Glenn Beck, the Tea Party, and Cleon Skousen: History in the (Re-)Making

When is history more than just “history?” Critical theory of the last few decades has skewered the idea that you can write objective, non-political history. Instead, each historical explanation is a narrative with its own set of biases and presuppositions. It has become prosaic to say that there isn’t a “history” but multiple “histories” we write about the pass.

But then again, this idea isn’t new at all.

The Tea Party has spawned a slew of articles and essays in leading magazines and newspapers trying to decode our current politics’ latest enigmatic movement. Who are these people, what are their motives, their complaints, their unconscious agenda? Some of these pieces reveal how bizarrely exotic this group seems to many such insulated writers, but the most fascinating pieces are those that dig into the text and language of the group and discover something interesting about the narratives–and “histories”–this movement is constructing. After all, the Tea Party’s extreme iterations don’t bother me that much–all feisty political movements, if they can gain any serious political representation, is immediately tempered by the vitiating ennui of filibusters, compromises, and super-majorities. But what really worries me is how this group–especially Glenn Beck–can rewrite the way we understand American history and, thus, the purpose of government, where it began, and where it is headed.

That our cultural history of America is being recast upon Glenn Beck’s infamous chalkboard is the thrust of Sean Wilentz’s “Confounding Fathers,” published in the New Yorker, which traces the American history professed by Glenn Beck to the conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society and history books of W. Cleon Skousen. The John Birch Society was convinced of a communist government takeover at the highest levels, and were obsessively suspicious of even the most American of Americans like Dwight Eisenhower. Skousen had his own communist/cabalist theories, but much of his influence on Beck lies in his shaping of the American story, as told in the “Five-Thousand Year Leap” and “The Making of America.” According to Skousen, America’s Founders–inspired by Providence and guided by the finest Judeo-Christian philosophy–laid out such a revolutionary constitution of free-market principles and moral values that our country propelled itself into the modern era with stunning growth in technology, prosperity, and civilization. The genius of someone like Skousen is that he understood you cannot simply give people a list of political agendas to uphold: current events reshape agendas all the time and people are much less committed to specific issues than you think. What they really believe in is the stories we tell about the destiny of our nation, our roles as citizens, and the mythos of its founding. Give a man a political agenda, and he’ll protest for a day. Give a man a political narrative, and he’ll protest for a lifetime.

Yet when you place these narratives under the microscope of academic methodology and consensus, these works are, to quote Stanford constitutional scholar Jack Rackove, “not worth a warm pitcher of spit.”* Beck is equally careless with facts, causation, and what he would call “elitist” history writing, which has been taken over by leftist/Marxist/socialist/Nazi professors. The “true” American history has been shrouded behind veils of political correctness, secularization, and liberal politics. Ironically (though perhaps not to him?), Beck decries academia while establishing his own Beck University, a type of for-profit, ideological remediation program.

Is Beck a threat to conservatism? Absolutely. But not merely because of his populism or his extreme rhetoric, but because his conception of history is a mish-mash of half-truths and warped realities. His historical style is revolutionary–not in the sense that it is new but because it unravels decades of slow, steady accumulation of historical understanding through careful parsing and analysis with brazen “I Hate Woodrow Wilson” T-shirts. It abandons any real concern for history in order to appropriate its ethos for the political purposes of the present.  As this NYTimes profile exhibits, he works on the fly, he talks through his ideas, and latches onto a topic and runs with it until he’s bored. He feigns a respect for history but it is only a respect for a history that supports his views, that reconfirms what he already believes.

If conservatives are seriously concerned about the influence of the Tea Party movement, they should be most scared of how Beck and others are undermining the respect of tradition and history by vilifying it even when they claim to be “recovering” it from the clutches of academia. This has implications beyond Novemeber 2010 but how an entire generation of young conservatives might understand not only American history but the very process of history is crafted. And for anyone committed to truth–both moral and historical–this should be deeply disturbing.

*Personal Note: when I was a freshman in college, writing a research paper on a 1950s 1st Amendment case, I cited a long quote from one of the Founder’s located in Skousen’s The Making of America that suggested Jefferson or another Founding Father highly encouraged Christian education for America’s children. But the first couple of words–the most crucial part of the quote–were in paraphrase brackets, and my teacher insisted I double check the source to make sure Skousen paraphrased him correctly. So I found the passage and was stunned: it didn’t fit how Skousen portrayed it at all. I had to remove the quote entirely from my paper. I don’t know about the rest of the book, but if a college freshman could almost accidently poke holes in the text, Rackove might be on to something.