Avlon: Good Riddance to Beck
John Avlon writes at The Daily Beast:
The nightly nervous breakdown will not be televised.
Glenn Beck is going off the air on Fox News.
It is a remarkable reversal of fortune for a man who one year ago was banking $32 million annually, teaching Americans how to fear-monger for fun and profit.
But with his ratings down nearly 50 percent and advertisers abandoning the show, Beck’s apocalyptic shtick has been getting rancid fast.
It’s almost hard to remember that not so long ago Glenn Beck was being taken seriously as a political figure by hyper-partisans on the far right. The proto-Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill in 2009 was directly inspired by Beck. This past summer, he filled one-third of the Washington mall with his faithful for what turned out to be a religious revival with political overtones, on the anniversary of the Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. There were even, it is now surreal to say, calls for him to run for president on a ticket with Sarah Palin—a draft movement that they had to deny.
A low-lights reel of Beck’s worst moments on Fox would take hours to watch, but it would offer a useful seminar on the politics of incitement and near-mainstreaming of conspiracy theories in the Obama era. A talented broadcaster, Beck used his perch to echo old narratives straight out of the paranoid style in American politics—sinister plots to impose one-world government, the intentional subversion of the Constitution, the oppression of the faithful at the hands of a secular socialist elite hell-bent on replacing the American experiment with tyranny. “The Glenn Beck Show” is the closest the John Birch Society has ever come to having their own national program, reaching millions and poisoning political debate in the process.
And let’s not forget that in the overheated, ‘no enemies on the right,’ anti-Obama environment before the 2010 midterm elections, Beck had his defenders in the GOP and conservative commentariat. Many more were content to be silent in the colluding spirit of ‘he might be crazy, but he’s our crazy.’
But anger and anxiety are difficult to sustain for long periods of time with any degree of credibility. Demagogues do best in economic downturns. The economy has steadily (if slowly) improved and the 2010 midterm elections reduced the sense of urgency in the opposition. The American system still worked and tyranny was not descending upon our democracy, as hotly predicted. Glenn Beck was the boy who cried wolf, constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric to get attention and ultimately becoming a parody of himself.
I watched Beck’s show last night for the first time in months after hearing of his forced retirement. I half-hoped that we’d see Beck liberated from his shtick and announce that this whole time he’d been punking America by playing out the script of ‘Network,’ bringing the character of Howard Beale to life as a lesson to us all. No such luck.
Instead, I saw Beck comparing himself to Paul Revere and predicting the end of the world. ...
