Their writing is often dense and difficult, but Beck not only reads it, he assigns it to his staff. “Beck asks me questions about Hegel, based on what he’s read in my books,” Pestritto told me. Pestritto is the kind of guest Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity would never think of booking.
Okay, so Beck may lack Buckley’s urbanity, and his show will never be confused with “Firing Line.” But he’s on to something with his interest in serious analysis of liberalism’s patrimony. The left is enraged with Beck’s scandal-mongering over Van Jones and ACORN, but they have no idea that he poses a much bigger threat than that. If more conservative talkers took up the theme of challenging liberalism’s bedrock assumptions the way Beck does from time to time, liberals would have to defend their problematic premises more often.
[….]Beck, for one, is revealing that despite the demands of filling hours of airtime every day, it is possible to engage in some real thought. He just might be helping restore the equilibrium between the elite and populist sides of conservatism.
No wonder those staffers don’t have time to figure how to spell “oligarchy”!
I never thought I would say this about anything, but this piece is grossly unfair to O’Reilly, Hannity, and Ann Coulter. Seriously.
valdivia
WTF. Hegel? Hegel?
I am speechless. Beck understands Hegel like I understands nuclear physics.
burnspbesq
Can you say “window dressing?”
bayville
Love this part:
This piece is also unfair to K-Lo and Andy McCarthy.
valdivia
also–this is the same argument as Sara Palin is a deep policy thinker.
RSA
Beck understand Hegel like Bush understands Camus.
gbear
Because that worked out so well for conservatives when they went after Obama regarding his religion and race. Obama’s speeches SO exposed his lack of thoughtfullness, insight, and purpose.
JK
Steven F. Hayward needs to put down his crack pipe right now. Glenn Beck is a raving, drooling, bedwetting loon and a malignant media carcinogen and nothing more.
If you want to know about Beck, don’t waste your time reading Hayward’s drivel
Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life
Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him
h/t http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/index.html
Salon also has a separate 3 part series on Beck
freelancer
Wow,
After reading this piece, I have only one question to ask regarding Hayward:
“With respect to Beck, did Hayward spit or swallow?’
Just Some Fuckhead
He takes some shots at a few of them but he doesn’t cross Boss Rush:
Mark S.
And all three of them are disingenuous hacks of the first order.
(I don’t know how the WaPo works: is this work of fellatio just online or did they actually give substantial space to it in the print edition?)
c u n d gulag
They have to make heavyweights out of flyweights. Hence, Palin “writes” a book, and Beck reads ones without pictures.
Next up – Mitt reads Kant. Which is perfect for the party of “Can’t.”
geg6
Holy shit. I didn’t think there was anyone in the media who was more stupid than Beck, but here he is. Jeezus Keerist. Yeah, Beck and Jonah Goldberg political philosophers more brilliant than even Jefferson and Paine. Fuck.me.
Morbo
@freelancer: Darn, you beat me to the fellatio remark. I wonder how Beck feels about Hayek’s opinion on socialized health care (he was a big fan of it). But I’m sure using one of the leading lights of the libertarian economist wing of conservatism as a counterargument to their current policy goals is something other than challenging one of its underlying assumptions.
Tony J
When you’re reduced to claiming that Jonah fucking Goldberg brings any intellectual heft to the conservative movement, you really have dug way through the bottom of the barrel and are one shallow spadeful away from dropping in on the Mole Men of Inner Earth.
And at no point in his cri d’coeur does the author address the rather basic question of just why it is that there’s no appetite amongst the reading public for weighty tomes proclaiming the superiority of supply-side economics and neo-conservative foreign policy. So I’ll do it for him.
Because they all failed miserably when put into practice. And people noticed. Simple, no?
JK
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Will Rogers wasn’t a lying, fear-mongering, hate-mongering cocksucker like Rush Limbaugh. Steven Hayward is out of his goddamn fucking mind.
licensed to kill time
Sort of OT but re: Beck and books:
From the NYT Book Review
aimai
I *did* see this coming. In fact I just posted this apropos of Moore’s work (which I admire) in a thread over at alicublog:
aimai
Just Some Fuckhead
@JK: Cut him some slack. Rush has the power to disappear him.
