Rethink.

Still away from the computer. The article was mailed to me and made my blood boil on a level it hasn’t boiled at in a while.

Re: “Partisanship Isn’t Enough (but it is Essential)” in The Weekly Standard

Dear Dr. Mansfield:

Glenn Beck is all kinds of crazy, and bringing forth some of the worst passions from the Right and so-called Independents. The least of it is that people are buying gold and stocking up on ammunition. The worst of it are those who think “white culture” needs to be protected, think the government is going to throw us in camps, and want the gold standard back for a variety of reasons, none of them good. Glenn Beck is feeding this insanity, there is no debate on that point. Only the most incompetent political commentator could miss this.

So you need a very, very tight argument that is worthwhile to even imply an equation of the non-partisan presentation Beck sometimes uses with the non-partisan presentation the President sometimes uses. I am not the biggest fan of the current President. I thought his bashing of President Bush was tasteless then, and is tasteless now. He’s definitely too partisan for my taste. He equates spending too much money and creating too much regulation with governance. He’s given, in my opinion, nearly a blank check to unions. I don’t like his foreign policy for the most part, though I am very happy with the work done in Afghanistan. There is a large difference, though, between criticizing the President for not having a serious foreign policy or spending too much money, and charging that what he really wants to do is become Hitler and send us all to camps. Beck’s continual invocation of how Progressive thought fueled the Third Reich – watch his show for 5 minutes, you can’t miss it – is aimed at nothing less than advancing the worst conspiracy theories.

My politics come from Lincoln and Jefferson, not Burke. At some point, tradition does serve to protect a craziness that can only hurt people, and things have to change. The non-partisanship of Beck is the non-partisanship of the John Birch Society: this is a tradition that should have been flushed down the toilet years ago, and wasn’t. Again, I have my reservations with the Left, but that’s a partisanship (or non-partisanship, or whatever) that I can hold electorally accountable.

The conspiracy theory of Beck is playing with fire, and the immediate losers are losing big. With a number of Americans thinking “white culture” is in peril, we are seeing deliberate attempts to provoke minorities, when they’re not actually being assaulted. And now I’m sitting here, screaming about how all this junk is going to destroy conservatism, and I have to watch someone whose work on Machiavelli’s use of lo stato is more than commendable, someone whose thoughts on Aristotle and Montesquieu I’ve read a number of times to find serious questions, someone whose Jefferson lecture is balanced, thoughtful and inquiring say this:

Glenn Beck is a kind of libertarian, and he has made a fair amount of money. But he rejects the private life that libertarians seem to recommend. He goes public with his distrust of everything public and thus requires libertarians to march behind patriotism, religion, and honor—all things not in your immediate self-interest….

Glenn Beck—like President Obama—is unafraid of calling attention to himself, but—again like President Obama—he does us all a favor when he seeks to bring others to live as he does.

You know full well as I do that Glenn Beck is not a “kind of” libertarian. He’s firmly in the Ron Paul camp of doing things like saying that the Federal Reserve was responsible for Watergate. You miss the real significance of the kinds of people who use the libertarian label and flock to Beck (obviously, not every libertarian) – these are “non-partisan” in the sense their lack of shame outweighs any sense that America is a country where other people live. The patriotism, religion, honor stuff is a cover for what really matters: their private interest is about yelling about how everyone else is wrong and how they’re always right. They have the right to conspiracy theories; American has been taken from them. These are people who think they own the country – they don’t want to work with different voices, and some of them literally don’t care if other people are slaves. They find “God” in the most obscure Founders, the ones who can be quoted to great effect at neo-Nazi rallies.

So go on and keep equating Obama and Beck, as if we should even consider living like Beck. In the meantime, I’ll do the work that needs to be done – writing on Machiavelli and Shakespeare, introducing people to Seth Benardete, thinking hard about Platonic dialogues like the Protagoras, working through a Nietzschean conception of politics. I don’t make a cent for doing this, and I only get blame from the inordinate number of idiots who think that my notes on a text should be a finished product. But I started doing this because love of wisdom means learning where one is ignorant, accepting punishment as need be. Now I realize how essential that task is: I am not going to be reading your columns any more. At this point, the roles should be reversed, not because I know what I’m talking about, but precisely because I don’t.

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• Defending Mansfield: Why the Executive is Not Entirely Defined by the Rule of Law
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• Re: “Some Open Questions for Conservatives”

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