printIn his groundbreaking series on the American Progressive Movement, Fox News personality Glenn Beck touched today on the differences between Republican and Democrat progressives vis-a-vis foreign policy. This was the closest Beck, the unambiguously pro-war, military-booster came to examining his support for the kind of state expansion (via war) the founders would have abhorred.
“The military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small.”
Militias are what the founders bequeathed, not mammoth standing armies.
Beck came close to articulating what readers of this space have been reading and imbibing for years. Warring for Democracy is the Republicans’ homage to Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism; nation-building abroad is how the Democrats prefer to honor his “legacy.”
Beck quotes Thomas Jefferson a lot, as he should. But ideological wars like Iraq, unequivocally backed by Beck, belong to the Jacobin—not Jeffersonian—tradition.
I thought I heard Beck quote the 1821 words of secretary of state John Quincy Adams (the 2nd part of the program is not yet on YouTube): “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
If not Adams, Beck recited another founder’s exhortation against empire.
The next step for Beck is to reject the recreational wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan with the support of his ilk, and espouse a foreign policy compatible with limited authority and republican virtues. You can’t embrace small government at home and big government abroad. The last Republicans are in the habit of euphemizing as a “strong national defense.”
The beauty of Beck is in his goodness. The fact that at times he says remarkably confused things doesn’t change this.
Here are some glaring mistakes Beck made in today’s program. (Continued below.)
He declared that if Americans knew about the Progressives and their creeping, clandestine agenda, they’d reject it.
It all goes back to immigration, mis-education; the changing face of America, and general rot. A few guns and G-d types may reject the “conservative socialism” (progressivism) in which we are mired based on a visceral feel for the principles of the founding. But most Americans I talk to are clueless—and even hostile to the founding ideas. So let Glenn not presume that progressivism is not in the DNA of a changing America. Once the country is 50 percent Third World, Glenn might as well be talking to the hand.
LOST IN TRANSLATION. After bemoaning how Progressives, having infiltrated America’s institutions, have toiled to alter the meaning of the Constitution, Glenn proposed his own revisionism: rewrite the Federalist Papers so that Americans, whom Glenn insist are never dumb, can understand these brilliant, but difficult, debates.
“Writing In The Age Of The Idiot”:
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.’ That genius, Thomas Jefferson, also insisted that liberty would be ‘a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed and enlightened to a certain degree.'”
Yes, the military as social experiment, as employment for the poor and downtrodden, as welfare, as an armed Peace Corps to realize the utopian dreams of our Progressive “leaders” in both parties . . . Politicians and generals strategizing, making often inane, airy policies . . . If we have leisure to view the military this way, that tells me we don’t really have a real dog in this fight, nothing truly vital. In the now quaint Jeffersonian view of a nation of farmers, for example, everybody is in the militia, everybody is part of the police force. An agrarian society tends to be conservative, peaceable, going to war only if and when there are actual threats to the republic, to kith and kin.
What do we have, bread and circuses, while the legions are off fighting for the interests of the empire? Ave, Caesar! Morituri te salutant!
You’re so close, Glenn! Take the next step!
I’ll never be able to fully trust Beck; after all he did call me a domestic terrorist himself once. Youtube of Beck Calling Ron Paul Movement Terrorists
Still, his turnabout has been amazing, and the most encouraging thing to me is that with his ratings at historic levels, Americans are actually tuning in to watch shows about history! This is something I never thought I’d see.
The strategy in public schools is to make history boring, all about memorizing names and dates to be disgorged on meaningless tests. The idea is to make the subject repugnant to the average person. It works. People don’t know history, don’t care, and most importantly, don’t want to think about it. That’s how the Big Lie survives. But people are waking up, and it doesn’t take a majority to topple a Big Lie.
I caught this program yesterday, and while I thought it was rather informative overall what really surprised me was the image of George W. Bush on a wall of Progressives and Beck saying the former president was basically a globalist. I admit to watching little television and even less of Glenn Beck but I am pleasantly surprised to hear at least a fragment of truth about our former president coming out on the Republican network. This was also the first time I have ever heard Woodrow Wilson referred to as a “racist dirtbag” on national television!
Fox and Beck were also part of the television educators that taught how government economics works after the bubble burst a couple of years ago and the TEA Parties began to form.
Beck should remember that the DOD used to be known as the Department of War.
Truth in advertising demands its return to its former name.
As for armed Peace (sic) Corps, watch the following commercial for the Navy. It’s entitled “US Navy: A Global Force for Good.” The final scene nails it when it comes to America’s hegemony over the world. http://www.navy.com/the-calling/?campaign=promocalling_navy
Scary, no?