JK
@Mark S.:
This op-ed appears in the newly minted fellatio section of the Washington Post’s print edition.
aimai
Sorry, botched the entire block quote thing. The entire thing is a self quote from a post about Moore as propagandist and educator and the important part is that Beck and Limbaugh both are thought of by their audiences as mediating between scholarly authorities, political and historical facts, and their busy listeners.
aimai
Brick Oven Bill
The ‘C’ was deliberate, and the peanut gallery fell for it. ‘C’ is for Czar.
Who would the military turn the power over to if it is determined that Obama was not Constitutionally seated, and martial law is imposed to restore order? Who would the military trust to execute their oath to support and defend the United States Constitution? To promise to step down from power like George Washington?
This is why Balloon Juice is such an important outlet for expression. It was exclusively on Balloon Juice that the first debate between O’Reilly and Beck was live blogged, and Beck declared the 5-3 winner. This was only, like, a year ago.
Now he’s got 5 Refounding Congressmen and counting, a significant march on DC, and an organization of millions of decentralized defenders of the Constitution, spread to every corner of the country, including Sandy by the fireplace.
JK
@Just Some Fuckhead:
If God actually existed, Rush Limbaugh would suffocate under the weight of his own blubber.
Comrade Luke
Um
And his opinions surprise us…how?
licensed to kill time
@Brick Oven Bill:
I nominate Czar Commander BoB. Sandy could be his VP, and they could steep their teabags by the fireplace. She wouldn’t get to vote, though.
freelancer
@JK:
Didn’t you see him on Leno? (I saw the first minute on Youtube, but can’t stand that asshole) He’s actually lost some weight.
gocart mozart
I don’t really have a comment other than, can B.O.B. be any less self aware?
JK
@freelancer:
Total Bummer. I was pinning my hopes on that fat fuck Rush dropping dead from a heart attack before his 60th birthday.
Chad N Freude
The last word on Hegel can be found here.
JK
@Brick Oven Bill:
Rick Moran just called. He’s missing a wingnut for his nuthouse.
Comrade Darkness
If more conservative talkers took up the theme of challenging liberalism’s bedrock assumptions
I’ll believe they are serious about challenging liberalism’s bedrock assumptions when they stop driving on public roads.
Tony J
After reading through it one more time, what Hayward – seems – to be saying, in a roundabout way, boils down to:
“Mr Beck, would you like something to read while I stroke your balls?”
Did I miss anything?
Comrade Darkness
@JK: Cheer up. Since he despises government regulators like the FDA, he’s probably taking some illicit supplement that destroys your organs.
JK
@Tony J:
No. That about sums it up.
And to think, the Washington Post once was a great newspaper.
Shell
Over at Amazon, it’s so depressing to see so many RW screeds in the top Ten. Malkin, dough-boy Beck and of course, Rogue Palin.
It was so nice for while, after the movie came out, to see Julia Child’s “Mastering Art of French Cooking” at #1. for a few weeks.
No hate mongering, no wingnut tedium. Just a classic dedicated to wonderful food.
On ‘Wait, wait, don’t tell me” today, somebody said she thought the book was called ‘Going Rouge.’ which would have made a better title.
El Cid
I am quaking in my boots for fear that Glenn Beck might use Hegel to question my core assumptions.
And I’ve read “The 5,000 Year Leap,” but although it was okay, it was aimed at people who knew basically nothing about early American history, colonial philosophy, the Founders’ views and traditions, or the origins of the Constitution itself, for that matter.
And yet this mediocre, trivial introductory text is treated by the modern rightie movement as some insightful revelation.
valdivia
@Shell:
maybe some Twilight related non fiction book will come out the week new Moon in out in November and knock a few of these off the top 10 list?
srv
What has really happened here is that the political non-existence of a true left results in democrats and moderates defensively defining themselves as “not the kind of liberal that Rush Limbaugh talks about.”
Hence thinkers like Chomsky and personalities like Moyers are generally seen as being “out there” and the right is free to swing to Cleon Skousen as the new norm.
Jon Stewart, Maddow and the John Cole’s of the interons assiduously document and humorize this reality, nod that Michael Moore is fat, and Ralph Nader is insane. They blindly support whatever policy (bailouts, debt, tax, health, Afghanistan) is served to them as long as they can convince themselves that it isn’t as crazy or stupid as what the New Birchers support. That is their dialectic.
