Mark Schmitt tells us what we can actually learn from Glenn Beck:
Beck‘s blackboard schemes are fiction, of course, part of what the writer Alexander Zaitchik, in a superb new book about Beck, calls “the oceanic audacity of his self-serving ignorance.” None of the people he fingers are socialists; few have more than a tangential relationship to the Obama administration. But Beck’s blackboards call to mind Marianne Moore‘s definition of poetry, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”: These are imaginary conspiracies with real people in them. And the surprising thing is that some of these people are now better known to Beck’s audience than they ever were to progressives. Willfully ignorant as he may be, Beck sometimes seems more deeply immersed in the history of the American center-left than many of us who live there.