One thing you have to admire about Glenn Beck is that he never gets tired of fomenting the same fear and paranoia that made him what he is.
Even before today’s speech at CPAC, Beck teased his keynote with a video on his web site. He promised that he would discuss a 1938 pamphlet he found that urges Rhode Islanders to vote Communist. Now most people would struggle to find anything relevant about that to current events, but not Beck. He ties this old rag to contemporary liberals by noting that the tract uses the fearsome word “progress.” And we all know that conservatives are bitterly opposed to progress in any form. Beck’s opposition to progress is so extreme that he portrays it as a threat and likens it to virulent and deadly diseases:
“Republicans need to get away from progressives. It is the cancer in our Constitution.”
In his rush to demonize the notion of progress, Beck has now described the Constitution as a flawed and sickly document. This is a little surprising considering the glassy-eyed worship he generally extends to the Founders and their works. But now Beck regards the intellectual and political freedom the Constitution guarantees as a tumor that will consume and kill it.
In the actual CPAC address, Beck gave an audience of the faithful a warmed over version of his Fox News program. He included the cancer diagnosis. There wasn’t anything in the speech that he hasn’t repeated incessantly on TV for the past year. It’s astonishing that none of his congregation remembers that they have heard all of this many times before. Talk about short-term memory. Beck retraces the usual suspects of taxing and spending. He raises the frightening specter of economic Holocaust. He stirs nightmares of the worst of all creeping enemies: progressives. He exhumed Van Jones and introduced his blackboard to thunderous applause. He reiterated his message of impending doom invoking all the standard Beckisms and familiar cliches. He couldn’t have spent more than fifteen minutes working on this cut-and-paste job.
Beck also reprised his dramatic reading of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. That performance was first staged in Florida last November. It is a surreal misinterpretation of the poem’s meaning. In Beck’s mind those words are not an embrace of the world’s downtrodden that they may find peace and fellowship. It is a condemnation of inferiors that they may seek repair. That these diseased and broken souls may be healed. He literally described Liberty’s poem as “an insult” to foreign tyrants, rather than the appeal to hope that the rest of us heard. It is a vision that perfectly fits Beck’s fixation on creating idols and demons and saviors.
Democrats have recently been casting Republicans as the “Party of No.” That’s a fair representation based on the GOP’s penchant for obstructing every legislative proposal from the Democratic majority. Republicans have set new records for the use of the filibuster to the extent that many lazy analysts believe that 60 votes are required to pass bills in Congress and that 41 is a majority of the 100 seat Senate.
But I think there is a better name and symbol for today’s Republican Party and the rest of the CPAC crowd. A name that is in harmony with a movement that dismisses science, rejects evolution and believes that humans coexisted with dinosaurs. A symbol that embodies the anti-progress theme with which Beck is obsessed. This is a movement that celebrates ignorance and revels in stagnation. They are The Stagnatists.
The Stagnatican Party wants nothing more than to remain permanently mired in whatever mud hole they currently occupy. Stagnatism perfectly describes the party whose leaders now wear their sloth as a badge of honor. Stagnatists are against progress. And Glenn Beck spent the better part of an hour today associating progress with all manner of evil. Beck and the Stagnaticans apply an originalist’s view to everything form politics to religion. They insist that society govern itself by the standards and insights of our ancestors. Any advances we might have made culturally or scientifically must be abandoned and we must revert to the practices employed hundreds of years ago. We must behave as if time stopped in the distant past. We must forget what we know now.
Stagnatism was on full display at CPAC this weekend. We can only hope that this regressive theory doesn’t take hold. The last thing America needs is a prevailing philosophy that holds that going backwards is the best way forward.
