I have no quarrel with TIME magazine devoting a cover to Glenn Beck -- so long as the accompanying story sticks to hard facts and harsh truths. The issue coming tomorrow, online today, sadly fails to do so in an apparent effort to woo the rightwing with a ludicrously "balanced" treatment of equally dangerous and wacko "ranting" coming from left and right.
It starts right away with a first paragraph that claims that only "liberal sources" estimated the protest crowd in D.C. last weekend as about 70,000, while conservatives say up to a million or more. Actually, virtually all mainstream media sources (even some on Fox News) endorse a far lower number. PolitiFact, the nonpartisan fact-checking site, cited an officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department telling a reporter that, unoffically, he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.
If you get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered about 70,000, many of them greedy racists. If you get your information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong, perhaps as many as a million, and the tenor was peaceful and patriotic.
In this nugget TIME's David Von Drehle revealed his method. The "left" says one thing, the "right" another and, hell, who is to know the truth? He returns to this late in the piece by raising the crowd estimate gap again and explaining it as merely "who do you trust?"
Of course such coverage is anything but responsible. If you're going for "balance" rather than truth, then you only encourage the most unscrupulous to make the most outrageous claims. Then your "balance" will inexorably move the "sensible center" ever further in their fact-free, crazed direction. Any kindergarten teacher can explain this in detail, if necessary.
In sharp contrast to Time's egregious malpractice, Salon ran a deeply significant piece about Beck, exposing the nature of the man who's had the most significant impact on his recent devolution-- Cleon Skousen, described as "a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised." In fact, no less than J. Edgar Hoover and the elders of the Mormon Church regarded him as a dangerous crank. So if Time had wanted to ask the right questions, they could have had Hoover and Mormon elders representing the "left" as "balance" to Beck supporters. This article, "Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life", not only provides a striking contrast with Time's journalist slop, it also provides a valuable complement to Tim Wise's highlighting of Ayn Rand's hero-worship of sociopathic killer, which inspired Part 1 of this diary mini-series.
Together, these two stories, about Rand and Skousen, are not simply stories about the advancement of conservative ideas. Indeed, they are actually the exact opposite-they are about the destruction of conservative ideas by the rightwing lunatic fringe.
Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.
At one level, Skousen doesn't sound that different from dozens of other conservative authors:
"Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).
Okay, so that sounds kooky if you know anything about American history, particularly the intellectual history of the Founding Fathers and their intellectual milieu. But no more kooky than dozens, if not hundreds, nay thousands of other rightwing writers. They all have a tenuous relationship with reality, at best. What's more telling is just how far out Skousen's ideas were at a relatively early point in time. And this can be gleaned by how other rightwingers-more ultra-conservative than conservative-viewed him at the time:
W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."
Skousen worked for the FBI for 15 years, but "his posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in nature," Zaitchik writes. He had nothing to do with the FBI's anti-communist activities. Then he began to blossom, as it were:
After retiring from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. "The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government."
This might have been the last that anyone heard of Skousen. But as it turned out, he was an early pioneer of conservative tradition of failing upward:
After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America's enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen's friend and employer Fred Schwarz as "an opportunist," the likes of which "are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally ... Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm."
.....
When Skousen's books started popping up in the nation's high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau's answer was an exasperated and resounding "no." One 1962 FBI memo notes, "During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes." Skousen's "The Naked Communist," said the Bureau official, is "another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed."
It should be recalled that Hoover tried to have Einstein deported as a Communist agent, believing that one of the most anti-authoritarian figures of all time was a willing stooge of Stalin. For years the FBI tried to connect the links via Einstein's brother, whom they believed to have spent years in Russia. In reality, Einstein didn't have a brother-a factthat the FBI learned repeatedly, only to forget it again. So when Hoover calls an anti-communist crusader a nutcase, you can be sure they are very, very far gone.
The story goes on:
By 1963, Skousen's extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had "gone off the deep end." One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen "money mad ... totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.
His extremism was further stoked by historian Carroll Quigley's book, Tragedy and Hope, which he also severely distorted. So much so that Quigley himself eventually gotinvolved in repudiating Skousen:
"Tragedy and Hope," Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley's book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called "The Naked Capitalist." Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America's NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen's nephew Joel).
In "The Naked Communist," Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In "The Naked Capitalist," Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push "U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society." Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch's own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
"The Naked Capitalist" does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited "Tragedy and Hope" author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen's interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen's latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of "inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary." Skousen not only saw things that weren't in Quigley's book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there -- namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen.
In short, Beck's intellectual hero is not a champion of conservative thought, he's a fringe reject of it!
But given how totally conservatism has failed in the real world, what else do they have left but unsubstantiated fantasies?
Conclusion
Back in the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev said he was going to do something terrible to us: He was going to take away our enemy. That's exactly what he did. And since there was no more realenemy out there, the right had nothing left to do, but to start chasing shadows. So long as there was a real Soviet enemy out there, conservatives had something to keep them tethered to reality. Some did much better with the whole tethering thing than others did, most did not. But because there was a real enemy out there, at least there was a reason for elite conservative discourse to keep some degree of reality orientation alive-even in the highly attenuated form of magical missile defense. Now that no such enemy exists, and al Qaeda is revealed as far less dangerous than Goldman Saks, the incentives are all the other way-the wackier the notion, the better it plays to fearful sensibilities that have lost all semblance of grounding in reality.
Conservatism traditionally has been about the preservation of existing social hierarchy, legitimated in terms of social order, which it routinely claims reflects what the Chinese called the "mandate of heaven." This had at least some level of plausibility until the pace of social change began to quicken in the early centuries of the last millennium. In relatively stable societies, it "works" in a sociological sense to ostracize non-conformists and identify with outsiders, the designated "other", the enemy. But as change becomes increasingly ubiquitous, non-conformists become socially valuable-they are the most adept at helping to devise new arrangements that keep society functioning, when the refusal to adapt would bring everything to a halt.
This is the fundamental realization that conservatism, as a philosophy-or school of philosophies-has yet to grasp. Because it cannot grasp this, it repeatedly misunderstands how it might adapt, how it might realize its own most cogent ideal of realizing gradual change that is minimally disruptive. Instead conservatism falls back onto one or another of its far less cogent ideals-of freezing itself in time, or even going backward, and in doing this, it chases fantasies... such as those conconcted by Cleon Skousen, and peddled by Glenn Beck. Do not be fooled, for that is what Beck is: a peddler of used and abused fantasies, crackpot ideas, and nightmares.
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