Beck bought himself the right shirt, tie, jacket and pipe to go on TV and convince his followers that American history is a lie. For those of us who have hung on to this spinning planet longer than others, a lot of what he says is awfully, not to say dreadfully, familiar. It's a little like experiencing a recurrence of small pox or polio in an area from which those diseases were banished a long time ago.
No wonder, Sean Wilentz writes, it's familiar to many. The roots of Beck's tea party philosophy are deep in the '50's, in Cold War scare tactics, in McCarthyism, in the John Birch society, in the politically useful "communist menace," and all that old stuff. Smells bad; looks bad; can make a nation pretty sick. It would be interesting to find out how many of those who embrace the tea party movement had parents who believed in McCarthy and the red menace. Daddy, I'm coming home... You were right after all...
Most of America outgrew that bad stuff decades ago. Not Glenn Beck.
