CPAC just finished in Washington DC. Glenn Beck was the headliner. He bills himself as a conservative, but what kind of conservative is he?
When I think about conservatism, I reflect on the Frisch play, “Biedermann and the Firebugs” (Biedermann und die Brandstifter). The play was written at time when Germans were trying to answer the question, “How could the Nazis have happened here, the land of Beethoven and Bach?” There are people who adopt the label “conservative” because they prize a morally upright life, insofar as they can perceive moral uprightness, who find themselves lumped with fiscal conservatives or conservatives of other stripes. There are a lot of conservative firebugs who are trying to start fires, not because the fire serves any conservative purpose, but because they like fires.
Glenn Beck is one such firebug. So is Newt Gingrich.
Mr. Gingrich made a rock-star-like entrance, wading into the audience to the throbbing beat of the song “Eye of the Tiger,” a searchlight flashing across the crowd as he shook hands with well-wishers. He predicted that the Democrats would lose the House and Senate in November and Mr. Obama would lose in 2012, undone by “the coming massive conservative majority.” He said that the Democratic health care proposals — all 4,500 pages from the House and Senate combined — “are among the worst legislation” ever to emerge from Capitol Hill. Mr. Obama should begin the summit by tossing out those bills and starting from scratch, Mr. Gingrich said, and Republicans should have the same amount of time that Democrats will have to present their views. “Let’s test the president’s willingness to be bipartisan,” he said.
Hmmm. The reason we send people to the legislature is to work on policy. After a year of work, in which the Republicans did everything they could to obstruct that work, Republicans now want to scrap the work that was done. Gingrich keeps using the word bipartisan, but it does not mean what he thinks it means. But I digress.
Back to Beck.
Mr. Beck, a recovering alcoholic, drew a parallel to addiction recovery programs and said that the Republican Party had to admit it was in trouble. “Hello, my name is the Republican Party, and I have a problem!” he declared. “I’m addicted to spending and big government,” he said, drawing cheers from the audience in a ballroom of the hotel where the conference was held. But both parties are to blame, he said. The Democrats tax and spend, while the Republicans just spend. He also said people were losing a fundamental belief that things would get better. “It is still morning in America,” he said. “It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding, hung-over, vomiting-for-four-hours kind of morning in America. And it’s shaping up to be kind of a nasty day. But it is still morning in America.”
Morning in America. Beck is using the Reagan meme, but is clueless to the fact that Reagan raised taxes.
On another note, half of the attendees were students. Many of them were trying to find jobs or find hookups.
CPAC is similar in function to Netroots Nation. I wonder how many students go there to look for a job or to find a mate?