for the future of democracy:
Beck is the latest in a long tradition to prove that a vision needn't be serious to package and sell. It need only be compelling on its own deformed terms. His brand of righteous antistate conservatism tantalizes so many precisely because of its operatic nostalgia, opiatic history, and tin-can Orwellian imagination. It is a vision of America as a rugged farmer with no need or care for subsidies, who watches The Lawrence Welk Show from a rocking chair in the heartland of a country whose birth God Himself performed. In this America, patriots choose Chevy trucks over bullet trains, an immutable Constitution over case law, and extremist, conversation-stopping rhetoric over informed, reasoned debate.
How we, as progressives, engage with a population that yearns for this non-existent version of America, particularly when so many of our citizens are in economic crisis, is something that Common Nonsense can at least begin to help us with. Glenn Beck and his appeal, no matter how ridiculous we may find it, is most certainly real. This sensational book is a great place to start exploring the phenomenon.