John Derbyshire on that Beck rally:
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/glenn_beck_beggar-in-chief/
On the one had, of course I was glad to see the Beckites/Tea Partiers out there in such numbers, and glad for the success of the rally. They jabbed a finger in the eyes not only of the left-liberal elites, but of the clueless and pusillanimous Republican establishment, who wouldn't touch Glenn Beck and his followers with a barge pole, other than to coo some sweet nothings at them when there are votes to be harvested. I hate liberals and I regard the Republican establishment the way Evelyn Waugh‘s friend regarded the modern world: "with calm despair." So put me down as, if not precisely pro-Beckâ€"still not knowing enough about the guy and his viewsâ€"quite definitely anti-anti-Beck.
On the other hand, as with most conservatism nowadays, I was left with the impression of a crowd of people marching east on the deck of a west-bound ship. The underlying concepts of Beckism are all liberal. They dare not be otherwise, or Beck would lose his TV show, his O'Reilly spots, his publisher and sponsors, Sarah Palin (and all his other links to official Republicanism), and be cast into outer darkness. To pursue the ship analogy, he would have jumped overboard. All public displays in our society, from 30-second TV commercials to Acts of Congress, are constructed on liberal premises. That's the direction the ship is sailingâ€"westward, to the left.
Hence Beck's extravagant praise for Martin Luther King, a radical leftist. Hence the failure to mention uncomfortable truths like, to take a random sample:
* the impossibility of continuing federal entitlements at anything like their present levels;
* the radical reduction in public services and public employment that would follow if tax rates were lowered to the degree Beck and his supporters claim to wish;
* the mad folly of giving settlement visas to a million foreigners a year when unemployment stands at ten percent;
* the doubleplus-mad folly of permitting illegal settlement of millions of Mexican and Central American peasants to form a permanent new underclass making huge new demands on government services;
* the gross and pointless squandering of public monies on crackpot schemes of education reform;
* the certainly and inevitably nation-destroying effect of permitting public employees to unionize;
* the impossibility of effective law enforcement without racial profiling;
* the absurdity of waging war not to crush and demoralize the enemy, but to transform his nation into 1955 Oklahoma.
* the infantile narcissism of believing that all life's ills have a remedy in law;
* the contradiction inherent in wishing for a health-care system that (a) has no socialist component, or only a modest one, while (b) providing every known treatment or level of care to every condition for everyone;
* the doubleplus contradiction inherent in the previous bullet point when the genome can be cheaply and rapidly sequenced.
Beck himself is a smart man who knows plenty of true things. Following Gates-gate last year, Beck said that Barack Obama nurses "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." That is certainly true: the truth of it shines out from every pageâ€"and even from the title!â€"of the President's autobiography. Unfortunately it is not a liberal truth, so Beck has been apologizing for it ever since in the most groveling, abject terms.
