Reihan Salam on Glenn Beck:
So in this very strange and very fluid political moment, Glenn Beck has emerged as the white Malcolm X. Whereas Malcom X embraced militant black separatism, Beck marries a stridently emotional style with political views that wouldn't have been out of place at a 1950s Elks Lodge event. But like Malcolm X, Beck terrifies mainstream liberals, who see something sinister in his inexplicable ways. And just as Malcolm X mellowed in his old age, embracing a more traditional interpretation of Islam shortly before his death, Beck seems to be self-consciously moving past the politicized anger that defined his program for much of the past two years towards a heavy emphasis on spiritual uplift for his people.
Except for the fact that Malcolm's father was murdered by white supremacists who were never brought to justice, his memories of the KKK terrorizing his family, his general experience of white supremacist violence reinforced or tacitly approved of by the state, being assassinated at 39 instead of making $32 million a year fantasizing about it on television, Beck and Malcolm...still have just about nothing in common. Both may have had a somewhat bitter reaction to the perception of race-based oppression against their people; only one of them actually lived that experience in any real way or got a decent book out of it.
That's not to say that Beck doesn't act like he believes that white people are living under similar conditions that black people did in Malcolm's time, it's very clear that Beck's particular brew of white racial resentment draws explicitly on an inverted perception of state-sponsored oppression against blacks during Jim Crow. I've written as much before. It's just that such a comparison is complete bullshit, visible to anyone who isn't blinded by their own desperate white guilt. I suspect Salam's comparison is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, if anything it highlights the discrepancy between what real and imagined persecution looks like. The problem is that even if Salam is kidding, a number of Beck's followers aren't.
