Déjà Vu All Over Again

A persistent strain of scary right-wing looniness keeps resurfacing every generation or so in American politics. There was the Know-Nothing Party, then Fr. Coughlin and his rants against Jews and communists, often conflating the two. Next, Senator Joseph McCarthy emerged warning of Communists infiltrating the Federal government, followed closely by the John Birch Society, which found even Dwight Eisenhower, Republican President and decorated General and Supreme Commander in World War II, as a witting tool of the Communist Party.

Just when you relax, thinking that’s part of our sordid past and the country has finally driven a stake into the heart of this craziness, Glenn Beck appears and the movement appears stronger than ever. It would be one thing if you could dismiss him and his followers as part of a harmless “lunatic fringe” — a phrase that Theodore Roosevelt first used against the far Left of his day. But, it’s quite another matter when the lunatic fringe seriously starts “infiltrating,” to use one of their pet terms, the highest halls of government as they appear poised to do in this off-year election.

The New Yorker magazine, which has alternately entertained, bored, amused, and educated me, for more than 50 years, but has never alarmed me, sent a chill up on my spine with its October 18 issue. In an article “Confounding Fathers,” author Sean Willentz traces the roots of Beck’s philosophy and teaching to Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society and Willard Cleon Skousen. Skousen was considered so radical in the early 1960’s that even avid Communist-hunter, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, put him under surveillance as part of dangerous right-wing anti-communist ring.

According to Willentz, by the time Skousen, a Mormon convert, died, in 2006, “he was little remembered outside the ranks of the furthest-right Mormons.” By that he refers to acolytes of Ezra Taft Benson, a noted anti-Communist who saw conspiracies behind every tree and under every bed. Scary as Benson was, Willentz says that Skousen was the “most outlandish of the era’s right-wing anti-Communists.”

Skousen wrote several books, including “A Naked Capitalist,” “The 5,000 Year Leap,” “The Making of America,” and a “rousing tract” in defense of Robert Welch, called “The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society.” I have never heard of these eminently forgettable books, as I suspect none of you have either, and they would have long ago been resting in well-deserved oblivion except that Glenn Beck has resurrected them and put them at the top of his recommended reading list. Beck claims that the “The 5,000 Year Leap” is essential to understanding “why our Founders built this Republic the way they did.” After he touted the book to his large viewing audience — estimated at 2 million or more – and wrote an introduction to the new edition, the book jumped to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. In the first half of 2009 it sold more than 250,000 copies. According to Willentz, Constitutional scholar Jack Rakove, of Stanford, inspected another of Skousen’s books that Beck endorses (“The Making of America’) as well as Skousen’s seminars and pronounced them a “joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.”

Fortunately, in the heyday of the John Birch Society in the 1960’s, there were moderate Republicans who spoke out against this lunacy and could help mitigate its impact. Even columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., was an avid anti-Bircher conservative. But, today, there are no moderate Republicans to speak out — in fact, there are no moderate Republicans — and so Beck has an open, largely unobstructed field and a large bullhorn and platform in Fox News that the John Birch Society could only have dreamed of.

No matter what scary stuff the kids will think of for Halloween, it will be nothing compared to the scary stuff that Beck and his followers might be able to pull on us just two days later.



Gerald E. Lavey