Martin Luther King III has an op-ed in The Washington Post today gently rebuking the idea that Glenn Beck's 8/28 march has anything to do with what his father was fighting for back in the 1960s. The differences are obvious to anyone with knowledge of history -- the civil-rights movement was about securing minority rights through government intervention; Beck views government intervention on behalf of the marginalized as tyranny. King was all about social justice; Beck sees social justice as Nazism.
Beck's march is one part reactionary conservatism (simply trying to do something that will piss liberals off) one part narcissism and one part unreconciled shame. Conservatives are used to blurring the obvious and large distinctions between liberalism and communism in order to saddle liberals with the responsibility for the atrocities committed by communist regimes. But they've never been able to reconcile that Manichean worldview with the historical reality that liberals were consistently on the right side of the most important domestic moral question the United States has ever faced. Beck is trying to bandage that wounded ego with a revision of history that puts conservatives on the same side as Martin Luther King Jr., but it's impossible. He's going to have to settle for the lesser satisfaction of making Al Sharpton angry.
If conservatives draw on their history of aggressive anti-communism for moral authority, liberals draw on abolitionism and the civil-rights movement for theirs. Both the conservative motivation behind this event and the outsize liberal offense are the product of bruised egos. Beck can never erase the fact that William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater were on the wrong side of history, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking there are many people still alive who have any right to "claim" the legacy of the civil-rights movement. All we can do is be thankful to those that fought to make this country a better place. Anyone can say they would have marched with King or fought for his cause. Ultimately, only a few actually did.
