Nate Silver has an interesting theory:
Beck is a PoMoCon — a post-modern conservative. And his philosophy is not all that difficult to articulate. It borrows a couple of things from traditional American conservatism:
– It shares an extreme distrust for government, particularly the Federal Government.
– It shares the notion that American society is in some sort of state of existential decline.On the other hand, it also features some important differences:
– It is much more distrustful of non-governmental institutions, such as labor unions, corporations, political parties, community groups, the media, and scientific institutions.
– It is largely indifferent toward ‘social issues’.
– It is much less explicitly aligned with the Republican Party.
– It has much less use for elites, which it also distrusts.The PoMoCons are not so much less self-consistent as they are less concerned with consistency, as compared with traditional conservatives. Theirs is a bric-a-brac, skeptical (sometimes to the point of paranoid), play-it-by-ear, relatively spontaneous reaction to the here-and-now — not something cooked up by a K Street thinktank. There is no future, no past — there is only today. And today is a pretty good day to be Glenn Beck.
In other words, says Silver, Beck is an anti-establishment conservative. I see where Silver is going with this, and in some ways, especially my disaffection from the GOP and its worshipful attitude toward moneymen (an attitude shared by the establishment liberal party as well, you will note), I consider myself an anti-establishment conservative. But as Glenn Greenwald points out, Beck is a terribly flawed advocate for any kind of principled, coherent anti-establishment conservatism
Some of this confusion is attributable to the fact that Beck himself doesn’t really appear to have any actual, identifiable political beliefs; he just mutates into whatever is likely to draw the most attention for himself and whatever satisfies his emotional cravings of the moment. Although he now parades around under a rhetorical banner of small-government liberty, anti-imperialism, and opposition to the merger of corporations and government (as exemplified by the Bush-sponsored Wall Street bailout), it wasn’t all that long ago that he was advocating exactly the opposite: paying homage to the Patriot Act, defending the Wall Street bailout and arguing it should have been larger, and spouting standard neoconservative cartoon propaganda about The Global Islamo-Nazi Jihadists and all that it justifies. Even the quasi-demented desire for a return to 9/12 — as though the country should be stuck permanently in a state of terrorism-induced trauma and righteous, nationalistic fury over an allegedly existential Enemy — is the precise antithesis of the war-opposing, neocon-hating views held by many libertarian and paleoconservative factions with which Beck has now associated himself. Still other aspects of his ranting are obviously grounded in highly familiar, right-wing paranoia.
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Ultimately, Beck himself is just a histrionic intellectual mess: willing to latch onto any hysterical accusations and conspiracy theories that provide some momentary benefit, no matter how contradictory they might be from one moment to the next. His fears, resentments and religious principles seem fixed, but not his political beliefs. Like the establishment leadership of both political parties, he has no core political principles or fixed, identifiable ideology. His description of himself as a ”rodeo clown” might be the most perceptive thing he’s ever said. Attempts to classify him on the conventional political spectrum are destined to fail, and attempts to demonize him as some sort of standard Republican bogeyman will inevitably be so over-simplified as to be false. Such efforts assume far more coherence than he possesses.
Joseph Lawler at American Spectator:
Here’s something to consider alongside today’s lead story. Nate Silver looks through some numbers and determines that Glenn Beck is not your average conservative rabblerouser like Rush Limbaugh. He isn’t hated by everyone on the left. Instead, he appeals to anti-establishment types, and is more or less disregarded otherwise.
In other words, Silver concludes, Beck is a postmodern conservative. I guess then he’d fit right in with these guys.
Joseph Gandelman at Moderate Voice:
Putting aside whether you like Beck or not — or whether the kinds of things he is saying are responsible, or totally lucid, and could unleash forces that could have serious consquences — Beck has tapped into a different area than Limbaugh.
Limbaugh has become the EPITOME of two establishments: the talk radio political establishment and the RNC, even when Limbaugh breaks from the RNC. Limbaugh’s less talented and even more political talking points pseudo-clone, Sean Hannity, also comes across as someone who is trying to elect people from one party and talking for a political establishment. More than any other talker, Hannity comes across as a rip ‘n read RNC talking points conservative talker.
Silver has a lot more in his piece that will provide food for debate — including in comments here at TMV.
And The PomoCon Himself:
Silver’s thumbnail anatomy of Beck’s politics is plausible enough, but on its face there’s nothing here it makes any sense to call postmodern. From a wider view, this is perhaps an opportune time to set the record straight on a few points about what is and isn’t postmodern-conservative.
So first consider Silver’s list of differences. Distrust of the non-governmental institutions Silver identifies has been a hallmark of social conservatives now for decades, which makes it somewhat discordant for Silver to suggest that ‘indifference’ toward social issues is in some way postmodern. The postmodern left is obsessed with power, viewing politics through a lens in which all social relations are function of power relations; and since I imagine Silver’s understanding of postmodernism is, unlike the one we actual pomocons tend to share, based on left postmodernism — about which more later — it’s unclear how or why he thinks social-issue indifference is pomo. And anyone who has followed our recent long exchange with the Front Porch Republic community knows that they, not we, are “much less explicitly aligned with the Republican party,” and in some important ways have “much less use for elites” than we do. These traits are more likely to be evidence of left conservatism than postmodern conservatism well understood!
Which leaves us with Silver’s catchall claim that pomocons are simply eclectic or ecumenical. Silver seems to confuse or conflate ideological eclecticism with the sort of political posture or practice that people without consultants adopt. And he seems to confuse both of these with a disinterest in the future that, at least to my eye, would utterly suck the wind out of Beck’s sails. Glenn Beck’s fame and identity derive entirely from a gripping fear that They are Taking Our Country Away From Us — horrible not because life has become unbearable today (the cry of leftist revolutionaries) but because the life we have lived will be made irrecoverable tomorrow. That’s a good-old-fashioned, white-bread conservative trope, as far as I can tell.
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For we pomocons, a postmodern conservatism is postmodern because it rejects Rorty’s project as kookily devoted to the modern longing to eradicate even the concept of eternity from human life; it is postmodern because it rejects the extension of Weber’s modern scientific heuristic to a conviction about what human nature really is. But these postmodern approaches open us onto an understanding of the wisdom of conservative dispositions, commitments, and convictions. We’re not pomo for pomo’s sake; we’re not conservative for pomo’s sake; and we’re not conservative simply because we feel like it or wound up that way and pomo because we have to be in order to get what we want.
A word about Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck is the worst. But why? Not so much because of who he distrusts or why. From where I’m standing, Beck is so awful because he theatrically combines and conflates performances of ultimate sincerity with performances of ultimate sarcasm. I think this is a telltale sign of a soul disordered by a confusion of love, power, and resentment. It becomes impossible, in such a person, to tell quite where their selfless solidarity, their egotism, and their hatred borne of weakness begin or end. And the titillating quality of this unstable charisma is precisely what they latch onto and exploit to become less a famous person than a famous happening. Their individual being becomes incidental to the phenomenon they represent. They actually corrode or dissolve their own identity in order to experience some hugeness that seems impossible to experience as a normal, integral human being. Any actual pomocon looks on that kind of allure as troublesome and dangerous, and the kind of person in thrall to it as no pomocon.
