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How was your week? Glenn Beck’s was pretty good, thanks. On Saturday he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and faced a crowd conservatively estimated at one million people (but liberally estimated at 87,000). “Something that is beyond man is happening,” Beck said. “America today begins to turn back to God.”
Two days later, Beck launched an Internet news website, The Blaze. (“The flame of freedom is dwindling,” he told a different crowd last week. “If you don’t want it to go out on our watch, then you must stand in the blaze. The fire of truth that does not burn those who stand in it, but consumes everything that is not.”) As I write this, The Blaze’s front page has three stories about the “Ground Zero” mosque, one about the “ballooning welfare state,” four about Glenn Beck and three about how Al Sharpton’s simultaneous Washington rally wasn’t as good as Glenn Beck’s.
Also on Monday, a Gallup poll showed the largest Republican lead over congressional Democrats that Gallup has ever measured.
What you will make of these events will, in a profound way, depend. Christopher Hitchens, sometime advocate on behalf of Republican presidents, was baffled. “What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated?” he wrote. “Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces, and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned?”
Hitchens’s answer was that what it takes is “white self-pity.” Whatever it is, there seems to be a lot of it going around. That crowd in front of Beck was big, and people who think like the Fox News host are contributing many of the foot soldiers for the Republican wave that seems set to push back hard against Barack Obama’s foundering presidency in November’s mid-term elections.
I’m not sure my own opinions about Beck are as important as the simple observation that so many other people have such strong feelings about him. And opinions about Beck, like opinions about so much else in public life today, are written in acid and invective.
In the U.S., but also in Australia after the photo-finish elections there and, increasingly, in Stephen Harper’s Canada, the gulf between cultural visions on the left and right is so wide the two sides cannot even speak comprehensibly to each other. Ottawa lifers have taken to calling the two sides Starbucks and Tim Hortons, but the rift is deeper than one’s choice of coffee. It’s the gulf between daycare and church, between the faculty club and the tool shop. It is coming increasingly to define our politics, and to envenom them.
In 1992, the Catholic conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan sought to mend fences among Republicans at the nominating convention for George H.W. Bush’s re-election effort. “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” Buchanan’s speech felt a little hot for the ’90s and was considered to be one of the reasons for Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton that year. But this fall the culture war, with more than a dose of religion to it, is back.
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