Glenn Beck: The man and the mission

“What, exactly, does Glenn Beck want?” asked Jules Witcover in the Baltimore Sun. The conservative Fox News host is more popular than ever, drawing tens of thousands of his fans to last week’s “Restoring Honor” rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Yet Beck gave them none of the anti-Obama rhetoric he serves up nightly on his cable show. Instead, said Joanna Weiss in The Boston Globe, Beck staged a revival meeting brimming with patriotism, piety, and paranoia. Describing himself as a humble vessel of divine will, Beck thundered that “God is the answer” to all the problems facing America. He didn’t spell out those problems in much detail, but “Beck’s worldview is diffuse enough to cover all sorts of dissatisfactions,” from the “secular socialists” taking over Washington to taxes to deficit spending. “What seems to unite his followers is a sense of persecution—and a need for some sort of cosmic validation.”

Why not take him at his word? said Jonah Goldberg in the Chicago Tribune. Beck “explicitly and studiously” avoided any mention of politics, yet his critics insist this was a trick to advance his political agenda. But why is it so hard to believe that he simply wanted to rally Americans around the Constitution and an ecumenical vision of God? It sure sounded familiar to me, said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. Beck, a self-professed former alcoholic and drug addict, took his message straight from a 12-step meeting: We Americans have succumbed to corruption and sin, and must look our failures straight in the eye and “surrender to a higher power.”

Come now, said Ed Kilgore in The New Republic. When conservative icons like Beck and his special guest Sarah Palin lead a throng of conservatives in a celebration of all-American virtues, the unambiguous message is that “their cultural and political enemies share none of them.” When Beck speaks of the growing threat to the America he once knew, said Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com, he’s making a gut-level appeal to “white self-pity.” His rising popularity, and that of the Tea Party, is a reflection of the growing realization that within decades, whites “will no longer be the majority.” The bad news, for Beck and his frightened legions, is that they may pray all they like, but “the U.S. population is simply not going to be replenished by Puritan pilgrims from New England.”

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