This has been another eventful week, and for another week I am a bit late in posting the review. Thinking about the “news,” thinking about what is new in our world, I have been mesmerized by the remarkable drama in Egypt, the conclusion of which is far from certain. At DC, we have been trying to make sense of this, with side glances at related problems. I think in fact that the standard ways of understanding these revolutionary times require such glances, because conventional ways of thinking mislead. I am going to address this with a couple of short posts, the first today, the second tomorrow, thinking about the revolutionary moment by reviewing the posts of my colleagues. I will start by reflecting on an apparent comedy and move toward an examination of potential tragedy.
Some of the conventional responses to the events in Egypt would be funny, if they weren’t so serious. The prime example is that of Glenn Beck: “Islam wants a caliphate. Communists want a Communist, new world order. They’ll work together, and they’ll destabilize, because they both want chaos, period.” That this is what he gets out of the complex events in Egypt reveals the power of ideological thinking.
Beck, ever on the lookout for conspiracies and frightening analogies, normally distills a powerful brew. But it seems a bit weak when it comes to a major foreign affair, indeed quite foreign for him and his audience. I suspect that even the confirmed Fox News viewer is put off by Beck’s week long attempt to demonize the obviously well meaning Egyptian activists, who have appeared on our television, computer and mobile screens.
In fact, I wonder what Gary Alan Fine thinks. In his appreciation of Beck, he makes two strong observations, leading to a provocative conclusion: Beck is a talented communicator, expressing popular skepticism about elites who purport to know what is best for the people, better than the people. And he pays intellectuals the complement of taking them seriously. Therefore: “Glenn Beck is an endowed professor for the aggrieved, presenting cracked knowledge.”
Fine concludes that Beck and the intellectual opponents he demonizes, the progressive intellectuals, such as Frances Fox Piven, actually have much in common. They question the easy assumptions of what they see as a self serving liberalism. But I would add, as they do so, they may not only reveal the limits of liberalism, but also undermine liberalism in the process, sometimes intentionally. And, back to Egypt, it is liberal freedom that is a (if not “the”) major commitment of protesters.
I think that Fine misses the dangers of Beck’s anti-liberalism. Anti-liberalism of the left in the U.S. is primarily a comedy; the rhetoric is serious but the appeal is limited. The right’s anti-liberalism is a much more serious threat, because it has a much larger and more powerful constituency. Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the whole Orwellian “fair and balanced” institution hold the attention of a significant part of the American public. If there is ever to be “a transition from democracy” in the United States, as potentially occurring in Hungary today, depicted by Andras Bozoki in his DC post , it will come from Beck’s quarter of the political landscape, it seems to me. Hungary and Egypt show that democratic transitions are always potentially with us and that they don’t only go in one direction.
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