Back in 2000, when he first launched his syndicated radio show in Tampa, he described his politics by saying, “I don’t really consider myself a conservative. I know I don’t consider myself a liberal,” he said. “I have a brain and I like to use it sometimes.” It was a smart pitch, one he more or less continued during his brief Bush-era stint at HLN, when he was billed as an independent.
But when he got his big payday and highest perch to date on Fox News, he made a strategic decision to go the full crazy. A talented broadcaster, he decided to use fear and hate to pump up his ratings. It worked for a while. But it’s a civic sin that can’t be undone. Forgiveness is for faith. In political debates there is always the videotape.
In some ways, this new guise is clarifying because it definitively answers a lingering question about Beck: is he sincere in his beliefs, or was his right-wing rhetoric just showmanship, part of a business plan to appeal to an agitated audience?
It was all just an opportunistic con job. And the dupes are the folks who bought into the shtick, carrying signs at Tea Party rallies that read “Glenn Beck is my hero.”
Real libertarians look at Beck’s latest attempted incarnation with a mixture of disgust and annoyance. They don’t want this rodeo clown anywhere near their bandwagon.
“Beck correctly identifies a libertarian moment,” explains Owen Brennan, who is a partner at Madison McQueen LLC, an ad agency that works almost exclusively with free market and libertarian groups. “As the size and scope of government grows, it’s no coincidence the popularity of our lawmakers is below that of root canals, cockroaches, and lice.”
“But the Beck brand is incongruent with many libertarians. Strong brands don’t tell people who they are, they show them through action,” continues Brennan. “And plenty of freedom fighters who went to the Beck Restoring Honor event in Washington, D.C. expected tar and feathering but got a revival meeting instead.”
Beck’s revival meeting on the Washington Mall was one of many attempted reinventions we’ve seen from the onetime Top 40 radio shock jock, putting him on pace to compete with Madonna or Bowie for discarding different phases of his career. And while his entrepreneurial experiment with The Blaze has proven financially successful, thanks in part to talented players like Will Cain, at his core Beck is closer to Father Coughlin than Ron Paul, let alone his hero Orson Welles.
Demagogues always do well in economic downturns, and Beck’s us-against-them exhortations and apocalyptic intimations had their moment. But the man who predicts the end of the world loses credibility, especially among his followers, when the sun rises after the appointed day.
Maybe Glenn Beck has belatedly discovered that his own brand of bile is the problem in our political discourse—or maybe he’s just realized that unhinged hate doesn’t sell as well as it used to. Either way, his aspiration to be an independent, sane, and substantive voice doesn’t even begin to pass the laugh test. Instead it’s just the latest reminder of what Eric Hoffer once said: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
