I finally got around to reading Matt Continetti’s piece on the tea parties. I’ve got to say I find it pretty flawed. First of all, it’s not really a piece on the tea parties. It’s a hit piece on Glenn Beck. And that’s fine. Conservatism is big enough and Beck is controversial enough, for people to take different sides on a vast range of topics. But I think Matt’s analysis simply comes up short.

(Warning: Long post ahead)

My chief complaint is that he desperately wants to force a Manichean critique of the tea parties (Santelli = good, Beck = bad) by lambasting Beck for being too conspiratorial and Manichean. The title of the essay says a lot: “The Two Faces of the Tea Parties.” Note, Continetti  isn’t being hypocritical. One could argue that the chief flaw of, say, Stalin was his us-vs.-them worldview while at the same rightly arguing that we should have an us-vs.-them attitude toward Stalin and Stalinists.

But, that’s really not all that analogous to what we’re talking about with Beck and what Continetti calls the Beckian “face” of the tea-party movement. It’s interesting that Matt never explicitly says that the tea party movement has a “Beck wing,” preferring instead for the more literary and ill-defined concept of a “face.” Still, Matt repeatedly and at length tries to hammer home this idea that there are two distinct “faces” to the tea party and conservative populism generally. For instance:

One imagines the Santelli face could be easily integrated into a conservative Republican party, with an affirmative agenda of spending cuts, low taxes, entitlement reform, and free trade. Some Tea Party groups, such as the Contract From America, are working toward this goal, even if they do not state it so baldly …It is harder to integrate the Beck face into mainstream politics. It is harder to imagine even a unified Republican government being tempted by the Beck program. Entitlements are not about to be abolished. The Federal Reserve is not going away. A flat tax is a long-term goal not a short-term fix. The budget will not be balanced by cutting pork-barrel spending alone. America is not about to renege on her international commitments.

The tensions within conservative populism are durable and longstanding. Consider two other faces. The first is Ronald Reagan’s: sunny, cheerful, conservative. Yet it is often forgotten that Reagan was the first Republican president to identify with FDR. He drew support from unions and other parts of the New Deal coalition. He left Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid intact. He was less concerned with undoing the work of his predecessors than he was with implementing reforms that promoted competition, investment, and growth. Not coincidentally, he was the most successful Republican president of the 20th century.

The second face is Barry Goldwater’s, circa 1964: tart, dyspeptic, radical. For Goldwater, “Extremism in the defense of liberty [was] no vice.” For Goldwater, the aim was “not to pass laws, but to repeal them.” It is no wonder that conservatives are attracted to such a message. But they are often the only ones who feel this way. Goldwater lost in a landslide.

There are a lot of stolen bases here. For starters, the notion that Reagan and Goldwater represented two distinct and irreconcilable factions would come as a shock to nearly every conservative and liberal commentator from, say, 1960 to 1990. Heck,  it would have come as a shock to both Reagan and Goldwater. The Goldwater forces inside the conservative movement in large part became the Reagan forces. (Matt also does a grave disservice to Goldwater by comparing him to Beck, given what Continetti thinks of Beck). So I have no idea how Matt thinks this historical analogy supports his argument that the Santelli and Beck faces are irreconcilable with mainstream conservative politics.

But then again, I largely think he’s wrong to divide the movement this way. And it is telling that he has to offer a literary interpretation to support this claim. If there were true wings to the movment, he would deploy  polling data, and speech excerpts from Beckians denouncing Santellians. Where are the primary fights manifesting these supposedly durable and longstanding schisms? We aren’t seeing any because, I suspect, the more radical tea partiers do not define themselves in terms of their opposition to the Santelli wing of the movement at all. That’s why the Beckians supported Scott Brown, and why the Santellians supported Nikki Haley — because this schizophrenia that Matt ascribes to the tea parties isn’t all that pronounced according to the tea partiers themselves. In other words, Matt is simply taking a journalistic short cut to get to the Beck-Bashing.  

This is a big problem for Matt’s analysis given that he says Beck can’t be integrated into the conservative movement.   Again, he offers little to no empirical data on this point. Rather, he lambasts Beck’s conspiratorial streak — and I think Matt is right that Beck has one, even if he might overstate his case. But how are we supposed to read this passage?

Beck is not simply an entertainer. He and his audience love American history. They are hungry for new ways to interpret current events. And Beck is creating, in Amity Shlaes’s words, “a competing canon” of texts and authorities. This competing canon is not content to assault contemporary liberalism, but rather deconstructs the very foundations of the New Deal and the Progressive Era. Among the books Beck regularly cites on his programs are Shlaes’s Forgotten Man, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Larry Schweickart and Michael Allen’s Patriot’s History of the United States, and Burt Folsom Jr.’s New Deal or Raw Deal? And books like Matthew Spalding’s We Still Hold These Truths, Seth Lipsky’s Citizen’s Constitution, and William J. Bennett and John Cribb’s American Patriot’s Almanac all belong on the list as well.

This intellectual journey has led Beck to some disturbing conclusions. Whereas Rick Santelli says the housing plan and the stimulus aren’t sensible, Beck says the Obama administration is the culmination of 100 years of unconstitutional governance. On the “We Surround Them” episode, Beck said, “The system has been perverted and it has to be restored.” In between bouts of weeping, he asked, “What happened to the country that loved the underdog and stood up for the little guy?” That country, he implied, is vanishing before our eyes. In Beck’s world, politics is less about issues than it is about “us” versus “them.” We may have them surrounded. But “we can’t trust anyone.”

Again, Matt is free to dispute Beck’s “disturbing conclusions” all he likes. But at times he seems to be trying – and trying very hard — to use Beck to discredit the entire conservative argument against the progressive revolution in politics. That’s an odd thing for a conservative writer, particularly one at the Standard, to do, given that so many of its contributors and editors have shown sympathy or support for that project in the past. I don’t have time to look up each one, but I suspect that nearly all of these books were well reviewed by the Weekly Standard (if they were reviewed at all) — including my book, which is arguably the most “radical” of  the bunch and yet doesn’t endorse anything like the conspiratorial politics Continetti describes. 

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Continetti is right when he says that Beck’s intellectual journey has led him into troubled waters. Why can’t Matt give Beck’s fans in the tea party the benefit of the doubt? Surely if they read Hayek, Shlaes, Bennett, Spalding, yours truly and others, they won’t go to the dark side too? I sincerely doubt that Continetti believes that they would. But he’s sort of forced to go there because the real point of his essay is to denounce Beck which means he must denounce all of Beck’s project as well (Thus I disagree with Dan Foster, who seems to think Continetti is celebrating Beck’s bibliophile proselytizing).

I could go on. But I’ll just leave it here: A more fair-minded treatment of Beck would at least acknowledge that Beck is right about a lot of things, that he gets people to read worthwhile and mainstream conservative and libertarian books, and that a good number of his fans and followers are perfectly capable of making up their own minds. And a more fair-minded treatment of the tea parties wouldn’t use them as a Trojan Horse for an attack on Beck.