I appreciate your comments about Christianity… and I thank you for allowing me my faith, but I was simply illustrating your point that Beck hasn’t researched his own religion enough to have made an informed decision OR he has decided to ignore it. Is this the same approach he takes to some of the subjects on which he speaks with authority that he should leave to discuss with experts?

It’s always a pleasure to come across someone who has taken the time to study the source materials and think hard about them.

As someone who was adamantly opposed to the totalitarian regimes whose leaders claimed the intellectual mantle of Marx and yet saw much to admire in Marx’s writings, I thank you for the nod to Marx. Too much is made of the early prescriptions in the Communist Manifesto (which even so were clearly anti monarchy and pro democracy) and not enough of his later “scholarly” works. That he was a classical economist who traced his roots to Adam Smith is often ignored entirely.

In the glorious days of the late 60′s and early 70′s when Marxism was a more popular political philosophy than it is today, one of my pet peeves was the corruption of key terms in Marx’s writings to suit rather, well, airheaded sensibilities.

Take , for example, the term “Exploitation of Labour”. This is a primary subject of the first few chapters of “Capital Volume 1″ and it is by no means used to portray the proletariat as a downtrodden class living in misery enforced by capitalist masters. It is a technical term Marx used to help analyze and explain what was, for him, a new and positive development attributable to capitalism–the ability, or rather, the systemic imperative, to extract a portion of the proceeds of labor for reinvestment in the means of production. Marx saw feudalism as a static, backward system that held the superior productive forces latent in “social labor” in check. Capitalism pulled humanity out of the economic backwaters and set it on a path of ever increasing productivity. This is what defines Capitalism for Marx. And he believed Capitalism was a necessary and desirable stage in the development of human economic society. As you may imagine, I was not popular many of my Marxist contemporaries

Another example: “Commodity Fetishism”. I used to cringe when I heard this because it was often used to insinuate that capitalism engenders a sort of perverse Freudian psychological attachment to material goods in the masses in order to divert them from their terrible plight and prevent them from rising up and throwing the Capitalists out. Not so. According to Marx, Commodity Fetishism was indeed an undesirable trait, but the critique was leveled at his contemporary socio-economic theorists who wrote as though , with the advent of Capitalist Commodity Production, human economic society had reached its apex and economic history had come to an end, as it were (sound familiar?).

One of the frustrating things about Marx for some is that he gave no clear vision of what a socialist society might be–because he didn’t really didn’t know. As for what might come next, he seems to have focused mostly on what he saw as “contradictions” and how they might be remedied. But he left no complete prescription. One great tragedy of the 20th Century is that despots have seized on the very few prescriptive statements Marx ever made and used them as gospel. Hence the enforced collectivization of agriculture in China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, North Korea, that is responsible for the death by famine of tens, if not hundreds, of million of humans.

And that brings me to the thing that gives me pause in your blog post regarding Beck.

“Four years in an undergraduate history program that focuses on western civilization (unperverted by Critical Theory, admittedly hard to find) …”

To me. this seems uncomfortably close a fetishism of sorts not unlike the commodity fetishism that Marx so abhorred.

In the end Marx was guilty of a fetishism of his own and one that is nearly universal. One that, paradoxically, disallows human agency a central role in human development. For Marx, capitalists were no more”free agents than workers. Both were “cogs in the machine” acting out predetermined historical roles. And so it is with many enlightenment philosophies.

I once worked with a dedicated Objectivist. Lunch time was often quite stimulating and thought provoking. On one occasion, the topic turned to the Great Depression and whether or not mobilizing to fight WWII (or, prior to that, to supply allies with heavy weaponry) helped to bring the depression to an end. Obviously such a discussion is full of traps–those who think fiscal policy an effective tool will be inclined to argue that it did, while those who favor monetary policy will be inclined to argue otherwise, etc.

The Objectivist contribution was: “Say’s Law. You might as well take all that production output and dump it in the ocean.”

Obviously, human agency plays no important part in this view of the world. There is a world of difference between asking the population of a country to accept rationing, wage/price controls, mandatory job assignments, etc in order to prosecute a war, and asking them to do so in order to take the results and dump it in the ocean. And I hypothesize that you will see radically different results in each case. .

One could argue that if folks thought of the production of military goods as the equivalent of dumping industrial output into the ocean, we might arrive at a more rational socio-politico-economic equilibrium (never mind that the notion of such an equilibrium itself is highly suspect). I admit I tend to that view myself. But that’s not the point.

Ouch! Gotta run.

But I will be visiting here regularly, though I will rarely go on at such length.

Keep on thinkin’.

