George Rebane

Glenn Beck’s Common Sense – The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government has been #1 on NYT’s best seller list for several weeks.  In it he outlines the excesses of a rampantly growing government and exhorts his readers to apply common sense so that they can clearly see that things in our Republic are going to hell in a handcart.  The case he makes is plain enough and regular RR readers will not discover much new in Beck’s litany of government abuses and history of muddle-headed programs.

I read the book last night – it is a short book of only 167 pages that also includes Thomas Paine’s original 1776 classic Common Sense.  Beck goes through a very detailed litany of how things have gone and are going wrong.  He sprinkles blame on both parties, but the reader quickly senses that most of it will stick to those of the liberal persuasion who are referred to by their preferred label of ‘progressives’.  It is a good read and I recommend it to everyone, especially to those who see themselves firmly in the Republican or Democrat camps.  Buy it, read it, and pass it on.

I like Glenn Beck and his ministry, but my criticism of Beck’s book is not how it describes our problems, but the solution that he almost doesn’t recommend.  On top of that, he inconsistently sees the American people as compliant and unconcerned about the direction their political leaders want to take them, and a paragraph later as made up of a very aware and long suffering cohort, spread across the land, that is merely waiting for someone to form them up and lead them back to a non-partisan promised land.

Beck recommends a spontaneous uprising of enlightened and non-violent voters who will simply vote out the scoundrels (of both parties).  And in the process mend the land by sunsetting volumes of stultifying laws and regulations starting with the revision of our byzantine tax code.  He emphasizes non-violence throughout the volume, even as he lauds and defends our Second Amendment rights for personal ownership of firearms.  Though he recognizes how grassroots gun ownership enabled our Revolution, Beck’s use of guns in modern America appears limited strictly for self-defense and duck hunting.

Beck gives no hint that he understands how the Peter/Paul Principle works, or that just rolling back the clock to the freedoms of yesteryear will not recreate the jobs and the quality of life we fondly remember.  He seems to think that on the count of three, the oppressed by government will all stand up and ‘just say no’.  The impossibility of such an event, as witnessed by millennia of autocratic and totalitarian governance, is totally absent in his offered nostrums.  The fact that over half of our workers need some wealth transfer mechanism to put a chicken in their pots is not considered.

This view of reality is shared widely by politicians of a conservative bent.  Recently our own congressman Tom McClintock took the same position about American workers – it is only excessive government regulations that keep them from successfully competing in the world labor markets to a level that will restore their expected quality of life and American dream.  All this as if the last two generations of catastrophic public education have done no damage, and that today’s advancing technology is like yesterday’s – it only displaces jobs from this to that (buggy whips to auto assembly).

Throughout the volume he assails and admires the progressives in their values, diligence, and patience to achieve their objectives.  He correctly outlines how collectivism continues to ratchet away our freedoms, but provides no realistic hope that we do anything other than continue playing into their hands.  His summary solution exhorts us to –

Assemble with passion, peace, and power, and march on Washington.  Let your voice be heard and your anger be seen.  Some will label your words as inciting or dangerous; help them understand that the truth will always sound angry to those who can’t recognize it.

DO NOT WAIT FOR OTHERS TO SAY AND DO THE THINGS YOU FEEL.  The American Republic will not be swept into the dustbin of history if good men come forward now.  Rest assured that others more timid than you will join in the fight, but they wait for you.

Count the number of times that merely filling the Mall has resulted in the rollback of government instead of exactly the opposite.