After weeks of teasing his audience with cryptic allusions to “The Plan,” on Saturday, Glenn Beck revealed key aspects of a new strategy he believes will help to restore constitutional sanity to American government. It won’t.
Given a perfect opportunity to embrace the concept of Jeffersonian federalism and state sovereignty as a check against the federal leviathan, Beck instead opted to push self-help seminars all over the country to teach ordinary folks “community organizing.”
Organizing is fine, but without a solid intellectual alternative to Washington, D.C.-dominated politics, all Beck’s legions are likely to do is get riled up and vote a bunch of Republicans back into Congress.
A bunch of Republicans that will still have no reason whatsoever to acknowledge the fundamental constitutional limitations on federal power.
Pardon me if I’m less than thrilled about partying like it’s 1994 all over again.
According to Beck’s website, these seminars will culminate in a rally on August 28, 2010 in Washington, D.C. at the feet of – who else? – Abraham Lincoln.
The irony of hosting an event designed to promote the Constitution at the feet of one of its worst enemies is almost painful.
Abraham Lincoln? You mean the Great Centralizer?
The president who shut down newspapers, imprisoned political opponents, and suspended habeas corpus? All while waging an illegal war that killed 620,000 Americans to prove the right of peaceful secession does not exist in a nation founded on that very principle?
Right, that Abraham Lincoln.
Let me be fair: Glenn Beck has been on point about a lot of things. He clearly has a knack for finding stories no one else is willing to report. But no plan to restore our Constitution can succeed unless it focuses on state sovereignty.
We don’t need new politicians in Washington, we need less power concentrated there in the first place.
America has been heading down an unsustainable path of centralization for more than a century and a half. Until we decide that freedom itself is incompatible with a one-size-fits-all government, we will continue to be pillaged by elected national monarchs from both political parties.
Once again, Glenn Beck seems to have missed a chance to use his very prominent platform to make that case.