COLUMN: Beck gives voice to frustrations

I’m not a Glenn Beck fan. Too weepy. Too creepy. And yet one has to admire the Foxcaster’s ability to motivate his audience, as he did last Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. where he pulled over 100,000 people for what some attendees describe as a religious revival.

Like him or not, Beck and his cohorts have tapped into a deep vein of public discontent. A significant number of people believe the U.S. is a nation in decline. Beck’s ability to frame that frustration and articulate it makes him a leading voice on the political right.

Unlike some of his fellow Foxcasters, Beck is mostly non-partisan in his discussion of American politics and culture. He’s angry with both political parties, a sentiment shared by many of his followers.

And yet, Beck isn’t really blazing new trails with his call for the nation to turn to God for some kind of social-political-cultural redemption. That has been done over the centuries by other religious leaders, sometimes to the detriment of society. Once people begin to think others are wicked, all kinds of nastiness can happen.

And yet, it is these small, but organized protests that often determine the fate of history. Only a third of Colonists were rebels, yet they threw off the British yoke in what amounted to a civil war as they also fought their Loyalists neighbors.

The Obama Administration would be wise to heed the backlash of Beck and his kin. Although they often dismiss conservatives as either “greedy” or nutty, the Obama Administration would be foolish to think Beck is just another nut. He may be a nut, but he’s a damn smart one.

With the election of President Obama, the nation took a giant stride to the Left. Now, people are uneasy with that move and sense that Mr. Obama really doesn’t know what he’s doing.

He’s doing the opposite of what should be done, and many citizens know it. No new jobs can be created in such an unstable political-economic environment.

Better than most, Beck articulates that. He has no inherent power; Beck is just a TV broadcaster.

But he does have a soapbox and he knows how to use it, as last Saturday proved.

People are frustrated with America’s leaders. Washington has always been an “insider’s” town, but today more than ever before it is totally disconnected from reality.

If the Obama Administration doesn’t move back toward the political center, it will crash and burn between now and 2012. The upcoming November elections will be a watershed test of that.

But Republicans need not cheer too much. The same forces that are now slamming the Democratic Party will soon hit them as well.
America is in revolt, not with arms, but with the ballot box. And while many slam the political Right for its sometimes goofy world view, it takes a few articulate nuts at the political extremes to keep the political pendulum somewhere close to the center.

Mike Buffington is editor of The Jackson Herald. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com .