Perhaps the reason no great thinkers of the left are on TV or writing for the NYT’s is because they actually have no base. Perhaps democrats should think about the long-term ramifications of that.
gbear
@JK:
You forgot drug-addicted.
Reason60
Beck reading Hegel reminds me of the scene in A Fish Called Wanda:
Jamie Lee Curtis, to Kevin Kline: “You’re an ape!
KK (smugly): “Apes don’t read Nietzche.”
JLC: “Yes they do, they just don’t understand it!”
Aimai had a bulls-eye observation about the followers of Beck/ Moore/ Limbaugh:
“Its aimed at everyone who is dis-involved and dis-enchanted and dis-informed, exhausted and demoralized and who don’t get any stimulation…
It can’t be stressed too highly that the people who listen to these guys think they are getting a free education from someone who is more educated and more connected than they can be.”
The Palin wing of the conservative movement is not swayed or shamed by intellectuals; they are profoundly detached and disenfranchised from mainstream intellectual thought, and the occasional quotation from Limbaugh or Beck from Thomas Paine or Edmund Burke is enough stimulation for them, without the need to actually read the source or digest the content.
Coincidently, Neal Gabler and Joe Carter on the same day published pieces making the argument that the conservative movement has collapsed into a religion or cult, informed only by anger and faith, resistant to reason or persuasion.
This makes it both frighteningly powerful, but doomed to failure.
DougJ
@srv
This actually makes some sense, though of course I don’t agree. BTW, the plural of “John Cole” is “John Coles”, not “John Cole’s”. That’s my one big grammatical pet peeve this days.
EDIT: And, by the way, I would argue that there is no “true right” either. Beck, Limbaugh, et al. are philosophically incoherent (to put it charitably) populist charlatans. There’s no more market for right-wing thinkers than there is for left. There’s no market for thinkers, period.
wasabi gasp
I’m Winston Wolfe. I solve problems.
valdivia
I love that the idiot liken Rush to Churchill. Huh?
@DougJ: and I know I am always misspelling things but I caught you in one too: these days, not this days. ;-)
gbear
@aimai: How did you ever have time to bake brownies this morning? You’ve probably written more for blog entries this morning than what Sarah Palin wrote for her own book.
Shawn in ShowMe
Just wait until Beck’s
stalkersinvestigative reporters uncover irrefutable evidence that FDR’s policies caused The Great Depression. Liberalism is doomed.aimai
I’m avoiding cleaning up. That frees up a lot of time. There ought to be some kind of quantum physics theory of free time that explains it.
aimai
DougJ
and I know I am always misspelling things but I caught you in one too: these days, not this days.
Let me know of any grammatical mistakes in posts. I like to correct them when I can.
licensed to kill time
@wasabi gasp:
“Clean-up in the backseat, Beck hit a bump and shot Hegel in the face!”
Ben
@RSA:
This is one of my favorite comments ever.
slag
And Bush read 95 books a year.
JackieBinAZ
@Tony J: the finger lovingly inserted in his anus at the same time.
aimai
Wow @ Gocart Motzart
That BOB quote is almost a Zen Koan of Wingnuttery:
Uh? If Obama was not Constitutionally seated the Military would continue to “execute their oath to support and defend the United States Constitution” by following the orders of the Vice President, and so on down the chain of command. Anything else would be a worm oroubourous of failure to execute the oath in the first place.
aimai
valdivia
@DougJ:
the only problem is that I rarely catch them but I did this time because I make it all the time.
Wilson Heath
Liberalism’s bedrock assumptions? That people are better off when they have rights, freedoms, and a society geared towards empowering these? Horrible.
As opposed to Conservatism’s bedrock assumption: whoa, easy there — you ever thought maybe we don’t want those things, now or maybe ever? Now that’s the ticket!
El Cid
srv: Yep. We’re seriously disabled from having true debates when all sorts of arguments are ruled out of hand as unacceptable by being ‘too’ left.
On the other hand, though it may be inconsistent and shallower intellectually, I find that now a lot of perspectives which in the 1990s would have been dismissed as unacceptably left are now discussed as part of the general liberal blogosphere range.
mclaren
Glenn Beck has modified Hegel’s dialetic theory of history — his version goes: Thesis, Antithesis, Dumbassedness.
(required)
Beck understand Hegel like Bush understands Camus.
