US Elections

All Mad Men are created equal: Glenn Beck's common sense

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney

22 October 2009

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I'll say this for cable news programs: they really know how to up the ante. Comedy Central's Jon Stewart pricked the absurdity of the relentless and frequently meaningless 24 hour news cycle, but he couldn't match Fox News's Bill O'Reilly. Then Stewart launched protégé Stephen Colbert and his wicked parody of the rabble-rousing, self-satisfied conservative anchorman, and the game seemed over. How could you top a man who accused reality of having a well-known liberal bias?

Why, with Glenn Beck, of course! A year ago, Beck was a minor league CNN personality, but the combination of the Obama presidency, a move to Fox, and a right wing desperate for direction has led to commentators saying - and not too implausibly - that he "might just be helping restore the equilibrium between the elite and populist sides of conservatism." If a media personality is - as the Obama administration has put it - the leader of the Republican Party, it's Beck, not Rush Limbaugh.

If you want to know why Beck is so popular, take a look at the video I posted up there. It's a snippet from one of his programs last week, and it's absolutely compelling. Beck is warm and intimate and confessional; he actually weeps during this segment, something not unusual for him. Like a conservative Jon Stewart, he portrays himself as a down-to-earth everyman who sees the madness that is modern politics and can only respond by blurting out his version of straight-forward common sense. It's great television whether you're on the left, the right, or even if you have no real interest in politics.

Glenn Beck's common sense (coincidentally, that's also the name of one of his books) in this clip is something to behold indeed. In fact, even if he serves only a partisan portion of America, his misty-eyed truth-telling springs from something deeper and more universal in the country's character.

Beck looks us deep in the eyes and lowers his voice: "I think if a politician came to us and said, 'Do you remember that simpler time in America...?' And I know, it wasn't a perfect time. America has always had her problems, big and small. But do you remember how that felt? Do you remember what life was like?" Then Beck plays a couple of dusty, old, feel-good commercials to support his point. One is the famed Coke spot featuring a boy offering American footballer "Mean Joe" Greene his soda; the other is a Kodak ad soundtracked by, of all people, Paul Anka.

They're the kind of things that might have been dreamed up by the imaginative might of Don Draper, and indeed, there is a bit of "Mad Men" in Beck's common sense. Not the cutting social commentary of "Mad Men" the TV series, which has no qualms about highlighting the deeply ingrained power lines of early '60s society - whites over blacks, men over women - but the stylish nostalgia of "Mad Men" the cultural phenomenon. If you get invited to a Mad Men party, you're not going to expect sexual harassment and pregnant women smoking; you're going to find stylish clothes, classy cocktails, and hot retro tunes. "Mad Men" in the public consciousness has come to represent exactly the kind of rose-coloured fantasy world the television series was intent on dismantling.

"America has always had her problems," Beck says, sweeping away Jim Crow and McCarthyism with one nebulous platitude. Fittingly for a man Time Magazine dubbed a "Mad Man," his vision of America is the same as that of "Mad Men" the cultural phenomenon; a cozy realm of certainty and surety unmuddied by social reality. 

This is how Beck puts it::

America has never been a perfect place, but we used to be united. We used to be united on some basic things. If a politician told you right now that he could make that happen again - you could go back to those simpler times when people were together - you'd do it in a heartbeat.

He follows that up with a fantastic folksy tale analogising America to a naive teenager who gets mixed up with a bad crowd, and has to be punished for it - a story that fits perfectly into his nostalgic reminiscence. He presents it as a conservative image of America, but it's more than that. It's an apolitical idea that runs deep within American culture.

Nostalgia is by no means unique to the United States, but the country has its own take on the emotion. Throughout its history, Americans have feared their nation is on the brink of losing its greatness, that, in the words of Beck, "the country is on the wrong track ... [Americans] know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN'T FEEL RIGHT but they don't know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it." It's a curious melancholia in the American spirit that counterbalances its optimism and swagger: this is a nation convinced that it had perfected itself at some glittering moment in the past, and each day it falls farther and farther away from that zenith. It's the same paradox at the heart of that famous pledge, in the preamble to its constitution, to "form a more perfect union" - how can anything be "more perfect? It's the paradox between the "self-evident" truth that "all men are created equal," and the original sin of slavery that undermined this affirmation from the moment of the country's conception.

America is known as a big, ambitious, and unrelentingly optimistic nation that valorises winners and exults in success. But it has a flip side too: the America of Americana: small towns and tight knit communities with a stoic admiration for hard work and traditional values. It's the America of picket fences and Fathers Knowing Best that has turned "Mad Men" from a smart drama into a cultural phenomenon. This is the America Glenn Beck likes to talk about. It's the mythical America so many of its citizens - on the left and the right - believe the country can return to, even if it was never really there. And even if Glenn Beck is a mad man, he is one in touch with a highly resonant brand of common sense.

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