The World According to Beck

Glenn Beck and the American Family Association have cost the American public $7.5 million in an effort to oppose government spending. Interesting.

For a mere $30 a pop, 2.5 million supporters of this campaign have clicked a button to have “pink slips” sent to all 535 members of Congress—warning them that they’ll lose their jobs if they “continue to flout American values.”

According to Beck, these values are honesty, reverence, hope, thrift, humility, charity, sincerity, moderation, hard work, courage, personal responsibility, and gratitude—and he is the self-appointed arbiter of those values. Most people would agree that these are important values, but the AFA claims that our current administration has failed to uphold them. In response, Beck proposes a radical drive to “take back control of our country” by ousting House and Senate representatives from their jobs.

The header on the AFA Web site reads: “We the People Demand Answers.” Doesn’t “We the People” in the U.S. Constitution refer to all Americans? Is this campaign targeted to all Americans, or just those increasingly outraged that “their country” doesn’t look the way it did 100 or 200 years ago?

Beck’s aim is get America back to “everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again.” And what exactly would this look like? A world of fear and terror, grief, mistrust of “outsiders,” despair and a loss of hope, a sense of American exceptionalism? Is this the world Beck envisions and hopes to lead us back to?