“Glenn – You make an excellent point. The entire notion that the political divide in America should also be a divide between “the intellectuals” and “the regular people” is a disastrous one. The only way we can ever hope to make progress is by supporting our theories with evidence, and discarding those beliefs that turn out to be wrong – and that goes for everyone. What exactly would “the regular people” do if they somehow managed to “overthrow” “the intellectuals”? I can’t imagine that things would go very smoothly. ”

I also agree with your observation that there’s a degree of hypocrisy to the Christian Right adopting the idea of “liberty,” since its very goal is to see to it that a specific brand of religion is imposed on everyone – by statist means.

And as for intellectuals that Beck should have on his program for legitimate debates, Hitchens is an excellent choice! I recently had the opportunity to meet him, and I’ve written a piece about it at my own blog: The Conscience of a Centrist (www.conscience-of-a-centrist.blogspot.com).

Having studied history at the graduate level and taught it, and enjoying discussion of historical topics with anyone any time, I am tremendously disturbed at today’s efforts to rewrite history according to a rigid and wrong-headed ideology. These Christian zealots say they are rewriting the liberal bias inherent in history texts (not that I ever saw any growing up), but that “liberal bias” is of extremely recent vintage and exploded the field in the ’50s to ’80s. Until that time, most public history was little more than American triumphalism and hagiography, and the “revisionists’ made us look at the consequences of American expansionism for Indians, blacks, and the environment. The role of women, the texture of everyday life, the nobility of much of the labor movement and not just the triumph of technology and Carnegie and Ford, deepened our understanding of how history affected everyone. And the sometimes brutality of our society toward blacks, workers, Indians, and others is sometimes on full display, and should be reckoned with. Few people even know can conceive of the fact that between 1890 and the early 1930s, thousands of white Americans sometimes gathered to watch “spectacle lynchings” in which black men were tortured, castrated, and burned to death for crimes real or imagined, or that a bank in Atlanta used to display in its lobby a jar with the body parts of a lynched black man. This hard-won revisionism overcame decades of officially taught history that focused a little too easily on triumph and progress and not on the costs. i think it is possible to be a patriot and value the many great achievements of our people in spite of our weaknesses–the economic miracles, the belief in fair play that stubbornly works its way underneath systems of repression and control, the fight for black civil rights, the genius of a man like Lincoln to push toward freeing the slaves even though he was not a radical abolitionist, and the triumphs of the New Deal, however flawed, which helped us set right so many social inequalities and economic inefficiencies. There is greatness in America, but ugliness, too, and we are not well served by going back to a triumphalist national story that sweeps problems under the rug with a lot of euphemisms. This is a new version of Lysenkoism, which reigned over Russian science in the last decade of Stalinism.

The irony is that there are countless textbooks focusing on the role of religion in American society, from the colonial period onward. No one disputes that religious ideals animated the New England colonists and fueled America’s sense of destiny, mission, and quest for social justice. A great historian like Sacvan Bercovich is too difficult for high school readers, but he is one of many historians whose ideas about religious life in America can be worked into the curriculum. But to claim we are a “Christian society” from the birth of the nation is just a fantasy. As you note above, many of the Founding Fathers were not religious men, and virtually all of them wanted to avoid the experience all too familiar of them from Europe, riven for centuries by religious war. That’s why they separated Church and state, and the fanaticism displayed by many people today shows it is still a good idea. None of the zealots wants to recognize that American was founded also by Catholics from Britain, France, and Spain, or that Franklin was influenced not only by English political ideas but by the Iroquois Confederacy in forming his ideas about democracy.

Above all, the rigid “Founderism” I see in a lot of conservatives–go back to the beginning, strict construction of the Constitution and 18th century ideas–the Founders themselves would find laughable. They no more expected future generations to slavishly follow their ideas and systems than we would accept 18th century medicine or science. They understood that society is fluid and changing, that new generations must find their own solutions to new problems of which they couldn’t conceive. They were steeped in history and understood that its flowing stream would continue far beyond their lifetimes. That’s why it’s also foolish to insist, as so many conservatives do, that we’re a republic and not a democracy. The Founders in fact had to amend their more aristocratic laws and ideas under democratic pressure from common citizens, and the history of this country has been a steady pressure to expand the voting franchise, involve formerly “out” groups and individuals, and expand democracy. If you are serious about restoring the political world of the Founders, then we need to bring back slavery and disenfranchise women and the unpropertied.

Beck’s views on Progressivism, which are both stupid and insulting, I will leave for another time.

