From the reaction to Glenn Beck’s rally last weekend at the Lincoln Memorial, you’d think the right-wing hordes had marched into Washington to personally storm the White House. But as is usually the case, the truth is much more boring.
Billed as the “Restoring Honor Rally,” the primary themes of the speeches were patriotism and faith, and the rally as a whole can be seen an ecumenical call to a religious creed that melds generic Judeo-Christian belief with mystical Americanism. Beck talked of “our sacred charters of history,” but the content of those charters was stripped away to leave evocative but disjointed fragments—”all men are created equal,” “we the people,” “liberty and justice for all”—mixed together into a religio-patriotic soup of overproduced sentimentality. The Founding Fathers were similarly stripped of substance and lionized for their character, faith, perseverance, and so on. Beck was essentially promulgating a made-for-TV version of American civil religion.
The civil rights movement figured prominently in Beck’s American narrative. To his critics, Beck was cynically appropriating Martin Luther King’s legacy for purposes contrary to King’s vision of social justice. But I’m convinced that Beck is sincere when he channels King, whom he often invokes on his TV program. Glenn Beck’s understanding of the Civil Rights movement mirrors his version of the founding era—they are both distilled to a few key phrases and images and enveloped in mawkish nostalgia. In fact, the uplifting symbols and soundbites of the civil-rights era fit in perfectly with Beck’s weepy, sentimental reading of American history.
Although there were isolated references to political issues such as government debt, this rally was a largely content-free affirmation of the patriotism, faith and cultural values of the crowd. Ross Douthat correctly described it as an expression of cultural solidarity rather than a political demonstration. “For a weekend, at least,” Douthat wrote, “Beck proved that he can conjure the thrill of a culture war without the costs of combat, and the solidarity of identity politics without any actual politics.”
Sarah Palin was a natural choice to keynote this event, as she has long been the head of the identity-politics wing of the Tea Party. A supporter the AIG and bank bailouts, Palin nevertheless captured the heartland’s heart with her espousal of traditional values, populist us-versus-them rhetoric and broadsides against “media elites.” She has emerged as the Tea Party’s own gun-toting fertility goddess.
Billed variously as a rally for the troops, honor, the founding fathers, the Constitution, charity, veterans, and faith, the message of the Restoring Honor rally basically came down to this: Keep being awesome, Red America.
So how did the spectators react to Beck’s rally? Mostly with boredom. Econo-blogger Robert Wenzel, who happened upon the crowds as the rally was breaking up, wrote that “The Glenn Beck crowd looked totally bored. No one was pumped up. No one was moved to cry… If I saw these faces walking out of a movie theatre showing, I would bet the movie would prove to be a total bust.” My own impression was that the crowd was in good spirits but relatively sedate considering that they were at an event that tens of thousands had traveled across the country to attend.
This wasn’t a Tea Party, but it was a Tea Party crowd. Plenty of rally-goers were wearing t-shirts sporting Gadsden Flag design and other Tea Party themes. Was Glenn Beck’s values-fest really what the Tea Party is all about?
Much ink has been spilled psychoanalyzing the Tea Party and trying to discern its goals and motivations. Tea Partiers have risen up to oppose bailouts, mortgage assistance to homeowners, Obamacare, and illegal immgration, and thrown their support behind favored politicians such as Marco Rubio, Scott Brown and Joe Miller. But despite its leaderless nature and fuzzy goals, the Tea Party has more or less consistently emphasized a core small-government message.
Consider the case of Rand Paul, whose insurgent campaign rode a groundswell of Tea Party support and a Palin endorsement to victory in Kentucky’s GOP Senate primary. Although Paul has toned down his non-interventionist rhetoric for his campaign, it’s noteworthy that his willingness to criticize military spending and commitments has not seemed to diminish his appeal to the majority of Tea Partiers. His success, then, provides persuasive evidence that Tea Party, despite its relatively inchoate character and leaderless structure, can best be understood as a libertarian-conservative coalition against increasing government debt, spending, and control over the economy.
But the Tea Party and its sympathizers have nevertheless shown a tendency to dilute their attention by fixating on largely meaningless, symbolic cultural issues like the Ground Zero mosque and perceived affronts to American pride, such as Obama’s alleged tendency to bow and apologize to foreign leaders. And the Tea Party’s vocal fringe constantly distracts itself with absurdities such as the controversy over Obama’s birth certificate.
The more the Tea Party gets wrapped up with patriotic outrage and self-affirmation, the more it will lose sight of its original goal to roll back the state. Glenn Beck’s rally, then, can be seen as a distraction on a massive scale.
Has Glenn Beck set out to neuter the Tea Party?
If I had a blackboard behind me, I might sketch a diagram linking Beck, through Sarah Palin, with William Kristol and work the connections all the way back to Leon Trotsky via NYU’s Alcove No. 1. So is Beck the neocon puppet-masters’ tool to distract the restive masses with his flag-waving clown show while the GOP is delivered safely back into the hands of big-government convervatism?
As much fun as this scenario is, Occam’s Razor directs us to adopt the more plausible alternative: Glenn Beck serves Glenn Beck. If the goal of this rally was to build the Glenn Beck brand, it succeeded magnificently.
And if Beck/Palin-style red-state cultural affirmation captures the energies of the Tea Party’s erstwhile middle-American revolutionaries, those who dreaded the propsect of a potent anti-government movement can breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe President Obama should write Glenn Beck a thank-you note.