———————————
Bush’s only problem with Camus, it turns out, was remembering whether to pronounce his name Ca-MOOSE or CA-miss. Rove wanted him to do it one way on the weekend and t’other way during the week, and he had trouble remembering which was which.
Not the pronunication, the days.
Pope Bandar bin Turtle
He’s [Beck’s] so vain
He probably thinks this book [Dostoevsky’s The Idiot] is about him
Mike in NC
What are the odds that if this bowtie-wearing pseudo-intellectual AEI dweeb tried to lecture a room full of teabaggers and townhallers, they’d beat him to the ground with their “Obama = Hitler” signs?
Woody
Re: Will Rogers
when Will was born, in 1879, his daddy–a full-blood, enrolled Cherokee who had served in the Civil war as a Lieutenant in a Confederate Indian cavalry regiment–was the ‘third richest man in Indian country’ (Oklahoma). Will was slated to become a minister, probably a Methodist. His family almost certainly had owned slaves, either back east or even after relocating in the Territory. Just sayin…
Db
Since when is Hegel a central part of Liberalism’s patrimony? I’ve read “Elements of the Philosophy of Right” and Hegel’s views are hardly what would be considered liberal, nor is he a figure contemporary liberal political theorist particularly engage with. If anything he’s more a proto-communitarian with disturbingly totalitarian tendencies (though, as ever, all that’s open to debate). I’m sure Beck is thinking something asinine like this: Hegel was a big influence on Marx, and in his fevered “brain” Marx’s communism is the main influence on liberalism today (!), so Hegel must be an even more distance influence. Fucking idiot. Maybe he should try Locke instead. He’s much easier to read and, um, actually is a key figure in liberalism’s patrimony.
Tonal Crow
@Tony J:
Do I have to explain *everything* to you libtards? The fact is that supply-side economics and conservatism have *not* failed. They’ve just never been tried.
Woody
In BoB, you see the actual fucktard agenda peeking its vile, factulent (stet) head out. They mean, frankly, to provoke an out-right, full-fledged Constitutional crisis by deligitimizing Obama–everything about him, every act, speech,or visit– through a continuous propaganda bombardment in the cabloid 24-hour news-cycle that ALWAYS returns to the central theme of his being “other.” They mean this to end in insurrection. They mean to induce the imposition of martial law and use it to return to power. I dunno if they can do it, but that’s the plan, i’d bet the rent on it…
Notorious P.A.T.
Don’t worry. Rich right-wing foundations buy those books by the ton to drive up their sales. Then they give them away. Or try to.
Notorious P.A.T.
Glen Beck, midway through a book about Hegel: “When are they going to get to “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Knocked Up”?”
blahblahblah
Beck cites a Marxist philosopher to prove his so-called intellectual right-wing bone fides? Do these PR idiots even fact check before they hit “publish”?
Balconesfault
Conservatism was bad enough off with Kristol being Kristol.
Sly
If Beck can read Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion or The Phantom Republic and come away believing the man to have been a eugenicist, my mind swirls at the notion of what his conclusions are about Hegel after reading Phenomenology.
Other than that Hegel hated paragraphs and punctuation.
Andy K
Who are they trying to kid? The truth is Beck doesn’t understand The Family Circus unless there are dashed lines that spell out how Jeffy got so dirty.
lethargytartare
@Balconesfault:
“Conservatism was bad enough off with Kristol being Kristol.”
Frankly, Conservatism wasn’t anything special with Buckley being Buckley.
Notorious P.A.T.
William F. Buckley and his magazine, defending segregation:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/001467.html
tb
My ass.
dadanarchist
I missed the Hegel reference.
I stopped reading after he called Doughbob’s magnum turdus
“a serious work” that “will have a long shelf life.”
Anything else he said after that moment was pointless as he demonstrated he had zero judgment.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@freelancer:
Hayward does work at AEI. So that partially explains it. I know, doesn’t say much for AEI.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
I also meant to add, Hayward is doing one of those WaPo chats on Tuesday. Should be interesting.
Comrade Kevin
@Db:
You’re giving Beck far too much credit there.
SGEW
Ahem.
– Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Doctrine of Being. Found underlined in Vladimir Lenin’s personal copy of the Science of Logic. (cf.)
SGEW
Also:
– Albert Camus, The Stranger.
