Glenn Beck, the voice of white resentment

robot-heart-politics:

azspot:

Between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, the American social experiment was shaped by a moral vision that was virtually the obverse of everything Glenn Beck and the Tea Party movement subscribes to.  Lets call it the social justice movement. 

There were three parts to the program: religious, economic and (in the later stages) racial.  The religion was liberal, moral and ecumenical.  The economic program was New Deal orthodoxy.  By the 1950s, ridding the world of Jim Crow apartheid  had become the movement’s primary goal.  Picture liberal Protestant clergymen, radical Roman Catholic priests and Jewish Rabbis marching arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy and you’ve got the idea. 

The civil rights movement couldn’t have succeeded without this movement.  As every white southerner realized, it took progressive rulings from the Supreme Court, progressive legislation from Congress and powerful intervention from the White House and the Justice Department to drive Jim Crow to his knees.  In short, it took the government.

Why are the Tea Party people and Glenn Beck’s fans are so upset about the federal government?  Because, in their view, integration was forced down their unwilling throats by judicial and legislative fiat.  

The lunatic fringe conservatism that Mr. Beck espouses with such goofy eloquence is driven, among other things, by southern white resentment.  Remember Beck’s weird comment about President Obama having it in for white people and white culture?