David Neiwert: Glenn Beck's 'Liberal Fascism Hour'
[Mr. Neiwert is the managing editor of crooksandliars.com and the author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.]
Of course, at the time I couldn't have predicted that only a little more than a year later, the hottest talk-show host ratings-wise on cable TV -- Glenn Beck, on Fox News -- would not only be regularly plumping Goldberg's book, he'd be devoting the core thesis of his show to the proposition that under Barack Obama, the nation is proceeding on a direct fascist course.
And that, as he did Friday, he'd devote an entire hour, replete with select historians, to exploring this crackpot notion.
As you can see, the entire show was such a mix of distorted fact and outright misconceptions, piled on top with tendentious misreadings of actual history, that it's hard to tell where to begin.
But a side remark Beck makes is fairly indicative of the problem with this whole enterprise -- namely, it is a grossly blinkered version of history, revised and selectively edited to serve as a nice bedtime story for conservatives. He turns to Amity Shlaes (we told you it was a select bunch) to ask her about FDR and the Depression:
[Shlaes, FWIW, chooses Wendell Wilkie. Yah shoor, he was such a success.]
This isn't the first time Beck has invoked Henry Ford as a consummate anti-fascist. This is very funny.
I walked through all this the last time Beck did this, but Hume's Ghost has a succinct wrapup:
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Read entire article at http://dneiwert.blogspot.com
Back early last year when I was busy critiquing Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, the question came up frequently: Why would I bother? Isn't it a problem to be treating a book of junk political philosophy like this with more respect than it deserves? Isn't flat-out mockery perhaps the better response?
Well, as I noted then:
[T]he problem with dismissing Liberal Fascism out of hand is that the mainstream media certainly haven't dismissed the book out of hand: Goldberg's been on a regular rotation of cable-talk shows since the book's release, and more certainly are on the way. As much as we might wish this noxious meme would choke on its own fumes, it's clear that isn't going to happen: the"liberal media" is all too happy to present this fraud as"serious," and there are going to be large swaths of the public lapping it up. (There already are, in fact.) Pretty soon any discussion of actual fascists will be dismissed with a wave of the"ah, you libruls are the real fascists" hand.
Moreover, from where I stand, his grotesque misreadings of history and the realities of the rise of fascism both in Europe and America, his eradication and trivialization of genuine American fascist elements from the pages of that history -- those things simply cannot go unanswered. Someone needs to point out that the Pantload has no clothes.
Of course, at the time I couldn't have predicted that only a little more than a year later, the hottest talk-show host ratings-wise on cable TV -- Glenn Beck, on Fox News -- would not only be regularly plumping Goldberg's book, he'd be devoting the core thesis of his show to the proposition that under Barack Obama, the nation is proceeding on a direct fascist course.
And that, as he did Friday, he'd devote an entire hour, replete with select historians, to exploring this crackpot notion.
As you can see, the entire show was such a mix of distorted fact and outright misconceptions, piled on top with tendentious misreadings of actual history, that it's hard to tell where to begin.
But a side remark Beck makes is fairly indicative of the problem with this whole enterprise -- namely, it is a grossly blinkered version of history, revised and selectively edited to serve as a nice bedtime story for conservatives. He turns to Amity Shlaes (we told you it was a select bunch) to ask her about FDR and the Depression:
Beck: Amity, let me start with you, because I want to go to the Depression, I want to talk about that. But what I really want to do, because we're running up against the clock here, is spend a little time on: Who is the person we should look to that stood up against this? Who are the people that were successful?
I know Henry Ford was one of them -- in FDR. He stood up against them and said, 'This is wrong!' Who else?
[Shlaes, FWIW, chooses Wendell Wilkie. Yah shoor, he was such a success.]
This isn't the first time Beck has invoked Henry Ford as a consummate anti-fascist. This is very funny.
I walked through all this the last time Beck did this, but Hume's Ghost has a succinct wrapup:
Ok, let's walk through this. F.D.R. headed up the war efforts against the Nazis during World War II. Henry Ford did everything he possibly could to prevent the United States from fighting the Nazis because he was a fan of the Nazi regime. Henry Ford was awarded and accepted the highest medal that Germany bestowed upon foreigners in 1938. The Ford factories in Europe helped build the Nazi war machine. The rabidly anti-Semitic paper that Ford published helped inspire the Holocaust and popularized the notorious Protocols of Zion.
But in Beck's warped, alternate universe, Henry Ford is anti-fascist because he didn't like the New Deal ... - while the guy who actually headed up the government while it fought and defeated the fascists is a fascist. Here's a clue for the eternally clueless Beck: we actually had fascists in America during the New Deal - and some of them were opposed to it precisely because they were fascists.
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