”Broke” Proves America is Not

Future generations will be in a better position to judge the contributions of Glenn Beck to the restoration of America. And we realize that the mere mention of Beck’s name in the opening paragraph of any essay can consign the rest of the essay to the category of unread, clicked-away-from content. But Americans of every political background would do themselves a great favor by reading Beck’s latest book, "Broke"

If Pravda has convinced you to hate Beck or to dismiss him as a dangerous and extreme rabble-rouser, then remove the book cover and pretend it was written by someone you like. If Pravda has convinced you that Beck is an idiot, you don’t have to ‘pretend’ anything about the author. Just read the book and make up your own mind as to whether you are reading the ideas of an idiot.

What you will find is an exceedingly understandable yet comprehensive review of the political and economic history that has led America to the mess of 2010. You will find a very non-partisan indictment of both political parties and their leading mouthpieces. You will find a healthy and humble reverence for God and the place of faith in America’s history.

More than anything else, you will find many, many ideas for getting ourselves out of the mess of 2010. Not partisan doctrines, and not political platitudes, but ideas grounded in the enduring vision of some of the world’s greatest radicals and revolutionaries: the founding fathers of America. If you come at these ideas without an agenda or preconceived determination of how to think about them, you’ll find yourself increasingly convinced of the logic and goodness and decency of what is being proposed.

There may be no objective way to measure the damage done to America’s civil discourse by the politics of personal destruction that have marked our era, but there is zero doubt that there has in fact been damage and it has been substantial. Too many opportunities to learn are dismissed without investigation because of mesmerism-embedded labels that instruct us to tune out if the ideas are associated with [name the person] or [name the group]. This is especially true as it relates to the ideas of people like Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. They of course have their tens of millions of loyal listeners/viewers, but Pravda has so stigmatized and stereotyped them as to create a mental block for many otherwise decent, thinking Americans from ever considering a word they might have said or written. Pravda has decreed that such behavior is a sign of bad manners or some other base depravity that proper people just don’t engage in.

Break through the Pravda trance. Read Beck’s book, “Broke”. Try to refute his data or his assessment or his diagnosis. (He’s helpfully provided all kinds of links to encourage his reader to ‘educate yourself’.) Go ahead and assume his recommended steps to save America are wrong (or simply assume America isn’t worth saving because something else is better). Then write your own book or blog to provide those better ideas. If you’ve read Beck’s book with an open mind, and haven’t descended into cynical sarcasm in the effort to discredit Beck personally, then it’s possible your ideas will be even better. But at least your views will have been steered into the arena of ideas and not into the arena of personality politics or group identity and group doctrine.

Beck’s "Broke" is a timely reminder that good and powerful ideas for solving any man-created problems are always present. As more and more Americans enter the debate over ideas instead of taking up positions in old forts of orthodoxy, we will find the answers for rising out of the mess of 2010.

Paul Gable

November 20, 2010