Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [93]
The Progressives
Beck labels these villains “progressives.” Progressivism is another one of those nail-Jell-O-to-a-tree words. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, political reformists championing a diverse range of policies began calling themselves progressives. According to historians, “Progressivism was not a single movement but an aggregate of them, aiming at widely divergent goals. To one progressive, regulation of trusts might be the great end; to another, clean municipal government; to a third, equal rights for women.”47
In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt split with the Republicans to found the Progressive Party, colloquially known as the Bull Moose Party, and ran as its presidential nominee. Aptly demonstrating the ambiguity of the term progressive, Roosevelt lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who was also regarded as a progressive. The whole idea of progressivism eventually drowned in its own nebulousness, and the term has become little more than a synonym for liberalism that many on the left adopted after Reagan succeeded in stigmatizing liberal.
But the ambiguity suits the right wing just fine. Like secular humanism, they have turned progressivism into a waste receptacle for every person and idea they despise. Thus, Bill O’Reilly’s “secular progressives” encompass George Soros, the ACLU, the New York Times, legalized drugs, same-sex marriage, underage sex, and Canada. Glenn Beck’s “progressive” tent is even bigger. He lumps together everyone from Hitler to FDR to Che Guevara to Nancy Pelosi. Dropping the secular adjective has also enabled him to attack progressive churches that emphasize social and economic justice, language that he calls “Marxist code words for the new global order.”48
In one profound O’Reilly Factor episode, O’Reilly and Beck engaged in a spirited debate about the essence of progressivism:
O’REILLY: “Progressivism wants to take your stuff. That’s it. That’s what it is. It wants to take your stuff.”
BECK: “I will go a step farther. They just don’t want to take your stuff. They want to control every aspect of your life.”
O’REILLY: “You and I agree . . . but you take it five steps further than I do.”49
For once, O’Reilly was exactly right.
Among the many things that Beck takes five steps further than O’Reilly is the three-part persecution formula. For instance, O’Reilly presented the secret plot to destroy Christmas in a scattering of Fox News programs over a period of several years. By contrast, Beck presents secret plots almost every night with a torrent of zeal and fury that makes Bill O’Reilly’s Christmas tale seem like a sweet bedtime story.
And while O’Reilly fears a slippery slope to a “brave new progressive world” of legalized drugs and same-sex marriage, Beck envisions nothing less than the savage despotic dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984.ce “Progressives—the root of the word is ‘progress,’” he explains. “You’re progressing to what? Progress implies steps forward, movement, right? What are you moving toward? . . . You’re moving step-by-step towards total government. And it depends on who gets you there. Is it going to be the fascists, the Nazis, or the communists?”50
Finally, Beck’s persecution narrative is far more developed than O’Reilly’s. O’Reilly puffs up political differences to make them seem like persecution—“Happy Holidays” messages constitute anti-Christian bigotry, and pejorative criticism of his show violates his First Amendment rights. By contrast, Beck warns that conservatives will literally be incarcerated or murdered by evil progressives. By associating the progressive revolution with the specter of black radicalism, he transformed the old communist versus capitalist narrative of Willard Cleon Skousen into a zero-sum conflict between “real America” and a progressive alliance of coastal elites and minorities.