http://www.theygaveusarepublic.com/diary/6479/glenn-bec... That twinkle you saw in Glenn Beck's eye yesterday on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, as this puny man strutted and fretted upon a stage where giants once tread, was the telling look of a huckster who knows he is pulling a fast one on America.
For a man who seems obsessed by Adolf Hitler and the rise of the Nazi Third Reich, Beck sure does spend a lot of time organizing mass rallies. But, then, isn't that the whole point?
Glenn Beck may be a rodeo and radio clown whose grasp of history is what you'd expect from a college dropout. But he seems to have absorbed enough World history to know you can attack extremism like Hitler's and still use that extremism as a blueprint for your own, and your movement's, rise to power.
Becks' meteoric rise, as well as the jarring contradictions of his message yesterday, are utterly unsurprising to anyone familiar with the story of Hitler's own rise from poverty and obscurity to power, or the reasons for the German masses embrace of this strange and evil man 80 years ago.
Former Rudy Guiliani speechwriter John Avlon writes in today's Daily Beast that the most startling thing about Beck's performance yesterday was its rank "hypocrisy."
"We're dividing ourselves," Beck piously lectured. "There is growing hatred in the country. We must be better than what we've allowed ourselves to become. We must get the poison of hatred out of us, no matter what smears or lies are thrown our way... we must look to God and look to love. We must defend those we disagree with."
After listening to what was in reality a massive mea culpa, Avlon wondered if Beck ever watched his own program. The man offers a "daily drumbeat of division for a living," says Avlon, as well as "paranoid snake oil" and "serial fear-mongering."
Avlon then provides just a few of Beck's "with malice toward none and charity for all" greatest hits:
• "We are a country that is headed toward socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest imagination."
• "There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America... done through the guise of an election."
• "The president is a Marxist... who is setting up a class system."
• "The government is a heroin pusher using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state."
• "The health-care bill is reparations. It's the beginning of reparations."
• "I believe this guy is a racist" with "a deep-seated hatred of white people."
Avlon then concludes: "You can't profit from fear and division all week and then denounce them one Saturday on the National Mall in Washington and hope nobody notices."
Oh, yes you can, as Beck surely knows. Just consult the history of Adolf Hitler.
Hypocrisy is how Hitler and the Nazis rose to power, and Beck knows it - as do Beck's wealthy corporate benefactors and those, like Dick Armey, who hope to mold the right wing Tea Party movement into an instrument for advancing the interests of America's plutocracy.
The leader of a divisive movement, like the Tea Party, attacking that movement's enemies for their divisiveness is nothing new. It is perfectly consistent with the way that Hitler projected his own demons onto his enemies in order to incite the anger of the German masses and rally their enthusiasms behind the Nazi cause.
Hitler always accused his enemies "of the very things he quite frankly admits to be his own aims," wrote social psychologist Erich Fromm in his 1941 contemporaneous classic on the rise of Nazism, Escape from Freedom.
In a chapter entitled "The Psychology of Nazism," Fromm said that Hitler constantly attacked Jews, communists, the French and others for "the very things that he says are the most legitimate aims of his own actions." Like Beck, Hitler's hypocrisy was so flagrant that "he scarcely bothers to cover this contradiction by rationalizations."
By justifying his own, and his movement's, sadism "as a defense against attacks of others," Hitler was able to portray the German people as "always the ones who are innocent and it's enemies as the sadistic brutes."
It's you who has the sadistic intention, therefore I am innocent, Hitler would say - a useful defense mechanism, says Fromm, "against being found out with regard to one's own sadism or destructiveness."
In fact, says Fromm, "there was literally no act of Nazi oppression which was not explained as a defense against oppression by others."
Think "Angry Left."
In recent years, those who watch American politics have been puzzled by the mystery of why so many lower and middle class Americans whose jobs have been outsourced and whose communities destroyed by the "creative destruction" of a predatory capitalism have responded, not by mobilizing against their capitalist oppressors, but by joining right wing movements that support the interests of their oppressors instead.
Thomas Frank in his best-selling What's the Matter with Kansas explains it by the "culture war" distractions of guns, God and gays that conservatives have offered the masses as scapegoats for their deeper economic anxieties.
That's party true, but there is a deeper reason, suggests Fromm, as he watched the rise of right wing German fascism in the 1930s. And it resides in the basic irrationality of human psychology that explains both the seemingly inexplicable Nazi phenomenon of the 1920s and 30s as well as the Tea Party movement today: A frightened people, suffering economic uncertainty, will naturally seek the comfort of strength in numbers and the false security that can for a time be found in submission to a strongman.
Fascism appealed most to that sector of the German lower, middle classes whose "whole life had been based on the principle of scarcity - both economic as well as psychological," writes Fromm, and whose economic security was most threatened by the rise of "monopolistic capitalism."
In an ironic twist of fate, says Fromm, the panic of dislocations caused by the capitalist market led Germans to meet their anxieties, not through revolution or protest, but by fleeing directly into the arms of their oppressors.
That makes no sense politically, writes Fromm, but it's entirely understandable psychologically.
The decline of the German middle class and the rising power of monopolistic capital had a deep psychological effect, said Fromm, yet it produced a Nazi political ideology that "aroused psychic forces" pointed in the precise opposite direction from "the economic interests of that class."
Nazism, said Fromm, offered a way for the lower middle class to satisfy its anxieties emotionally and psychologically, even as it was committing economic suicide by enlisting in a movement that would "become an important force in the struggle for the economic and political aims of German imperialism."
And just like the Tea Party today, the Nazi Party was a puzzling coalition of lower middle class Germans and wealthy German aristocrats and industrialists -- the latter supporting the Nazi movement in hopes it might "shift the emotional resentment which threatened them into other channels" that served their own economic interests.
German industrialists like Krupps, and the Junker aristocracy, played a huge part in the rise of Nazism, said Fromm. "Without their support, Hitler could never have won."
As the Weimar Republic faltered in the 1920s and 30s, the property owning class was confronted with a parliament in which 40% of delegates were either socialists and communists, or Nazis hostile to capitalism. These vested interests saw a democracy in the 1930s that did not work because it no longer preserved "the privileges of big industry and half-feudal landlords."
(For an update on this fascist movement, see Jane Mayer's New Yorker cover story this month on the under-the-table financial support being slipped to the Tea Party movement by the billionaire Koch Brothers.)
Cementing the rich-poor Nazi coalition was Hitler himself.
Hitler was an efficient tool of the rich, said Fromm, "because he combined the characteristics of a resentful, hating petty bourgeois with whom the lower middle class could identify emotionally and socially, with those of an opportunist who was ready to serve the interests of the German industrialists and Junkers."
Hitler sold himself as the "messiah of the old middle class," says Fromm, but he never delivered on those promises, mostly because - just like the Tea Party today -- Nazism never had a specific political or economic program.
That is because, says Fromm, "it is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism."
Instead of following the course of Americans who elected an aristocrat from New York to alter the relationship between the People's Government and the society's vested financial interests, the Germans gave into basic human emotion and embraced Hitler's tribalism, with what Fromm called its spirit of blind obedience to a leader, its hatred of racial and political minorities, its craving for conquest and domination, and its exaltation of the German people and the Nordic race.
Comparisons between Hitler, the Nazis and contemporary American politics are always fraught with danger. But a review of the historical record seems appropriate in the present case when we are dealing with a dangerous demagogue like Glenn Beck who seems to want to resurrect a nightmare history in order to see it repeated.
Ted Frier :: Glenn Beck: American Fascist
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