As for the role of Christianity in our country, all of our founders were not Christians – that is certain. Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin were certainly not – they were deists and some argue that Jefferson and Franklin were atheists, but I don’t think we can know that. I don’t think it’s particularly relevant what religion they were in comparison to their creation of a constitution that doesn’t mention god once in it in terms of thinking about what the role is of Christianity in the founding of our country. In writing, George Washington said plainly that we are in no way a Christian country in the 1796 Treaty with Tripoli – look it up. As well, Thomas Paine, believed by many to be the invisible hand behind the Declaration of Independence, was outright hostile to Christianity and the bible, openly claiming it was full of lies and not believable in his writings.

My point in mentioning this is not to criticize Christianity per se, but rather to illustrate my point that the claims of some Christians today to some strong connection between Christianity and the creation of our country have no weight and moreover, are an inappropriate reach by religious zealots into the political sphere, where they have no rightful place. It goes without saying that you are welcome to your faith, but don’t dare assert the authority of your faith by claiming credit to it for the greatness of our country.

I am a Christian and not affiliated with any party to prevent being identified with party ideology. When you mention Beck’s plan to “…discuss the role of ‘faith’ in our nation’s history,” and how he will discuss how “…individual liberty [arose] from the teachings of Moses, as embodied in the Ten Commandments is using faith,” I would agree with him in spirit. I believe that our founders, many of whom had documented faith in God, used this influence to write the documents that founded our nation.

I don’t believe that Beck understands having a true Christian faith. Such a faith is a complete surrender to Christ and his teachings. Beck is a Mormon. Without belaboring the Mormon vs. Christian argument, I will make this comment and move on: The book of Mormon make a lot of claims to events that could easily be proven through cursory geographical study if they were true (and if they would be permitted in some areas). I am dumbfounded that Beck – the studied and researched person he makes himself out to be – claims Mormonism as the faith that will get him closer to God. Having said that, for me, this diminished his credibility for me. Knowing this makes me also side with you on your points that he should not speak with authority to subjects on which he is admittedly not able to do so.

I agree with Tom Monohan who “… see[s] Beck as a person still undergoing an awakening.” I sense he is learning as he sojourns and is simply taking his listeners and viewers with him on his journey. Like any time before Beck abounded on the national stage, we have the choice to follow, glean, or ignore his comments. Even he will tell you that. Like anyone, Beck has the potential to fail as much as he has to continue to be a voice that many will identify with.

I won’t stand for people who blend their religion with their politics – I’m an atheist and that means in their view I’m not good for the country. Do you understand how violative that is? How exclusionary it is? How much it scares me that people like that think nothing of 800,000 people a year getting arrested just for pot in this country. That think it’s okay that Virginia just dropped its law that prohibited basing state hiring decisions on sexual orientation. People who think I shouldn’t be allowed to gamble, but then let the government become the biggest bookie in the world.

Many of the folks who come along this way think they are libertarians based on watching Beck, who you seem to agree is not well informed on many topics that he blathers away about. He’s also chaotic, which makes it even harder to take seriously. But he is no libertarian – his family, faith and country stuff is the same old crap i’ve heard from christian republicans for years. How well is that working to govern this country? What license do those people take because of their self-awarded moral superiority? As far as I can tell, they are just as flawed as anyone else on earth, so really, they should get hell off their high horses and keep their fantasies about a god who chooses to hide utterly from us (not leaving even one single shred of scientific evidence, but in fact leaving convincing evidence that ever thing, ultimately, is random). Well, they should keep it to themselves. I certainly don’t want some jerk to tell me that the fact that they believe that garbage makes them somehow a better American than I am.

Do you see how big a deal this actually is from a principled standpoint?

Regarding religion, many of our Founder’s were enlightened and shared their common belief in mono-theism through Free Masonry (Franklin and Washington were Past Grand Masters). They also recognized the entwined history between politics of religion (not a belief in a single God) and monarchical government caused many of the people’s problems.

Building on the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, they, through Madison, gave us the Constitution. I agree that it does not mention God and shouldn’t. They believed a man’s relationship with God is a personal relationship not a civic one. As for the Federal Government, we don’t give it power through our beliefs; we give it through our will. We are a country that protects freedom. We believe that the citizen is superior to the “crown”. It was novel in 1787 and today is still hard for many to accept.

Beck is coming down the learning curve and may or may not come to fully grasp a pure Libertarian position. That’s OK since the LP does not have a purity test. As the old saying goes, “I’d rather have someone representing me I agree with 75% of the time than someone I agree with 10% of the time.” As an 11 year member of the LP, I welcome folks who don’t agree with every plank in the platform. A bit of conflict can be a good thing, its what force growth and enlightenment.