Mike in NC
Bill Buckley was a wingnut dickhead when it wasn’t cool to be one. So fuck his soul. That is all.
SGEW
Ah, literate irony. Such a hard jewel to find in the media, nowadays; but when you do, it’s truly precious.
In a way, I miss the Bills, Safire and Buckley. At least they were honestly well-read.
Joel
Where’s Voltaire when you need him?
jl
Hegel?? Really?? Yeah I would suppose he has unlocked the secret bedrock of modern liberalism, and progressivism, and whatnot ever non-wingnut ideologies threaten the Republic. And we should shake in our boots, now our mistaken ideology will be torn out, root and branch.
I’ve read several times that Hegel ‘proved’ from first principles that there could only be seven planets (not sure whether that is true, though. I read it first in Bertrand Russell, who was not overly scrupulous when dinging his philosophical enemies). He did continue to slobber over the vicious and murderous goofball Napoleon into the nineteenth century, long after more sensible people (including Beethoven, a fricken artiste) had enough sense to know he was a irredeemable monster. Those nuggets indicate Hegel would fit better with modern wingnuts.
Seems to me the only people who claimed hegel in a positive sense where irresponsible eggheads who used him to spin intellectual theories for the early communist and fascist movements.
So, on second thought I am not too worried. I think Marilyn Monroe probably had a better handle on reality when she tried to read Schopenauer (which is a story I read once, not sure if that is true either).
Nellcote
@Woody:
That’s a little like Charles Manson’s strategy to start a race war.
Psyberian
It just so happens that I’ve been reading Hegel – he had a “system” as and has been respected for that. In a nutshell it helps to understand other philosophers after Hegel if you understand Hegel – I was a philosohy major.
Db is right above.
But my understanding is that Hegel realized that pure, unleashed capitalism woud create a poverty class. His solution was that the country would help make up for that in some ways, but Marx used that idea to help justify abandoning capitalism altogether.
Nancy Irving
I’m confused. Isn’t Hegel supposed to be the intellectual father of communism?
jl
I think modern liberalism, or moderate liberalism, or conservative social democracy (taking conservative in world wide perspective, though by current US standards that kind of conservativism is considered leftist) the major influences are
John Locke,
John Stuart Mill,
Adam Smith (including Moral Sentiments as well as Wealth of Nations).
But, better to let Beck have some one tell him absurd stories about Hegel, maybe. Or maybe not. What can you say about a strange thing related in a bizarro puff piece in the Kaplan Testprep Daily Digest? (I may not have the snarklingo correct for the Washington Post, but I tried to be hip).
Psyberian
Nancy, one of the reasons I wanted to study Hegel is that he has been blamed for both communism and totalitarianism. But obviously he couldn’t be both himself. His totalitarianism is fairly explicit, but the communism is only inderect and paved the way (sort-of) for communist-like thinking. (Hegel would say that communism is the anti-thises of his political philosophy.)
dsc (Unreasonable liberal)
not to mention Hegel. And, my stars, Willl Rogers!
It would be a blast to try to engage Beck (or any TV pundit) in a serious discussion of modern philosophy.
Walter Benjamin, a thoughtful Marxist (whose writing never fails to thrill me), committed suicide at the train station of the border between Spain and Portugal while waiting for papers (which had first been denied, then were sent at the last moment but were delayed in arriving) to allow him passage to the US to escape from the Fascists–Spanish and Nazi.
Imagine that–A commie afraid of a Fascist–I thought they were on teh same side!
I can’t even talk to my crazy Fox-watching family members about how their careless use of words they don’t understand makes them all look like utter fools.
But this would only further deepen my despair.
Psyberian
(That should of course be spelled “anti-thesis” in my last comment.)
What I found most shocking about Hegel was his belief that war is good. War brought its people together. They become unified in a common cause in war. He also talked about China with high regard since it was so unified.
There is no room for independent factions in his political philosopy: everyone should walk in lockstep behind the leader. Disagreement causes weakness in a country.
Psyberian
I detest the accusation that liberals are communists. To respond that you’re not one is to be on the defensive. It would be better to come up with a positive term or phrase on our own that at least partially explains our position. Maybe it would be better to say that I am for “regulated capitalism” rather than saying “No, I’m not a communist.”
Sly
@Jl
I always thought Schopenhauer’s musings on Hegel were apt: